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.
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”.
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.
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…
lol I just checked and I had 26 pending app updates. Every one of them had about the same level of detail.
The only exceptions were the Wikipedia app and Voyager, both of which listed some new features.
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.
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
Most apps will be built using libraries to provide functionality.
For example a Lemmy might use a small database to store cached data on the device so it doesn’t have to redownload data as you navigate back and forth. Rather than writing their own code to create and maintain the database that functionality is available as a library they can import into their app and use immediately.
There might be dozens or even hundreds of libraries in any given app, this is great in that the app developer can focus on their app specific features and not worry so much about the low level features but these libraries also have their own release schedule and may only support security fixes on their current version.
This can result in a situation where you could have weekly or monthly updates just to include library updates even if you haven’t added any features directly to the app itself.
As a hobby developer, I feel like I’m just gluing libraries together to get what I want.
In my job as a software developer I’m mostly gluing libraries together.
In my hobby developing software I’m writing the libraries people glue together!
Hobby? That’s all the “real” stuff is too.
Best answer here. The wide use of open source software inside other software leads to precisely such a situation.
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.
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.
Yeah, try using Android 3 Honeycomb. Go on. Give it a try.
It’s not that nothing changes. It’s that changes are small. Humans react violently to big changes. If you change everything about an app all at once, people will hate the app, and leave.
If you make all those same changes, but spread them out over 2 years? They adjust. It’s like giving someone a pill to swallow. You don’t give them a pill the size of a watermellon, and expect them to swallow it. Instead you break it up into pieces and slowly feed them the whole pill over time.
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.
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.
Gotta harvest more of your data
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.
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 have an excuse to issue a new ToS and opt you back into everything you toggled off.
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.
