Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
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Re: Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
#2In an "app store" context, the apps don't serve you; you just generate content/engagement for them. The apps you're looking at don't WANT you to be informed because you might choose not to use them. These notes are just a formality standing in for forced automatic updates. Spotify on Google Play is particularly insulting. They basically tell/shame you that you should just always update without caring about the changes.
Re: Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
#3If an app is good enough, developers and managers and "agile coaches" and such don't stop, they start doing busywork. It looks like they're working and progressing, but all they do is scare users away with by removing features, breaking workflows and more horrible stuff. You're just making money for the shareholders, nothing more. They don't care about users...
Re: Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
#4With many apps an issue for changelog writers is that often behavior is tied to feature flags, which can be remotely enabled. Thus a new feature is rolled out in the app but only visible to some testers. Only after a while it's enabled for all users. Thus app release is independent from availability of a feature.
That said "Bugfixes and performance improvements" is as useless as it gets ...
Re: Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
#5The reason these bigger apps just put "Bugfixes" and "Performance Improvements" in their changelog is because when you have many teams contributing to the software not only through actual code editing but also feature flagging what features go out on what release, rollback policies etc this becomes a nightmare to fill in. Doubly so when different users are receiving different experiences.
The article says at the end: "You see? Not that hard right?". It is that hard in bigger organisations.
Re: Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
#6The problem is often the "bugfixes and performance improvements" are a list of 60 things, and for almost all users "there are less crashes and it is faster" is all they would want to know. How many users want to read (OK, possibly people here)
"On some versions of glibc, the 32-bit specialisation of memcpy which used SSE2 instructions had a bug when the memory being copied crossed the 2GB boundary, so in that case we now use our own memcpy"
Or "Changed some internal lists to be only be sorted when they need to be rather than eagerly sorted whenever elements are added, which speeds up start-up time".
Re: Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
#7The problem is often the "bugfixes and performance improvements" are a list of 60 things, and for almost all users "there are less crashes and it is faster" is all they would want to know. How many users want to read (OK, possibly people here) "On some versions of glibc, the 32-bit specialisation of memcpy which used SSE2 instructions had a bug when the memory being copied crossed the 2GB boundary, so in that case we…
Hehe I'd be happy to read such a changelog
Re: Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
#8I automate the app deployments for our team and “bugfixes and performance improvements” is the changelog because it’s totally automated on release. Yes the automation could grab something from the commit logs but I’m not confident I’d want to expose some of our commit messages. Also recent versions of iOS have further hidden away the update ui making it very hard to find for most users, so why bother taking the time to add them manually when 99% of your user base will never see them?
Re: Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
#9One time I wrote simply “bug fixes” for an app update and it got rejected because the description was too short. I changed it to something more in the lines of “bug fixes and improvements” and it got accepted. I generally like writing changelogs for users but I also wonder how many people have automatic updates on and never read them.
Re: Lets talk about changelogs (how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements)
#10If an app is good enough, developers and managers and "agile coaches" and such don't stop, they start doing busywork. It looks like they're working and progressing, but all they do is scare users away with by removing features, breaking workflows and more horrible stuff. You're just making money for the shareholders, nothing more. They don't care about users...
In the case of many popular apps, it's a bit more than that: they're actively fighting what they perceive as bad actors, that is people trying to use their app not as intended, using their protocol outside of the official app and so on. In this case they have nothing to gain by describing the changes in more detail in the changelog.