Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

The way to fight this has been out there since before most of these companies and products have existed – use FOSS. If you want more convenience and polish then just remember that you are trading it for privacy and autonomy. There is no middle option.

I wish there were legal protections against this kind of thing. Even worse, I’ve had updates break stuff that might never get fixed. For example, I have Roku TVs and a recent update broke CEC.

The updates aren’t for my benefit, because my TVs worked fine from day one. Instead, the updates are to push more and more advertising and recommendations. It’s to the point where my TVs are slow, bloated, half broken trash. They’re definitely not what I bought off the store shelf.

As others have said, stop using software that has that capability, or at minimum treat all SaaS (broadly defined) as a hostile actor and conduct yourself accordingly. It's miserable, but that's the ecosystem we've created. As long as we continue to incentivize companies by giving them money, they're going to keep treating us this way. It's actually to tech companies' benefit to actively alienate customers that don't want to fit the mold of how they want them to behave so they can maximize unit profitability.

Also, a shout out to Duolingo who did exactly what is described here. I paid for the app and woke up one day to find I was forced to upgrade and when I did the app became something completely different where the previous "game" I was playing was gone. They of course ignored my complaints about it, and their app sucks anyway for learning so in a way I'm glad they broke the cycle. It's still a terrible way to treat customers.

Sounds like a simple case of antitrust. But antitrust is really a political process, not a legal process. Or perhaps a better way to phrase it is that it is a political process that happens to go through the judiciary branch.

> For example 1Password deliberately crippled perfectly fine password sync for users because they wanted to force them to new, cloud (and subscription) based version.

I’m unhappy with 1Password’s direction and I’m no longer a user, but it’s important to note that at least on macOS and iOS they never forced anyone to update to the new versions. I didn’t stop using 1Password 7 when version 8 was relased. It continued to work fine even on Apple Silicon (without the need for Rosetta) and it will probably continue to do so for a good while.

I can see a case against forced software upgrades, but it doesn’t seem right that a company should be unable to remove features. What if something turned out to be insecure, confusing, or detrimental? Should 99.999% of users be forced to deal with a feature they despise because one person wants it?

> I clicked the “X” dismiss button. But Apple somehow assumed that that meant “yes, install it immediately” because 20 minutes later I got a “you must restart” notification and when I restarted, the system was running macOS 14.2.1.

That definitely sounds like a bug to me, not a product decision. Real shitty though. Apple definitely better than Microsoft when it comes to shoving updates down your throat, but as others have said, yes the ultimate answer is to use FOSS. For my use, I appreciate regular updates, they rarely cause me trouble, and don’t want to have to be a linux sysadmin for my daily driver anymore. But I understand the desire for crystal clear control. Apple is usually pretty good about this, so this failure really is a stain. I hope they fix it.

In America, almost certainly not, for a few reasons:

1. Almost every consumer agreement contains an arbitration clause. This means the number of consumers that actually can sue becomes incredibly small.

2. Security updates are real. In which case, let's say a company wants to add or remove a feature you may, or may not, want. If there was such an obligation to support exactly the same feature set, the company would be obliged to bring security patches to every major version of a software platform - which is possibly, technically, impossible. Imagine Apple being forced to provide individual security updates for iOS 15.4, 15.5, 15.6, 16.0, 16.1, 16.2... all the way back to iOS 11 I suppose. Most likely, this actually would slow down innovation. Let's make modern WebKit run on iOS 11 - what could go wrong?

3. Some features may need to be removed in the future due to patent lawsuits (like Apple vs Massimo removing the Blood Oxygen sensor in future models). Other times, the design of a system needs to be changed, or wireless compliance logos need to be updated, or radio strength needs to be reduced (Apple in France lawsuit), or so forth. There's also public interest reasons for updates - for example, if a flaw was found in iOS that allows bypassing anti-theft locks. There's also legitimate corporate interests in the eyes of the law - like fixing a copy protection loophole. There's also features in a platform that have recurring costs and licensing from third parties, that may expire [1]. Then what?

4. As much as we gripe about Apple and 1Password, they are really the exception to the rule right now. The main problem that legislators are concerned about is that most devices don't get updated, particularly cheap IoT devices or Android phones after a few years. Putting new rules on getting updates out is the opposite of the public interest concern at the moment.

[1] Edit for this hypothetical: Imagine that your music player shows cover art. That's almost always provided by a company called Gracenote and it requires a license. Let's say a manufacturer's device, 8 years down the road, has that license expire. Is that reasonable, or does Gracenote need to be paid for, by the manufacturer, forever, for using their API? It's removing a feature "you paid for" if it goes away. You can see how this becomes sticky quickly.

You'll have to negotiate the terms of use with the software provider.

There's a good chance somewhere deep in the T&Cs a clause exists regarding changing the product as their business evolves to provide the "best experience" for the majority. Their argument for deprecating features might be legacy development and support costs.

Dropbox

I wish I could just use Dropbox as it existed 10-years ago.

"Just a folder that syncs".

I don't need Paper and all the other features that have come since then.

Note: I'm not knocking Dropbox, there's just some products that are great and don't need enhancing. I wish I could buy that version.

Sadly, not really. Academically, there is what I would consider a good tentative argument that these folks are "access[ing] a computer with authorization and [using] such access to . . . alter information in the computer" without consent. 18 U.S.C. § 1030(e)(6).

However, private federal prosecutions aren't really a thing. And I think you'd be hard pressed to get the FBI or USAO to take a novel application like this and expend resources on pursuing it.

Have you considered filing in small claims and getting your $80-or-so 1Password license fee back?

Even if there was, and after a long, arduous class action where the company was found guilty, the penalty for violating it would have to far exceed the expected recurring revenue from forcing updates.

Automatic updates are a system setting that you can just turn off.

I’m not sure how you hit this path if you don’t have it turned on.

That said on a dialog like this anything other than an affirmative confirmation should be considered to not be a confirmation, and that specific failure seems like a general bug rather than anything nefarious. There are plenty of times users may want to delay an update even if they have auto updates enabled, and if one of the obvious ways to do that doesn’t I’m sure it would be annoying for them as well.

Switch to android and become a happy power user! It's an open and better ecosystem for almost everyone involved - users, developers and phone makers.

I think you can disable automatic updates and it won’t prompt you to upgrade anymore.

If the update was already pending, then I can imagine it’s harder to stop (or not possible as the installation is already in progress).

Regarding 1password, I also hate the way they moved to a sub. I had a “lifetime” license before and unfortunately was forced to either update or leave. I opted to leave and started using a different app for passwords.

That's one of the main reasons why I use NixOS (for Windows non-FOSS apps too): the apps have no permissions to self-upgrade, only root can do that.

Mobile is more difficult, the easiest way: buy a Huawei without Google services

Sony did lose its appeal during the PS3 OtherOS lawsuit (it ultimately settled) ...

but for the macOS case can you not just reinstall? There may be a difference between inconvenience and impossibility.

I’m confused about your statements regarding 1Password. I am still using 1Password 7 with the exact same sync that I always have since the day that I bought it. Nothing has ever changed.

This is the so called "enshittification" that's happening market wide. Vendor lock in sucks -- regardless whether it's Amazon, AWS, Apple or 1Password.

The only real solution is to take your money and go elsewhere. Stop buying Apple products, say.

Hell, I've even experienced vendor lock-in on FOSS products when the program crippled something I needed to use, or refused to fix an issue that caused me hours of tedious work-arounds. Or they decided to go closed source and go to a subscription model. (Their choice, but I'm not using it).

Yes, FOSS.

tl;dr: the world is messy, automations and remote control by vendors has shown to be the only working method vs. individual responsibility/organisational responsibility, and the law isn't against that (at least not in the EU so far).

Longer wall of opinion:

There isn't, mainly because that would cut both ways: you'd get the same constructions as budget airlines where the core product would seem to be what you want, but everything becomes a paid add-on.

Right now it's an embedded cost or hidden cost, and there is no service fee. For companies like Apple that can work because the products as sold as a single SKU while that hasn't worked for others (and they tried!) like Windows + Hardware, Android + Hardware etc. It never worked out because the ongoing cost and service requirements aren't something the consumer is willing to pay for separately and the vendor can't eat that cost because they don't sell it as a single product with a single business case.

Technically we could go to a model where this actually gets done:

  - Hardware and Software is separate
  - Support and Services are separate
  - Features are paid for separately

There is a small subset of a niche of a fraction of the market that does want (some of) it, but it nearly never covers the cost to the extent where you get everything you want (i.e. Framework; Fairphone, you get modules and software you can almost self-compile, but the NDAs around MRC, ME, PHYs and GPUs makes it impossible to really do all feature and functionality control yourself).

The same applies to computers and software if you treat them as a black box but are interconnecting them, you now get dependencies, network effects and "your problem is everyones problem". This means that if not enough participants play by the same rules to a high enough degree, the system doesn't work at all and everyone feels that pain. Even things like MTA-TLS, basic PKI, or even basic hygiene like not operating an open relay or open proxy is a bar 'professionals' are unable to consistently pass... We need protections from ourselves and each other (in terms of hosts) and the last few decades have shown that individual responsibility and corporate policy are not working out.

Ideally, if someone really wants this, they would be doing this by not accepting an EULA that has automations they don't want, and go back to first principles where they do have that control, but without attestation they would not be allowed to participate in shared systems (like the internet).

To make further discussion easier, we could make a simple base case like "the OS used to support exFAT but after this automated patch it no longer does". Perhaps the license expired, perhaps it was vulnerable to a zero touch exploit and the cost was too high to fix it and the impact on the brand was too high to leave it in. Not sure what other reasonings we could come up with, but there are similar things related to RSR, MRT and the likes were existing functionality might be impacted in some way shape or form.

> Ask HN: Any legal way against forced software upgrades and feature removal

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. /s

Fixing bugs sucks, that's why we rewrote the "app". CADT