Annoying Desktop Updates & Adobe Promo Popups

The solution is totally misleading. I have been using Adobe Reader and observing its behaviour for more than 17 years. The Updater option in Preferences was removed from the free Adobe Reader many, many years ago. It still exists in Acrobat, which is a completely different product.

The really frustrating thing is that when customers open PDFs and give print commands on our systems, Adobe Reader keeps attempting background updates from time to time. For a normal end user, there is no official option in Reader's Preferences to simply disable this behaviour. There are administrative/policy methods to control it, but those are certainly not a straightforward user-level setting.

And customers are already accustomed to using Adobe Reader, so switching to another PDF reader isn't always practical in a customer-facing environment.

No doubt, many of Adobe's other software products are excellent, but this updater mechanism in Reader is one of the worst aspects of their software. Camera Raw is another example—although it may not be used by countless users, it keeps getting updated as well.

I have also seen people on the Adobe Community asking how to disable the Reader updater, only to be told to go to Preferences → Updater and turn it off. That advice is misleading because Adobe Reader does not have that Updater preference in the first place. Adobe's own current documentation confirms that Acrobat Reader is set to update automatically by default and that there is no UI option in Preferences to control this.

Note: The user has clarified in the 2nd thread that it is Reader.

I meant say Acrobat Reader not Autocrat.