Okay. So I’m no UX expert, just a developer and I’ve also worked in product management. I think at some point, if you work in this field, you have to develop instincts around the design and experience of things. A modal (i.e. app-locking) dialog that says “contacting the iphone software update server”, which is current behavior and not changed as far as I can tell, is so far out of the realm of acceptable in my view, that if we differ on that point, we can’t even begin a discussion about the more subtle issues… (Consider that Chrome updates itself all the time; now imagine if you launched Chrome, typed in gmail.com, and it suddenly locked up all your tabs because it was ‘contacting the Chrome software update server’.)
After all, design trades in subtleties, otherwise if the discussion is just about explaining the purpose for a widget, everything in an interface can be explained, even this well-known ‘bad UI’ example: http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png