C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is rolling out a new way to conduct Google Messages updates.
- The update notification takes up your entire display and opens every time you start the app.
- It’s a not-so-subtle way for Google to encourage you to keep Messages up to date.
Keeping your Android apps up to date is important. Not only do updates bring new features, but they also sometimes incorporate new security protocols to keep you and your device safe. However, it looks like Google is now going to take updates very seriously — so seriously that it might just be a huge annoyance.
Let’s take Google Messages updates, for example. For a long time now, if there’s been an update for Messages, you would get a notification about it when you open the app. The notification would take up about half the screen and could be easily closed. Once you close it, that’s it — you wouldn’t get notified about it again until there’s another update.
Today, though, we are seeing a new system. In Messages, the update takes up the entire display, as you can see in the image at the top of this article. Furthermore, if you close the update prompt without downloading the new version, you’ll see the same full-page notification about updating the next time you open the app. This will repeat forever until you update (or until the app auto-updates in the background).
Check out the video clip below to see how relentlessly annoying this is:
Google actually warned us that this would eventually happen. Back in January, the Android Developers Blog posted about this change. However, this is the first time we’re seeing it in action, and it’s…a lot.
Granted, keeping your apps up to date is important, and this new system will help get that across to users. But we’re not sure annoying the hell out of the user about it is the best strategy.