Audible’s app is another symptom of the Update-Upgrade Disease.

While I’m now post-smartphone, I do still keep an older iDevice for listening to music and audiobooks when I’m on the move.

I mostly listen to podcasts while jogging and something from Audible when taking longer walks or bike rides through the river valley. While I couldn’t be without my creaky bookshelf of dusty livres, nor my Internet archives of literary classics, I equally enjoy having a story read to me while my eyes are free to gaze aimlessly from place to place and my feet carry me along. I’m particularly fond of this divertissement if the book is read by its author, but even more so if it’s read by Grover Gardner. It’s my very own autodidactic peripatetic school, this.

But not if Audible,i another symptom of Update-Upgrade Disease, has anything to say about it.

From: Audible Customer Care – newsletters@audible.com
To: d@gmail.com
Subject: Audible app news: Update required before 06/30/2015

Dear Peter D,

It looks like you may be using Audible with a device that has an older operating system. We’re sorry to inform you that as of 6/30/15 we will no longer be supporting Audible apps that work with your operating system.

To avoid interruption of your service, you can either update the operating system on your device or use a different device with a more current operating system. Either way, you can then update to the latest version of Audible.

If you have any questions, please refer to our FAQ page at: http://audible.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4439.

Warmest Regards,
The Audible Team

The “customer help” link there continues :

If you do not update your app to the most updated version you will not be able to refresh your library or download Audiobooks.

My little iDevice runs Audible’s current app just fine, thank you very much, so no, I’m not upgrading my entire fucking OS.ii My current set-up does exactly what I want it to do exactly when I want it to. It’s the definition of an instrument, just as a computing device should be. So if you think I’m playing ball with you losers, fuck you and fuck your mother with a barbed baseball bat, you sillycon valley swine. Your mother smells of elderberries.

This idea that what worked perfectly well before is for any reason no longer good enough is as dead as Dave Chappelle’s stand-up career, in case you hadn’t heard. The time and place when, as inexplicably as the biblical prohibition against buttsex, it was every program user’s divined duty to feed and clothe the retards who set and followed the UI trendz by endlessly adopting updates that were more likely to brick perfectly usable hardwareiii than provide meaningful improvements to functionality has come and gone. That frustrating, wasteful, counter-productive, beyond unpalatable, and downright nauseating chapter in computing history is drawing to a close and not a moment too soon. And if you read the logs, it’s actually fun to watch !

Now it’s one thing if you’re fixing bugs because you don’t know how to code in the first place and all the libraries you chose were dynamic and “who can possibly keep up with all the progress in the world” that isn’t really progress so much as furious activity masquerading as such, I get that. But forced software updates necessitating OS updates and even hardware upgrades because “old is bad mkay” is something else altogether ; something really quite unacceptable if you have any intention of not being buried six feet under like Microsoft and their Office suite.

Audible, you’re the only kid on the block until you’re not. Don’t be another symptom of this godawful infection.

___ ___ ___

  1. And by extension Amazon, the service’s owner.
  2. The workaround is to download the .aa file from the web, load it into iTunes, then onto the device. It’s definitely less convenient, but it works without having to upgrade operating systems.
  3. Try running iOS 7 on an iPhone 4 and see how long your battery lasts. Running a smartphone on anything other than the core OS it shipped with plus whatever security updates is rank insanity. In upgrading to the next-gen OS without the next-gen hardware you’re just pushing yourself closer to the store to buy another $800 phone and giving yourself something to bitch and moan about with your friends in the meantime. Mebbe you need that, mebbe you want that. I sure don’t.

5 thoughts on “Audible’s app is another symptom of the Update-Upgrade Disease.

  1. […] tentacles – its monstrous web services business,ii their “dynamically” stupid audiobook offerings, and their owner’s newspaper for people who are too old read logsiii – let’s look […]

  2. […] mobile apps, like MacOSX, like goddam Porsches, like the entire fucking “civilised” stack. […]

  3. Pete D. says:

    So it’s been 4 months and the app still works despite the fact that I didn’t update either it or the OS. Nice bluff, fuckers.

  4. […] seen in the mainstream implementation of planned obsolescence in consumer electronics and “apps,” which at this point even includes, sadly, cars. […]

  5. […] past few months, one or two of these glitches have admittedly been corrected by software updates (*spit*), but several others – most notably the landscape lockscreen and Safari-YT glitch – […]

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