There isn't any substantial difference between some types of software engineering and other engineering disciplines. The HDTV antenna I unboxed this morning was a travesty of "engineering" and is the electrical engineering equivalent of a crappy todo app. OTOH, my day job developing software is as rigorous as the physical engineering I've been involved in (my undergraduate degree is in Electrical Engineering and I worked in that field for about a decade).

The "problem" is that most software doesn't need to be engineered any more than the average garden fence does, so there is a lot of drawing of false parallels.

And as far as nagging users to update, that can be a little difficult if your software is embedded in the controls of a diesel engine somewhere in the South China Sea.