Thank you for allowing me to speak. If my words offend, I apologize.
I landed in the forum on an old thread (closed ~2012-2014) about this same topic because of the grief I went thru while tracking down a problem.
I’ve been with the Avast! crew since, well, since it was a ‘four guys coding in a basement’ crew. And yeah, there’ve been some hiccups along the way with rolling out new releases. But for me they were relatively minor hiccups; a small price to pay for ‘Always free for home/personal use.’, because those four guys wanted to reduce or prevent the spread of bad code - ‘malware’ wasn’t in the lexicon yet.
I’m not going to flog the dead horse of “My computer, my choice when to update.”, though I think it valid. My own issues stem from those forced updates that killed a totally separate application. An application that had been running fat, dumb and happy for years; and ran equally-well on two different OS’s - XP Pro SP3 & Windows 7 SP1… until that manual update setting was ignored.
Up until about a year ago I had operated a one-person SOHO. That no-longer-functioning application caused me to lose a significant pile of income; significant to me anyway.
Since that time I had cause to repave my system back to it’s ‘nearly new’ state: OS, service pack, security updates, 3rd party applications, etc.; and everything worked as expected for about a week, when that forced update came calling.
Being retired, I now had the time and attention-span to actually debug this silliness. Imagine my chagrin when I traced the app’s program-flow and found it’s last actions were to launch a new thread and call into an Avast dll, at which point the instance either locked, or went into a race state, with dueling threads. Checked About Avast and well hello, new version! That’s where I stopped digging. Completely uninstall Avast and all is right with the world again.
Please don’t misunderstand. In no way do I expect Avast to maintain 100% compatibility with every version of every application, on every version of every OS.
But I can’t help wondering how many other people have had one single app die for no apparent reason, no error messages, no other system problems; then fiddle with it for a while, and just give up with “Oh well, it’s a mystery.”
All because “Manual Update” didn’t really mean anything.
All My Kin, thank you for allowing me to speak. I am finished.