> … pushes out buggy software as production-ready and that we're all their beta testers is a pretty common …

this is such a pet peeve of mine lately. companies are doing this all over the map now, from cars (especially self-driving), games, network equipment, entire software suites… and on and on.

i absolutely did not opt in to be a beta tester as a random human on public ways. i did not opt in to be a beta tester for your search engine results. i did not opt in to be a beta tester for the games i spend $90+ on. i did not opt in to beta test your company’s network equipment which we paid full price for.

build and closed test your products with interested parties who explicitly opt-in and quit forcing and charging us to be experiments in your company’s r&d.

I hear this talked about in the past but is it still true today?

I've at least never experienced it (and I stick to the Stable/Release channel).

I have 4 AP, 9 cameras, NVR and Dream Machine - I guess I got lucky over the 2.5 years I've had Unifi.

You can easily turn off automatic updates. I check the forum before I update. Haven’t had any issues for 10+ years.

I haven't found that to be the case on Stable channel.

(I do notice people on forums love to use Early Access update channel where... YMMV).