Upgrading Software

There was a week in September where one-by-one all my devices gave me the upgrade warning. Perhaps I could’ve upgraded earlier, but I didn’t and in this one week all the different software had finally had enough of my inaction and wanted change.

If you work across different devices, sometimes you may not switch on a particular device for weeks or months, depending on what you’re working on. If you’ve been working on a different device, when you switch back the software is often slightly out-of-date and needs an upgrade.

In this case, September needed a lot of major upgrades. The rough order for me was something like this…

• Ubuntu starts giving me a frequent “Would you like to upgrade message”
• MacBook Pro works fine until I try to build an iOS app then there are problems

So then, once you upgrade one thing, other upgrades become apparent.

For my main Ubuntu machine…

• Upgrade Ubuntu to 24.04
• Leads to the Postgres database also needing an upgrade
• Then, other software needs updating or re-installing

Then, when making iOS apps on the MacBook Pro…

• Upgrading MacBook to Sequoia 15.0
• Leads to Xcode needing an upgrade to version 16
• Which leads to Flutter, Cocoapods, and various packages related to the Flutter mobile app also needed upgrading.
• Which means that your mobile app is now only for iOS version 18.
• So then, if the physical iPhones are not upgraded they need an upgrade too.

In this case, with this round of upgrades it turns out that iPhone 8 and X do not get the latest version of iOS. While they still function normally, and can test older versions of iOS apps, they have become useless for testing the new versions of apps.

Likewise, when upgrading an instance manually, or switching from an older AWS instance to an AWS instance with the latest software…

• Operating system upgrade
• Package manager upgrade
• Upgrade the software
• Database may also need upgrading
• New versions of the software may need the code to be altered
• Some third party software packages may be deprecated and need changing to alternative packages.

Some software is more important to upgrade than others, although all software should probably be upgraded relatively often. The nature of software such as WordPress, because everything just sits in the web root, it should be upgraded as often as possible. Other software that is not as vulnerable to attack, can possibly be upgraded at a more leisurely pace. However, using software that is many years old on any project is rarely a good idea. Generally, upgrading to the latest versions of software will improve the security of those applications.

Because of the importance of upgrading your WordPress software, WordPress will often tell you in advance that an upgrade is coming and let you know which things will need to change. Some software is good like that, others not so good. The worst times I’ve had upgrading have been when it’s been a framework on top of a framework.

Some software needs more work to upgrade than others. Sometimes it might depend on which version you were on and which version you’re trying to upgrade to. Ubuntu was very easy to upgrade but some of the other software that needed upgrading as a result took longer. It also took time to go through everything that used to work and make sure it was still working.

Some hardware may not be able to be upgraded. Certain hardware cannot be upgraded to Windows 11 by the normal method. Apple devices are the same, at some point each piece of hardware stops getting updated with the latest software from Apple.

Similarly, WordPress, Laravel, Node, and React apps may be fairly straightforward to upgrade. Whereas a React Native app will need to be upgraded, then android and iOS versions of the app will probably both need tweaking separately. So, the process of upgrading React Native, or Flutter, for both android and iOS can take a while and be a bit fiddly.

There are often different ways to upgrade anything. If the standard automatic way does not work, you can often upgrade manually. If nothing seems to work, sometimes starting with a fresh, blank install is the way to go, then gradually adding in the existing code piece by piece until the software is working and has been upgraded. There will be many different ways to upgrade each project, knowledge of the specific software and having upgraded it before is a huge bonus.

When choosing the software to use for your next projects, upgrade cycles should be considered.

To discuss upgrading your software drop me a message.