This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point.
Requesting permission to update throws a significant amount of users. They're typically not capable of determining if the request is legitimate or not, they're fearful of updating things they rely on, and god help them if it's not a one-click update.
Yep, most "consumer-level" end users would prefer to not be asked. I'm probably a bad nerd, but it's even true of me. When I go to my parents house for some holiday or another, I used to meticulously check everything on my mom's computer to make sure it was working well. Now I basically just jam on the manual software update button for everything she has installed that doesn't autoupdate, because she's too afraid or inconvenienced by the manual update button. Everything else, though, is just managing itself and she doesn't notice.
"This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point."
yes, but no. saying that silent self-update is table stakes is missing the point: table stakes from your users' perspective is "shipping software that doesn't need to be consciously maintained."
whether you ship rarely and get the bugs out before you do, or ship frequently but have automatic upgrades that don't break things, doesn't matter.
Requesting permission to update throws a significant amount of users. They're typically not capable of determining if the request is legitimate or not, they're fearful of updating things they rely on, and god help them if it's not a one-click update.