Docker desktop : nag screen with pay or update

When the client launches on Windows, since a few weeks, I get a nag screen asking me to pay for a subscription or update.

It’s really unclear what you do:

  • if you want your users to upgrade, let them upgrade
  • if you want your users to pay, ask them to pay

Don’t play with asking to upgrade or stay at the same version by paying. It’s a LITTLE BIT suspicious to ask for money or asking for an upgrade. When I see this nag screen, I suppose that the upgrade contains malware or something.

Apparently the above post is about the following, which I got after ignoring the update badge in the app’s icon for some time:

Update dialog

The only problem I have with that is that’s it’s not clear if “Restart” only applies to Docker.

Care to explain more? Why would malware think it has better chances to be installed with this dialog? (Assuming it even needs to show a dialog at this point.)

I get it too, and I’m tired of trying to fix it.

I click on “Install and Restart”, the dialog disappears, and nothing else visible happens. I assume the update must be failing because a day or so later the nasty thing is back.

I don’t mind an update nag. What I mind is an update nag that doesn’t go away after I consent to the update.

I agree the wording is confusing. My main issue is that this is now essentially “nagware” - there’s no way to say “skip this update”, so pretty much daily, up pops the confusing modal, and I press snooze on it every time.

One way I’d upgrade far more readily is if there was a way to do the upgrade without stopping all my containers. I use my containers for dev work, so some of them are long running, and if I stop them I have to do all sorts of reconnects and re-setup. If I could do the desktop update without having to go through all that, then there’s no reason NOT to update, and the nagware isn’t necessary, or indeed that much of a problem if it continues to exist.