Updates that don't tell me what is being updated
why do i need to update the app so i can see changes. Whats the point of a change log then? I have auto updates off cause it a hassle to revert back to an earlier version if I dont like the changes. I know for a fact the ig update is for their new stupid map feature and AI shit. I will not update unless it stops working completely. Is it so hard to say what specific bug was fixed and what exactly do you mean by performance. why cant it be detailed like this
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Hey, Chime? You can work on your creative writing when the changelog is done.
Also, it seems to have been written by an arrogant 19 year old. Everyone knows what a cornucopia is.
Sounds like ai slop changelog lol
I find it deeply offensive that an app could suggest I may not know the word "cornucopia." I wouldn't give a shit if it was the only app I could use to pay my bills; if it at any point suggested that I didn't know a word as common as "cornucopia," I would delete it immediately, leave a 0 star review, and post the offense to a community like this.
And just to be clear, the bar for how uncommon a word would have to be in order for it not be offensive is way higher than cornu-fucking-copia.
"Terpsichorean." That's a word I wouldn't be offended if they thought I didn't know it. Or maybe "legerdemain." I know both of those words, but I wouldn't be offended.
Hmm, those are cool
Terpsichorean - “pertaining to dance” Legerdemain - “someone who is particularly skilled with one’s hands in the use of conjuring tricks”
That was the most upsetting of all of the examples. How condescending (GoOgLe iT). What an ass.
This sort of shit ought to be banned.
We made our interface SUCK! Can you change it back? NO!
FUCK YOU
We improved our tracking algorithms to more accurately monitor your every move.
We found an unpatched microphone exploit that let's us listen in on all of your conversations.
I would rather no change log than the LLM generated fall thing… that was a waste of time to read.
just trust us bro, no spyware in here, bro.
I 100% agree that proper changelog should be provided, but to defend devs a litte, the play store changelog character limit makes it almost useless for anything but very small changes.
Though doing funny haha in the changelog is so dumb, they should be like "this changelog field can't handle the changes, please see the changelog inside the app"
Could the Play Store changelog contain a link to the official changelog then?
No links allowed last time I checked.
linphone adds a link and tumblr tells people to go to their dev blog where they talk about bug fixes, updates and issues they are aware of and fixing. I dont think the play store prohibits that.
Oh ok, I just know it was frowned upon before.
Is it actually clickable as a hyperlink though?
idk about the play store or ios but im using aurora store and if you go to the app page directly you are able to copy text. And Fdroid lets you link an external change log thats click-able.
I checked the play store, the link is a clickable hyperlink.
So yeah, link to full changelog should be the gold standard then. (And including as many changes as fits ofc)
Is the hope that, after updating and checking the changelog and deciding that updating is NOT for you because of some idiotic breaking-change, you just hop in the time machine and prevent yourself from updating ?
The hope is that its at least better than nothing and at least available at all.
It's especially better than the cringe attempts at being funny or cute.
I mean, realistically it's not possible to keep using an older version anyway. After a month or two it might stop working due to backend changes, unless it's truly an offline app like a calculator, then maybe it will only break after a longer period.
So your choice is update or uninstall anyway.
Like, do you seriously know anyone who uses "this app, version from March 2022" and "that app, version from January 2023" because that's their favourite versions of these apps? It's just not a thing that happens.
Just like for websites. But I don't ever see people complaining that websites don't usually have changelogs. You just get the latest version every time you refresh and you can't do anything about it. And if they don't like changes, they stop using it, not try to reverse time.
The obvious answer is there's no human at the helm recording changes, it's just the next build. You'll take it and you'll like it.
Or that the person writing the changelog is in marketing and knows that end users will be seeing this as communication directly from the company. Marketing people tend to foam at the mouth when they see a chance to "connect with their users".
Your hypothesis is confirmed by "Because nothing says Fall like financial progress."
Right, like I said, no human at the helm
The meal planning app that I use got bought out by Samsung and they did this. Put a load of ads in and then advertised a "+" version that got rid of ads. The ads were just advertising the "+" feature. 12 months later they said they were going to remove the ads for everyone.
OMG, thank you! Until now I thought I was the only person to be fucking annoyed by this shit.
We are here. Dozens of us!
Modern mobile app development almost always releases features gradually behind feature flags, so changelogging things is not necessarily practical to do.
Why not? Put "added feature XY, staged rollout in the coming X days" in the changelog.
Certainly better to know that there is a new feature and you might get it now or some time later, than some nonsense like "nothing says fall like financial progress"
Well, you might be inclined to not roll the feature out at all, depending on the results you see from the rollout/an A/B-test. Also, having it written out with a date in the changelog binds you to that date, unless you want the embarrassment of not shipping on a promised time. Maintaining a changelog for very large app development organizations is also a pretty damn hard task, trying to coordinate whatever all teams are releasing in a particular build.
I agree that getting cute with the changelog messages is a bit stale. Might as well not add anything at that point.
I feel this in my bones. Our biggest device contains hundreds of apps and firmware. We generally update the apps and firmware together. It's nearly impossible to summarize the changes in a meaningful way. What issues were fixed? Likely a few hundred. What new features were added or improved? Another big list. Management thought AI would magically solve this problem, but it turns out that it has no idea which things are worth mentioning vs which should be glossed over.
It sucks both internally and externally.
Thank you – I will be less frustrated next time I scroll through the iOS App Store change logs.
You expect them to admit:
Implemented more aggressive collection of personal data to sell to advertisers.
Advertisers of medical and beauty supplements are now suggested to your teenage daughter if she deleted her picture minutes after not receieving likes.
Users who advocate for neonazi and genocidal idologies now get suggested to each other to better promote and organize which returns higher profit of targetted advertisements as their usage time and activities increase together.
As part of our new monitoring and speech policy, users are now allowed to use the word retard, removed, f-word, tranny, and n-word with hard R without their posts getting flagged or reviewed which allows for better targetted advertisements and higher revenue for the Zuck.
Data collection now includes geophraphical tracking of your friends and intrests of people you follow giving higher revenue for shareholders.
Implemented analysis of background data collection of users usage and screen time, which gives higher profits per click to our targetted adveretisers.
does lemmy.world not allow bitch? lol thats funny
or is it something else like cunt
Censorship of words is the dumbest thing to me. People simply change the word. Keep playing R-worded whack-a-mole lmao.
lmao...! Yes Lemmy censored my comment but I hope I dont get banned for it. I was mocking facebook content policy changes which the Zuck implemented to lick Trump's removed which was part of his $25Million settlement to avoid repercussions for banning his account back when Biden was in Office.
i cant wait for both their downfalls !!
changelogs should be legally mandated on app stores
"performance improvements and bug fixes"
... which is also almost verbatim what it says at the bottom of the "good" example...
... in a addition to a link where they explain their "improvements and bug fixes" in greater detail without character limits. So yes it is a "good" example.
i dont know if they do lending but the banking side of it is convenient enough. I use it to send/recieve money to my parents cash app is too complicated for them, i dont use it as my bank account.
Is that an iOS thing? On Android versions don't reset reviews, and there is no "review of older version" message.
I've never seen that happen, in fact bad reviews about problems in my apps keep being shown at the top of the list, even though the problems were solved years ago and the reviews are about a very early version.
Facebook is one of the worst:
The app must be so fast that it has transcended to a higher plane of existence if it gets faster every update.
“We’re updating the segmentation logic of our A/B test infrastructure to downgrade its respect for the CloudFlare score when deciding whether or not to mark a session as coming from a bot. This was skewing the data on several of our start screen UI experiments, particularly within APAC data.”
Sometimes, you really don’t want to hear it ;D
Actually, I do. But more importantly, I should have the option
Maybe this didn’t come across from my example but my point was that a lot of changes are internal, highly technical, housekeeping, etc and unintelligible without proprietary knowledge of the entire codebase and a full code diff. It’s not going to be the benefit you think it is, and it is not reasonable to expect a full diff with every release - unless you want to go use open source software for everything.
If you want to add your desire to the list of pie-in-the-sky things that would be ideal to have in life, fine, but it’s not practical or useful in reality. Even the publishers who appear to be doing what you want are not telling you everything. There is always an undercurrent of technical housekeeping. And sometimes that’s ALL there is.
I can understand a banking app such as Chime* wanting to obfuscate whatever bugs or potential exploits they’ve come across and patched - to prevent users on older versions from being targeted; but the rest of those examples are utterly bullshit.
I put forward Duolingo as another egregious example of this bullshit:
Silence, Owl. Anki supremacy till the end.
Patch notes:
Ahow many updates receives an app, is now considered a "good" metric somehow now. So now if dependabot pushes a PR, it's a new release on the app stores (of course without testing)
The algorithms on the app stores now consider the app "active" and push the app "up" in ranking
There was a certain billionaire bragging about his app getting 3 vibe-coded updates a day while the competition "only" got 3 a week
So, they can't write a real change log. What can they write? "Dependabot updated leftpad from 1.1.3.2 to 1.1.3.3" "untested: updated Gradle from 8.14.2 to 8.14.3" "200mb update to change a comma in the Hungarian translation"
chime: a PM asked an AI to write this after the only dev that knew how to do this quit
Discord: The PM was frustrated with the devs not summarizing this release crap that no one cares about anyway and hid it behind a link ah that's so much cleaner now.
Instagram: fuck you
Linphone:
Even Google does the same with almost every app like Maps, Files, Chrome.
Who the hell uses Google Files for anything but a bad file picker?
That's an example I gave. I use Solid Explorer.
Solid choice.
I created a folder using Simple Gallery but it couldn't see it. I created a couple more with the same issue. Google Files saw them just fine. Simple Gallery does see them now. I'm guessing that the issue had something to do with the Android 16 upgrade though I didn't update the app and there wasn't a follow-up update to the upgrade.
People who use defaults, what do you mean?
Google does a lot of A/B testing, so listing new changes may be pointless as the new features may be available only to select few.
Also developers have no incentive to document changes. It's a hassle to compile a list of changes since last release, and people don't read the Changelog for every release, especially with auto updates on.
I'd be great if they could at least use an LLM to compile the Changelog
You dont need an llm, and it doesn't need to be a developer. Devs are more than capable of writing down words that a human can understand, and if the project is big there will be a manager who has the context to provide a short summary.
However all of that requires company effort.
Developers very seldom communicate in a way that pleases their company leadership. There's a reason support, sales and marketing people have jobs. If companies didn't need them, they would cut them to save cost.
However, the developer should be able to put down their changes and whomever is in charge of communications should be using the change log as a chance to communicate to end users the changes in a friendly way. Not this nonsense. LLM could do it but it, but it's best to have it written by a person.
This seems like roughly what I said except discounting the idea that a changelog, marketing communication, sales communication, and support are all wildly different. I don't want some dumbass in sales or marketing who can barely add two numbers together without a calculator trying to explain that Firefox fixed several crashes in the latest release. Similarly I wouldn't want a developer trying to psychologically manipulate you into buying something you don't need -- that's why you hire sociopaths.
Wow, tell me how you really feel about sales people. Jeez.
I think it's a universal experience if you're an engineer who does customer facing work. Every salesperson I've worked with has been either extraordinarily stupid or a sociopath who overpromises something that doesn't exist so they can get a commission, regardless of the fact that the thing they sold doesn't work and sometimes cannot work. They are a scourge upon this planet and if they all disappeared overnight the world would almost certainly be a better place.
Marketing otoh I just don't have a lot of respect for. Sure, they lie and use made-up phrases and barely know the product they are marketing in a lot of cases, but they're company-approved lies so you're usually not on the hook for making their lies a reality. The salespeople have to bend those lies into a bullshit "solution" first before it personally impacts you. Plus marketing folks don't have commission, so they aren't as personally invested in feeding some made up shit to any given random asshole group lead or director, which is refreshing.
I mean, I am an engineer who does customer-facing work... it's not been my experience that sales and marketing people are this bad. I suppose maybe I just work for an exceptionally chill company, but wow, that really sucks.
I'm sure you're just venting, but be sure to monitor your attitude going into work because this kind of resentment, if held at all times, will drive you insane.
Youtube also does this. Basically it says "To see list of changes, look in the app guide" or something like that; no morons, I want to know what you changed BEFORE updating.
I think a lot of times they don’t want you to know what’s been updated. For instance, pointing out all the bugs you’re fixing might make your app look like it’s always full of bugs. Or the security fix might draw attention to issues that exist for currently outdated apps.
Not saying it’s a good reason, but maybe that’s their thought process.
It least Instagram straight up doesn't give a changelog, rather than letting you read dumb exposition that tells you nothing. (Thats still crap tho)
That sucks
I just want the changelog....
I am sure you can automate that in your ci cd thingy
"We are hard at work making discord work better for you"
While content being completely locked away inside proprietary app.
I dont know, I feel like all these fake messages are quite dystopian. What happened to actually treating users as intelligent? I guess maybe today most users dont know anything about tech so thats why this is happening.
"Bugfixes and performance improvements"
I see that one all the time from big companies because it sounds nice and tells you nothing.
One of those updates a few years included embedding adware. So, thanks for that... jackhole
Pumpkins and... hay...?
That Chime one is the sloppest AI slop I've seen today.
That's been a joke in the Playstation community for years now:
"Stability Improvements."
Well, shit, we must have the most stable system in the universe at this point...
lmao
Also fuck all these ads reminding me its going to be cold soon.
"General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience."
Change logs are kinda hard to do in a CI/CD environment because of the way that development style works.
It's actually pretty challenging in general. Not sure you've ever built a change log before but it's a pretty interesting exercise thats easier said then done. Even open source logs just copy paste the commit log which can be not all that helpful.
People deserve to know what they are installing on their device. Period
I'd argue that if the app is not monetized, you deserve whatever the dev feels like giving you, for free.
People can also just not install those things. No one is forcing it.
Isn't this just what AI is the greatest tool of all time for? At least, so I'm told by the AIvangelists.
Unironically probably a decent use of AI
Also happens with some apps on fdroid. "Update available" - click to see, nothing there
I asked this on the Motorola sub when i first got my phone and no one gives a shit.
The changelog was always something like "various bugfixes and stability updates". removed, what did you do?
Hey I think your instance censored your post in case that’s unpalatable to ya
(Prob was a word I personally never use heh but the removal is grating anyways, oddly enough)
I know and it's annoying that I can't say female dog
AFAIK discord does it on the app.
But its more convenient if they added it to the changelog.
Whats New in this Textra update?
Bug fixes
Improvements
Slack does this all the time.
The first one is cute one time. When it starts to become a pattern, it’s laziness. Especially when it’s copypasta, which it usually is.
Change long Probably be like
-- Fixed typo that corrupted the database
-- Fixed hardcoded credentials
My bank's app recently went like "We've implemented a feature if you use our widget, and also one hidden feature." Like fucking just tell me what the fuck that's about? I'm not looking for easter eggs in my fucking bank app.
That looks so much better than having only “General fixes and improvements”
In general, I agree, though. Quite regularly I would prefer better update notes, release notes, etc.
Because there's a very strict character limit on the Google Play store side for update messages. So if it's a bigger update, all I can do is put a summary of the changelog there.
Every single google made app does this, why would anyone else do anything different if the creators aren't willing to put In the effort either?
Wish we could upload videos, I recorded this exact same issue a few days ago with Spotify. I use a modded Spotify and curious to the updates. Thus I checked their App Store and this what’s been spammed on their App Store page;
“We are continuously busy making Spotify much better! Don’t want to miss anything? Make sure you have automatic updates on!”
One free host here:
https://catbox.moe/
Donation supported, been online for years now
Then can embed like this:
I always just blame Dave and his bugs.
"Mariah thawing"
That's grim
She needs to be defrosted from her summer stasis in time to sing about Christmas.
Though in all seriousness, it's sad to think that enough people saw that AI slop of an update summary and thought, "Yep, that sounds better than anything I could've come up with. Let's run with it."
...and you should thank them for it. you ingrates! Because, after all they have been granting you the undecieved privilege of deciding for yourselves what software to install for too long. We should all thank Google for taking that burden away from us, soon, as well as Apple who never granted anything to anyone. Not for free, that is, and not much anyway.
Welcome, your Ford Pinto is fully up to date!
Ready for the ashtray!
A developer here, I usually list user - facing changes in the Changelog.
Even if the changes are not listed, general "bug fixes and performance improvements" is a worthwhile update too. These updates can contain fixes to annoying UX glitches, or really speed up the app, if a new faster API endpoint was added to the backend, and app change is needed to make use of it. You will also get security updates, to the app and its bundled libraries which is important nowadays.
but why not list those specific changes instead of just saying “bug fixes and performance improvements”? If the changelog is character limited on app stores cant you put a link to a dev blog or something? I want to know what is being changed on apps that have access to data on my phone. I have permissions off on every single app because of this, you literally never know what they are doing. All im asking for is transparency. Tumblr has a dedicated blog where they talk about updates but spotify just doesnt even give a shit.
Im a dev too i dont understand the modern app development landscape, how hard is it to just tell users what they're getting??
"Fixed errors in the French translation" might only appear in the French change log.
Hey just due to your mention of Insta thought you might wanna take a look at this
https://www.distractionfreeapps.com/
I've used it for a good while now and really like it but outside of that not an expert in terms of security or features. But it stops the updates, and I can choose to switch off pretty much everything and purely use it as a messaging app.
ooh that could be good, i only use Instagram to message my friends anyways. Deleted everything on there.