I work on the CodePush team and we are simply interested in helping devs engage more closely with their end-users, by delivering value more quickly and hopefully less obtrusively. We by no means want to prescribe poor and/or annoying update practices.

As was mentioned, our existing API surface actually leans towards the use of "active updates" that present the option to install or ignore to the end-user. That said, I think there are numerous scenarios where silent installs could be valuable as well, and you could even imagine an app having a user option to disable that or not.

We want to provide the primitives and services necessary to create these experiences, without imposing any specific opinion to how devs should cater to their respective userbase. Compelling user experiences are absolutely priority one!