My car's OTA update broke Android Auto, and it's a indictment of modern software
16 Jul, 2026
Just yesterday morning, my brand-new MINI Countryman auto-installed software update 03/2026.54. How exciting! The release notes promised groundbreaking changes, like changing the default interface highlights to green and other vague, unmentioned "stability improvements."
You know what else it improved? It completely killed Android Auto.
And it's not just me. Forums also have iPhone users watching CarPlay suffer the exact same brain-death under this firmware. It is a pathetic, damning indictment of modern software quality. Clearly, this shit couldn’t or wasn’t tested in any real-world capacity.
So, my plan of action? I have to call MINI at some point and demand they fix this garbage. I already know how that call is going to go. They will obfuscate, read from a generic script, and try to make me run through the ultimate "we don’t know what the fuck the problem is" playbook:
- "Have you tried deleting and re-pairing the phone?" (Yes, obviously).
- "Have you tried clearing your cache?" (Fuck off).
The Cult of the Two-Week Sprint
I blame the absolute idiots who convinced the tech industry that developing software in two-week "sprints" is a good idea. If you genuinely think that, fuck you. You are mentally challenged, you are not an engineer, and you should stay as far away from software development as physically possible.
The most toxic, brain-rotting concept anyone ever introduced to technology was: "We can just fix it later."
Everything you create should be an artistic endeavour aiming for perfection. The moment you introduce the idea of "rapid deployment," you give tech-illiterate managers a license to take the easy way out. They start treating deeply complex software architecture as "shallow" and easily patchable.
Newsflash: Issues are not shallow.
You shouldn't be allowed to push this half-baked garbage to vehicles. I am not your QA department.
And don’t get me started on the product managers trying to justify their pathetic corporate existences by cramming useless AI into every screen, or worse, trusting Artificial Intelligence over Actual Intelligence (sorry, I know it's a tired old line, but it fits). Fuck you, go do something to benefit humanity instead.
There was a time when software actually improved. Now, "updates" are just an excuse to break shit that worked perfectly yesterday.
The Compliance Racket
It gets even worse in my day job. I am forced to bend the knee to Cyber Essentials Plus compliance, which mandates that all high and critical updates must be pushed within 14 days of release.
Let's be completely real: this does not make anyone safer in the real world.
Yes, technically, you are patching vulnerabilities. But in the actual, messy, human world, people get hacked because of deliberate user actions executing malicious payloads regardless of the underlying OS vulnerabilities.
Heck, my mum once managed to pick up a malicious payload for iOS on her old first-gen iPad. Now, this was years after iOS 5 was relevant, but still user input was required.
Or,take that LastPass breach where a senior DevOps engineer's home system was compromised. He was running an old, unpatched version of Plex, but he also downloaded a malicious payload under the guise of a software update. He didn't get hacked just because he ran old software; he got hacked because he fell for a targeted exploit and executed untrusted code.
Heck, I was running an old, unsupported version of Plex on a 4K Blu-ray player that hadn't seen an update in years, and you know what? I was perfectly fine because I controlled what ran on my network.
Now, to see off your interjection that I'm wrong and that a wild remote code execution exploit doesn't need user input well even with a wild Remote Code Execution (RCE) exploit, anything can be mitigated with proper firewalls, isolated network architecture, or offline, local hot-patching.
For instance, companies like 0patch do incredible, ongoing micro-patch support for legacy versions of Windows going all the way back to Windows XP. They prove you don't need a massive, bloated update package to stay secure.
But no, we have to run on this endless hamster wheel of updates because of a massive compliance racket. Organisations pay thousands of pounds to get a stupid fucking tick on a form and a PDF certificate. And they only want that certificate because they’ve arbitrarily given it meaning.
Stop giving these useless badges meaning.
The only thing that should matter is software quality and having the ability to do your job quickly, reliably, and effectively. Running a constant treadmill of updates that only seem to degrade performance, introduce regressions, and break your tools helps absolutely nobody.
Even Microsoft is Having a Mea Culpa
It has gotten so spectacularly bad with Windows that even Microsoft has been forced into a humiliating public reckoning. Their internal K2 Initiative is essentially a massive, desperate attempt to claw back some semblance of usability and performance from the absolute disaster that is the Windows 11 codebase. They are literally trying to rewrite their own bloated interface code just to get the Start menu to not lag by seconds.
It is incredibly depressing, especially when you remember just how performant, clean, and snappy Windows 8.0 actually was under the hood before they bloated it to death.
If we don't start demanding that software works before it leaves the developer's machine, we are going to keep paying premium prices to act as unpaid, frustrated beta testers for the rest of our lives.
We are All Complicit
To be brutally honest, I am part of the problem too. I have had pressure to make things worse instead of making things better.
We are all complicit in the world we make.
So when I say "fuck you," I don't just mean a faceless manager or developer. I mean "fuck the industry that we've made." Let's stop accepting mediocrity. Let's start respecting quality again.
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