Should I force users to update an application?

Posted by Brian Green on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Brian Green
Published on 2013-06-26T20:28:38Z Indexed on 2013/06/26 22:29 UTC
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user-experience

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support

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software-design

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usability

I'm writing an application for a medium sized company that will be used by about 90% of our employees and our clients.

In planning for the future we decided to add functionality that will verify that the version of the program that is running is a version that we still support. Currently the application will forcequit if the version is not among our supported versions. Here is my concern.

Hypothetically, in version 2.0.0.1 method "A" crashes and burns in glorious fashion and method "B" works just fine. We release 2.0.0.2 to fix method A and deprecate version 0.1. Now if someone is running 0.1 to use method B they will be forced to update to fix something that isn't an issue for them right now.

My question is, will the time saved not troubleshooting old, unsupported versions outweigh the cost in usability?

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