Endless app updates are a modern-day seventh circle of hell. Can't we have a once-a-year National Update Day? – Stephen Jardine

Can’t app-makers agree to a once-a-year National Update Day, ideally on a wet Sunday in February?

They say every dog has its day. It turns out, National Dog Day is on August 26. In fact, there seems to be a day for just about everything nowadays. Today is National Macaroni Day. Tomorrow is International Skinny Dip Day (you have been warned).

All this nonsense stems from lazy PR people who create the day to help push stories about their otherwise forgettable clients. If you don’t believe me, National Etch a Sketch Day is next week. I wonder which mechanical drawing toy is behind that?

But where is a national day when you really need one? Hardly a day goes by when I don’t wake up to my phone telling me I need to update some application. When it’s not doing that, it’s telling me I need to update the phone itself.

It would be nice if the tech wizards responsible for apps actually got them right before releasing them into the world. The world was in no great rush to get the garden flower-identifying application, so why not just make sure it works properly first?

That way they won’t have to release endless bug fixes that seem to do nothing except sign you out as a user. Then when you sign in again, your password isn’t recognised and the modern-day seventh circle of hell begins. Enter user name. User name not recognised. Enter email. This account already exists, etc, etc.

Most of the time I just ignore the app updates knowing they make very little difference anyway. By the time you get to update 9.8.27, you’re pretty much convinced the developer is a 15-year-old with a copy of Coding for Dummies who knows even less about this stuff than you do. Also, they tend to make things worse. The Gett Taxi app has updated about 13 times in the past year but still seems to be totally haphazard when I try to get a cab.

Some apps update automatically but others demand human involvement, seemingly just for the sake of it. Others are cunning and stop the tech from actually working until you follow their orders. I’m in that predicament at the moment. Having ignored for weeks the messages begging me to update a device, it’s now refusing me access. We’re locked in a battle of wills. Sadly I need it much more than it needs me and in these days of artificial intelligence, I suspect it knows it.

Updating smartphone apps can be a tedious business (Picture: Chris Ratcliffe/AFP via Getty Images)

So I propose a National Update Day. Instead of constantly bombarding us throughout the year, everything would instead be concentrated into a 24-hour period. A wet Sunday in February would probably be the ideal occasion when it might seem like a welcome alternative to an afternoon in Ikea.

Every app would demand updates and upgrades at the same time and users can just sit on the sofa making the changes as the rain cascades down outside. Knowing the day is coming, we could also offer some incentives to ensure teenage children are around so they can rescue the inevitable disasters that occur when doing anything the IT world thinks is routine and simple.

Someone could even devise an app to countdown to National Update Day and schedule all the changes. Perhaps they could even make it work the first time as part of built-in obsolescence.