Motiviated by this article on techcrunch which states that mobile fragmentation is turning into a nightmare. I want to ask the platform developers out there. Have you learned nothing in the past 10 years?

In the early 2000’s browsers were a mess, everyone was running a different version of whatever browser they preferred. To make matters worse, there were competing agendas from the major browser developers that left web developers scrambling to keep up and implement backwards compatible hacks.

Enter google chrome. As far as I know Google’s Chrome browser was the first major browser to make the decision to auto-update their browser everytime you restarted it. And so the beginning of evergreen browsers emerged. Quickly firefox, safari, and then IE followed along. Having an evergreen browser means that web developers can write a lot less conditional code which leads to less buggy code overall. This also means that any device capable of running one of these evergreen browsers can use a web application without issue. The result; customer satisfaction goes up and developer productivity and happiness increases, huge wins for everyone.

Now, I ask again, have we learned nothing? Why is upgrading your OS on your phone or computer optional? Or at least why don’t OS developers do the update automatically unless you specifically turn it off. Most people when it comes to technology are simply too ignorant or lazy to update their software. Why are OS developers still making it optional. For the love of god somebody please tell google, microsoft, and apple to stop this nonsense and just update the users software. And for those of you screaming, “we can’t do that, it will break my applications”. If an application stops working then it is up to the application developer to fix the broken software (assuming the os developer gives ample notice about deprecations), not the user to put their entire upgrade cycle on hold.

One last thing, microsoft this is for you. Stop charging for operating systems !!! Nobody else does it, time to get on board.