You can say "we managed to do X without Y" for a lot of values of X and Y.
I think that's the wrong way to go about things; instead it's more useful to ask "will this be useful?"
There's a long list of real-world use cases in part 3 of that blog series.
I miss telemetry in my app sometimes too; there's some features where I wonder if anyone actually uses this, and I also don't really know what kind of things people run in to. Simply "ask people" is tricky, as I don't really have a way to contact everyone who cloned my git repo, and in general most people tend to be conservative in reporting feedback. I have found this a problem even in a company setting with internal software: people would tell me issues they've been frustrated at for months over beers in the pub, when this was sometimes just a simple 5 minute tweak that I would be happy to make.
Can I make my app without telemetry? Obviously, yes. And I have no plans to ever add it. But that doesn't mean it's not useful.
> instead it's more useful to ask "will this be useful?"
Well, that's also the wrong way to look at it. Because everything, no matter how broadly bad it might be, is useful to someone somewhere.
Of course telemetry can be useful to the developer of the application (if they look at the data and act on it). But at the same time it violates the privacy of all its users, who vastly outnumber (at least for most projects) its developers.
For any argument we need to look at pros & cons, not just the pros.
I think that should go without saying, but yes, obviously you're correct that "useful" involves arguments about advantages and disadvantage. The previous poster wasn't talking about trade-offs though.
The vast, vast majority of people simply do not care about this type of privacy (from absolute strangers with no details about their personal lives). It's a nerd canard that this type of data sharing matters.
Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Chrome, games consoles, Docker, VS Code, IntelliJ etc. They all collect telemetry and stats on how they are used. That didn't stop them becoming monster success stories even amongst the developer population because nobody cares.
The Go team are right to do this. Really, we should all be following their lead. Software telemetry is essentially pure win with no downsides for end users, which is why everyone has adopted it. It can also be done in better ways than we do now, like by recording stats in human readable form in files that sit around for a while before they get uploaded, so uploads can be turned to manual mode for inspection by the 0.1% of people who do seriously care.
Every new feature starts at -100 points and must have at least 100 points to be added to the list of features.
You should only be adding telemetry if you can verifiably prove it will give you information you can't get otherwise, that you will actually use that info (what features hit the most bugs doesn't freaking matter if you are spending 95% of ever sprint doing completely different things) and only if you can find a way to legally guarantee that info is used for NOTHING else.
Microsoft did not have broad telemetry in Windows in the 90s, and yet Raymend Chen had no trouble getting popular software and running it to find out what problems it ran in to. When vista had basic telemetry, all they found out was that nVidia makes crash prone drivers (50% of all Vista BSODs) but that didn't help them at all. People still blamed Vista for all the problems not caused by Vista, and nVidia was not getting that telemetry.
Telemetry is a weird crutch that people keep latching onto before they even break their legs.
I think that's the wrong way to go about things; instead it's more useful to ask "will this be useful?"
There's a long list of real-world use cases in part 3 of that blog series.
I miss telemetry in my app sometimes too; there's some features where I wonder if anyone actually uses this, and I also don't really know what kind of things people run in to. Simply "ask people" is tricky, as I don't really have a way to contact everyone who cloned my git repo, and in general most people tend to be conservative in reporting feedback. I have found this a problem even in a company setting with internal software: people would tell me issues they've been frustrated at for months over beers in the pub, when this was sometimes just a simple 5 minute tweak that I would be happy to make.
Can I make my app without telemetry? Obviously, yes. And I have no plans to ever add it. But that doesn't mean it's not useful.