Who says it's best practice? It's _your preference_. Point me to the page where google recommends your "best practice". Yeah, that's what I thought...
There is a subset of angry nerds who believe that everyone is too stupid to be allowed to have technology unless they do things the way they decree they be done. They also believe that if <1% of people have a problem with an OTA update, then it means that 100% of people should erase their phones because. They willfully ignore that the exceptions are just that, exceptions. They're no different from the lunatics who believe that because one man claimed his wife got brain cancer from her cell phones that cell phones cause brain cancer, period. Nevermind that there are literally BILLIONS of people who have been using cell phones for over a decade and no epidemics of brain cancer have appeared. Someone said they got brain cancer, so it's "best practices" for everyone to get a Bluetooth or keep their cell phone in a lead box since brain cancer.
I had a run-in the other night with a guy who does a show on the web radio station that I do. His show is about IT and mine is a general nerd culture (i.e. movies, videogames, comics, TV) thing and I got a frantic call from my g/f when our show was airing (we'd pre-taped this episode) that she couldn't get the stream. There'd been some changes in the servers and the webmaster overlooked updating all the links. While frantically trying to figure out WTF was happening on the private staff chat channel, Mr. IT Guy was being an obnoxious d-bag, ignoring what I was saying and burping,
"It looks OK for me, so I don't know what you're doing wrong." Typical "helpful" nerd arrogance.
I ended up deducing that AdBlock Plus was preventing the iframe with the TuneIn logo link from displaying. He then launched into a rage fit in which he said, verbatim,
"You don't build websites for "everyone", you build them for "most people, in a vanilla configuration". So yes, when I look at this and test in the latest versions of IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari...and it works just fine...but it doesn't work for YOU, then the problem is on your system, not with the site. In my day to day world, if you're running software on your machine that prohibits you from utilizing my site properly, then it's incumbent upon you to deactivate that software, plugin, add on, or whatever the heck else it is, not on me to "fix" my site for you.
AdBlock Plus shows 15 MILLION installs on the Firefox extensions page. That's a whole lot of people you're telling to get with YOUR program. Adblockers are widely used, so if you don't consider the ramifications of how your site displays to someone using them, you're making the choice to silently tell them you don't want their patronage. The competition is just a click away, pal.
What the arrogant, nerd rage, l337 h4X0rZ who are attempting to justify their rude, sneering behavior can't comprehend is that they aren't helping anyone buy being pompous jerks to people with questions and problems. Their error isn't in saying that perhaps a factory reset may be needed to sort out whatever glitches are occurring, but in their angry denunciations of those who didn't do it the l337 h4X0r way of wiping everything before updating don't deserve assistance because.
If 99 out of 100 users can update via the OTA without wiping and it works fine, what is the justification for demanding those 99 erase their phones or GTFO because User #100 has a hiccup? A: There isn't. It's just snotty nerd arrogance and it doesn't help anyone. It just allows them to stroke themselves in public.
BTW, the Google Play versions of the HTC One and Galaxy S4 are getting their OTAs for 4.3 now. None of the stories about this have commanded that users erase their phones because angry nerds command it. Also:
Hmmm, no warnings about what the angry nerds say to do. Funny how that works.
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