> In practice, my Windows install always updates in the middle of the night when I'm not using it. It closes all of my apps and only reopens the web browser. But, it's not so bad. It doesn't bother me. I can however see how it might annoy some people. But I think the effects of this are exaggerated.
Apple has definitely figured out the "reopen apps when you reboot your computer" feature. I wonder why it's taken Microsoft so long to do the same.
Even if Microsoft were to provide some special API for this, tons of legacy programs won't be using it, and most new ones will also ignore it.
Under Microsoft Windows, application installers can register some handler to run on startup, and can implement this themselves: the program can check whether an instance of the program was interrupted by reboot, and if so, start it up in a special way whereby it is told to recover the state from the most recently saved parameters. Those could include volatile state like position of windows, object selections and whatever.
There is really nothing for Microsoft to do there other than maybe lead by example; implement some sort of best practice in a few notable Microsoft programs, document the practice and encourage developers to do same.
Apple has definitely figured out the "reopen apps when you reboot your computer" feature. I wonder why it's taken Microsoft so long to do the same.