Hello,
My colleagues and I have discussed your feedback a bit and we would like to get more information on your usecase, as well as to check if a certain feature we currently have would address the friction you are experiencing.
The feature we have available is called Update Locks (see: Update locks - Balena Documentation ). With update locks, you can tell the supervisor to not restart the services on your devices (even when updating variables) until you tell them to do so by overriding the update lock. Please see the aforementioned docs on how to create an update lock. Can you please confirm whether this is a fitting solution for your usecase?
Regarding your usecase, as mentioned we would like to learn more about it. You mentioned that 97% of the robots in your fleet are not interested at all in some variables because they have not updated to the latest software version yet. When would be ideal for the restarts to take place? Do your devices have maintenance periods? Is there some time during the day (i.e. midnight) when it is okay for the devices to restart? What are the consequences of the restarts that you are trying to avoid? As much information as you are comfortable providing would be useful for us so that we could consider your usecase and try to come up with the best possible solution for all users.