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.
Gotta have an excuse to issue a new ToS and opt you back into everything you toggled off.
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 a crock.
I get the reasoning, but there’s gotta be a better way to manage stale apps.
I have a number of apps that aren’t on Play and work fine, I just save the apk or back it up with Swift or Neo Backup.
Its pretty crazy. I was very taken aback by the email. Dev accounts aren’t even free.
Could be security and updates for features you might not use
Security patches and rare bugs that most people don’t run into, mostly
The standard answer is “security”…and that may be true in some cases.
But a lot of it is just job justification. Some beleaguered coder somewhere has to do a thing because their manager has to do a thing because their director has to do a thing and so on. Box checking exercises.
Also the app is probably built on a mountain of dependencies all of which have updates and security patches and bullshit. Delaying those updates for too long makes finally making a real update a nightmare, so you occasionally release updates just to keep up.
I’m glad in my 30 years of work I’ve never even caught a whiff of this nonsense. I’d undoubtedly heckle someone who proposed it to the point where I’d be fired. And I’d do it again.
Spelling mistake in commented notes.
Oh god. These app updates are so huge, I wonder if anything about this is diff/delta.
Maybe I’m old but having 20 apps wanting 200MB+ updates and all of them having the filler text gets to me.
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.
I disabled updates (though it looks like some Google apps update anyway) and majority continues to work. Few apps occasionally start a protest and tell me that I need to update before they resume their work.
It doesn’t answer your question, but indeed points that mostly there is nothing important.
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).
Gotta harvest more of your data
I would set that automatic app update off, apps are to known to sometimes update to newer enshittied versions like Fantastical did.
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
It’s a number of reasons. One I don’t see already mentioned is that Apple and Google require apps to target the latest versions of their OSs and libraries. For example Google released a new version of the Google Play Billing Services library. All apps were required to update to the newest version by kid August (you could request a two month extension). So to the end user it seems like nothing has changed. But under the hood the app is now using the latest apis. This could also apply to non-Google/Apple apis. Maybe a change of the developers own api was necessary.
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.
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.
