Why Should You Disable Automatic App Updates?

For convenience, you might have automatic app updates enabled on your iPhone or Android device, but why should you disable automatic app updates even if it means less convenience for you.

Depending on how many apps you have on your iPhone or Android smartphone, you might be getting a handful of app updates every day, and having your device automatically check for and download app updates can be pretty handy.

However, many users will argue that app updates should be a manual thing you do when you have free time, rather than your smartphone doing it for you.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that you don’t have to worry about constantly updating your apps and they don’t have time (or take the time to manually update their Smartphone’s apps).

However, enabling automatic app updates has some downsides; so why disable them if you currently rely on automatic app updates.

App Updates May Have Problems

While app updates are expected to improve the app, sometimes that is not always the case. App developers can make mistakes and sometimes miss a critical bug when they release an app update.

This has been a problem lately sad, a popular podcast app for iPhone. A previous app update broke the app to the point where it crashed every time users tried to open it. It wasn’t like this for everyone, but apparently a lot of people were having this problem.

If you had automatic app updates enabled, you risked being subject to a bonked update without having any control over it, whereas if you had the option to update yourself, you could choose not to update the app and wait. A new update to come.

Of course, there’s no way of knowing that an app update will throttle your smartphone without going to the forums and researching potential problems, so it might not be entirely important, but I think it’s always a good idea to wait a few days. In case my Facebook or Twitter feeds are flooded with other users having issues with a particular app, update any app anyway.

Look To See What Has Changed

Another great reason to disable automatic app updates is to get a better idea of ​​why an app update is coming for a particular app.

Most app updates are nothing more than basic bug fixes and performance improvements that are often not that important to the basic user. However, some app updates are pretty big, and the change logs included with app updates can tell you a lot about what you’ve downloaded and updated.

For example, the YouTube iPhone and iPad app was updated not so long ago with a brand new look that many users didn’t like at all. It came with a much simpler user interface, but was much more difficult to navigate.

If you have disabled automatic app updates, you can choose whether or not to install the update, so you can continue using the old YouTube app for as long as you want.

To disable automatic app updates on Android devices, open the Play Store and tap the Menu icon in the upper left corner.

Scroll down and tap on and then select . When the pop-up window appears, select .

On iPhone and iPad, scroll to and tap . From there, turn off the switch under the section named