Remember when software updates were making you excited?
Today they induce fear. What will they screw up this time?

OS X

Why are they continually ruining Finder?
No more custom Finder sidebar icons? Check! Why should my need to be able to quickly find my most important folders be more important than some Apple-designer’s vision of uniformly grey icons?

Stop users from running apps that didn’t come from the AppStore? Check! Gatekeeper does that and it’s on by default.

Tags. I love them in theory, but did they have to ruin the coloring system for it? Now if I mark a file with a color I only get a little dot next to the name instead of the whole name being highlighted. Easy to miss when important files used to pop out so clearly.

I admit I jumped the natural scrolling direction bandwagon, but it was an unnecessary change to say the least.

Memory usage. Slowdowns. Apple Mail. I could go on…

iOS

I learnt it the hard way: Updating mobile devices leads to their death.

I kept the iPhone 3G and iPad 1 updated to the very end and watched them turn from snappy tools into sluggish, unusable junk. Try doing anything with an iPad 1 that’s on the last-supported version of iOS – makes you want to throw it into a wall. That’s Apple’s sweet way of telling you to buy a new one. I’m telling you: The iPad 4 stays on iOS 6 until its death.
Well, I have 1 good thing to say about iOS 7 though: much nicer ringtones.

Android

Being unhappy with the restrictive nature of iOS I switched to Android and boy was I glad I did!
Bigger screen, SD card, notifications, gesture typing, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted! Yay! But then something happened. System updates happened.

Some idiot moved the quick settings icons away from where they were quickly accessible. Now I have to swipe down and then touch a button to get to them. Not as quick anymore, is it? I can go whole days without switching out of airplane mode now that I don’t see the toggle whenever I look at my notifications. (Yes there’s an airplane in the top bar too, but that’s not where I’m used to looking for it…)

But the worst change of all was this: Since Android 4.4 KitKat apps are no longer allowed to write to the SD card, they’re only allowed to write to their own single specific folder on there (/Android/data/com.company.appName).

What this means is this: You can no longer move files to your SD card with ES File Explorer, File Commander (or any other File Manager for that matter) unless you put it into their own single dedicated folder. You can no longer download a file from dropbox and put it into your folder structure on your sd card. SD cards are done. Unusable, useless. A killer-feature killed. I’m not going to pop the card into a PC to manage my folder structure every time I download a file, am I?

Was there not a time when software developers aspired to making the lives of their users better and easier?

Was it not common to design features based on what was best for the users instead of the design process being driven by arrogance, ignorance or obvious financial motives.

Why spend $100 more for 16 more GB of flash memory on your phone when an sd card of quadruple capacity costs $35? Because you can’t use your sd card for shit now.

Why buy anything on the Mac AppStore or Windows 8 Store when you could just as well buy it on the developer’s website where the devs get 100% of the money. Right, because they changed the rules.

Better security is the official reasoning for those changes. That’s funny. Aren’t those the same companies that want to store all my documents, passwords, search history and photos in their US-based data-centers where who-knows-what happens with them?