"It is magical because it continuously updates an entire development platform invisibly, frequently"
That "frequently" is every 30 minutes, by the way... I accidentally removed the goog updater from my Lil Snitch rules and noticed that it then started asking permission every 30 minutes, on the dot (I started recording the times for a while).
I don't know why it needs to check so often - except that that kind of data would be very useful for noting how often your users were on 'puters, and if they moved around etc.
Out of curiosity, were you allowing it to check? If you denied permissions I could see it asking every 30 minutes since it failed the previous attempt.
In this case the benefit far outweighs the cost, if a bug is introduced in an update I want Google to be able to patch it and my browser to receive it asap.
That "frequently" is every 30 minutes, by the way... I accidentally removed the goog updater from my Lil Snitch rules and noticed that it then started asking permission every 30 minutes, on the dot (I started recording the times for a while).
I don't know why it needs to check so often - except that that kind of data would be very useful for noting how often your users were on 'puters, and if they moved around etc.