It seems the time has come when Avast is no longer providing sufficient value for me to put up with the downsides, some of which I'll list here:
- Fails badly with the latest Windows Update Roll-up
- No word at all in more than a day from Avast engineering on the above issue
- Becoming less and less efficient, and slowing my work down a lot lately
- Too many false positives
- Lack of an option to override blocking even a [Susp] false positive when it is detected
- Features not working / obeying UI settings (e.g., scans popping UI open & loss of voice announcements)
- Heading in directions I don't want or can't use (e.g., NG)
- Disruption of work (e.g,. processes failing when Avast chooses to do a Deep Scan)
- Providing more and more unwanted programs (which of course can be deconfigured, but it's the principle)
- Packaging of unwanted software components in Avast executables/DLLs
- Predatory / misleading operation (e.g., opt outs, aggressive installer UI choices)
- Dropping rankings in tests of multiple AV packages
- Need to uninstall / reinstall the program to keep it working (even once was too many times)
- I've updated both updates that were supposedly problematic and my system works just the same. And it has been this way pretty much every single time users complained about things like this. The issue usually lies in something other than avast! (often wrecked system itself).
- Performance tests and my experience says otherwise. avast! has been the lightest compared to other products.
- Too many false positives only in AV-C on-demand test which was plain ridiculous. Where in reality, i've had like 5 false psoitives in 10 years.
- The lack of adding stuff to exclusions in detection popups is by design, because people tend to exclude anything and everything when they desperately want to run something. When they have to dig up settings through menus, they kinda sober up and give up. Which is good. Those who really know what they are dpoing will still do it. It's really by design and i understand why it is done so. I've seen way too many people just excluding stuff because they wanted it to run regardless of anything. Which is not smart and defeats the purpose of using antivirus in the first place.
- I've never ever had GUI to popup by itself. Voice announcements for virus updates were removed because the popup has also been removed (because it has become obsolete with streaming updates). The rest should still be functional the way it was all the years before...
- Don't have any problems with DeepScreen, in fact they managed to improve it the way that LockNote now functions with it properly which used t be problematic since it always generates a new container which confused the old Auto Sandbox and DeepScreen...
However i do agree with you last points of too much "crap" being intorduced into the installer, too many things getting re-checked when program update is done, i've seen too many systems get Chrome and Dropbox installed on systems where users were using other browsers and had no intention to ever use Dropbox or similar stuff. Just because it was pre-checked in update popup. I understand that they need to make profit from free somehow as well but you really have to draw a line somehwere and they are standing on it...
The dropped rankings in tests are also annoying, yes. Despite countless promisses that this and that will dramatically improve things, i always get disappointed. I know tests aren't the exact indicator, but how can you spread the word if the product you're recommending always ends up at bottom half of pretty much every single test? And considering how avast! used to be right below top payable players, i find that troublesome as well.
The need to re-install product to fix it is also annoying. I didn't had to do it myself more than once but i've seen users do that to fix things. I've proposed a self-diagnostic system which would check up avast! operation on daily basis and if something was indicated as broken and non functional, it should performa a sort of self repair/re-install of avast!. But that never really happened.
I kinda just have a feeling sometimes that the days of users having some word at development are now long gone and avast! is way too focused on satisfying their shareholders and nothing else. And shareholders always just want profit, profit and profit and making things bigger and bigger. Which is not necessarely always a good thing.
