Right now auto-update is always enabled on macOS and Windows. Let's imagine a scenario where the user intentionally wants to keep running a build that's different than the latest GA one. While they can install it and start using it, within minutes they'll be informed that the latest GA version has been downloaded/installed in the background and they will be given the option to restart into that new version now/later. This means they effectively can't quit & restart the app and remain on their different build. Therefore it seems like we'd need to have a Preference option to disable the auto-update.

One example use case for this involves Support. We may at some point want to offer special builds to users that provide early access to experimental functionality. We'd like them to be able to continue running such builds and quit/restart as necessary until they explicitly "opt in" to upgrade to a GA release.

Yet another example use case might just be a conservative user that likes to always manually upgrade so they can take their time browsing release notes and confronting the potential hit to productivity should they fear hitting new bugs or climbing the learning curve of new features in a new release.

Another variation of this came up while responding to community issue #2685. In brief, as a government agency, they summarized one of their policies:

...we cannot allow automatic download and install regardless of whether we are running in an Admin or standard user context. How can this be disabled?

In that case, just having a Preference would probably be inadequate since a user could conceivably just go into the Preferences menu and re-enable auto-updates. Therefore we likely would want to also provide an install-time option so that the app would never permit auto-update under any circumstances.