I feel like my phone apps update constantly. In general, that’s a good thing, I assume. I figure they’re fixing bugs or whatever. However, I don’t run into issues very often, nowhere near the rate of updates, and nothing seems to change after the update.
Compare that to Steam games which update really infrequently and the changes are usually much more obvious.
Security patches and rare bugs that most people don’t run into, mostly
Gotta have an excuse to issue a new ToS and opt you back into everything you toggled off.
Not every change is going to completely overhaul the app. More than likely, the changes are a fix to some obscure bug not caught in testing that only affects a small percentage of devices. Just because you don’t encounter it with your workflow and device doesn’t mean it isn’t a critical bug preventing someone from using the app. It could also be a new feature targeting a different use case to yours. It could even be as simple as bringing the app into compliance with new platform requirements or government regulations (which can happen a couple times a year, for example Android often bumps the minimum SDK target such that apps are forced to comply with new privacy improvements).
Some good answers here. Also developers regularly add or update translations, support new features your phone doesn’t even have, compatibility with a different smartwatch, or regular bugfixes that only trigger in special circumstances and just for some users… All of that is difficult to notice for the regular user. Unless you buy the latest smartwatch an try to operate the app with it, or set your phone to Arabic.
And then there are maintenance tasks that don’t add any (visible) features. And apps are generally part of some more infrastructure at the respective company. Internal changes in their workflow or related software might change things. Or they decide to prepare something for the future or make it more efficient.
Sometimes they just update the year in the copyright notice. Or they re-build the app with the latest versions of the libraries that are supplied by different companies or open source projects. Those regularly change, fix bugs and generally you don’t want to depend on any old software library versions with known bugs and vulnerabilities. So there are a lot if reasons why software gets updated without visible changes.
I see a lot of the other reasons mentioned, but one I don’t: on android you are required to release updates at least every year-ish or they will completely delete your developer account and app.
Source: got that message recently for an app I made and haven’t had a reason to update.
What’s better is on an iPhone or iPad you can set the apps to auto update and it will not auto update. It’s normal for me to check and have 15 apps that have updates that have been sitting there for a month.
Same with Apple Watch. They have this feature that tracks sleep but guess what? You won’t get software updates if you do that because it only updates at night.
I’m not normally a conspiracy guy but I have an old app that I swear they update (but not really) just so that people think it is active.
(No sources) but apps with no updates get removed from the stores. So yes , some updates are “nothing”.
With games, frequent and regular updates are mainly to keep people returning to the game and to fix bugs. Many apps already implement most of the features people need and dont really need new features for people to keep coming back, so the focus is moreso on maintaining compatibility and fixing bugs like crashes, as well as keeping up with OS updates (which tend not to affect games as severely, though can in some cases). Keep in mind theres a huge number of different phones which are on different OS versions with different system APIs, and msny devs dont test on a large number of devices. Desktop drivers and OSs tend to smooth over a lot of the hurdles there
Pokemon Go
I swear, it seems to have weekly 100 MB updates that change nothing, make something worse, or just change the splash screen.
Those updates are unaffectionately called “streak breakers” because by the time it updates, I’ve forgotten to launch it again.
Read the patch notes and see what’s changing. Usually it’s “squashing bugs”, but there could be a few new features you’d like in there.
Many developers (especially popular apps) like to go into great detail, like this…
There are maybe 3 of my ~50 apps that provide actual changelogs. All the others only write “bug fixes and performance improvements”, puns or other marketing pitches.
I disabled auto updates and only update if there are actual changelogs or the app doesn’t let me use it anymore without updating. But there have been too many automatic enshittifications for me to trust auto updates.
I dunno… I see the same thing with video games too. Half the updates to my games don’t even get patch notes, and like a few things recently that are over 2 decades old are getting regular updates.
When they do have notes, 90% of the things being fixed or changed were problems I never noticed or had seen anyone posting about. Even if it was something I might have encountered, a lot of the time I wouldn’t have recognized it as a bug. Like if a weapon was supposed to do some extra things and didn’t, but it also didn’t tell you that it did that extra thing I would never know it was broken until they fix it. Most bugs seem to be that; fixing mistakes most players wouldn’t even notice as being a mistake. And in the case of many Fromsoft games: they make changes they don’t even put in the notes. Often in the form of removing text from item descriptions to make things even more vague.
Having a regular schedule of updates helps get individual big fixes or features out faster. You may not notice a difference because you may not experience the bugs that are being fixed. There may be slight changes to features that you don’t use enough to notice. There could even be features that are disabled until they’re remotely enabled. Mobile apps often run A/B tests for changes to see how those changes affect user behavior, so you might be in the “no change” test cohort when you don’t see changes, those changes may never activate on your installation if the test doesn’t pan out.
I recently convinced my team to adopt this practice so I’ve been brushing up on it. When done right it can mean a more stable app and quicker response to issues since it relies heavily on monitoring app performance, bug reports, and user reviews. Communication to users is hard since you don’t want to have every update be “fixed bugs” but it’s also unnecessary to say “fixed an issue where a batch upload job didn’t handle individual errors by retrying” for each change that may not actually impact you as a user but which impacts the business that builds the app.
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