Iphone apps - why the constant updates?!

[anonymous-user]

As the title says really.
Every few days the apps have updates.
Spotify seems to be one of the worse. The latest update is 'Never Miss a festival / improvement.....' or some nonsense
No doubt the view will have changed & has been pointlessly altered.
Youtube is almost unusable,with stupid non-intuitive menu etc
Why are the apps so poorly thought out that they always need updating?
Employment generation I guess in most cases
It would be nice if they got the apps right & left them alone!

[audi321]

They rush them out of development, with little or no QA. Then spend the next months fixing the bugs the users have found!

Oh no.....that's just my place of work lol.

[S10GTA]

audi321 said:

They rush them out of development, with little or no QA. Then spend the next months fixing the bugs the users have found!

Oh no.....that's just Pistonheads

EFA

[anonymous-user]

I would have thought that Spotify & Youtube have had plenty of beta testing by now!
But still updates every week it seems.
I guess jobs for the boys, to give us their perceived improvements constantly..

[Mattt]

Baffles me how large seemingly simple apps are, modern coders would've never survived in the days of floppy drives...

[scorp]

Mattt said:

Baffles me how large seemingly simple apps are, modern coders would've never survived in the days of floppy drives...

I think a lot of it is artwork, a simple splash screen for a iPhone 5 is going to cost a handful of megabytes these days.

[scorp]

audi321 said:

They rush them out of development, with little or no QA. Then spend the next months fixing the bugs the users have found!

Oh no.....that's just my place of work lol.

I'm not sure it's possible to find every last bug in a piece of software using a small QA teams, there are far too many device/environment/action permutations to test everything exhaustively in your average modern app. Usually the biggest test group is your end user base, unless you want to hire 100,000 QA engineers and add a couple of years of development time then bug-fixing updates are here to stay.

[Tebbers]

I think uber are on record as saying that they use the constant updates as a marketing tool as well so you're constantly reminded of it.

[cptsideways]

The latest iterations of Google.play.services seems to be a thing to jam up older android phones. No amount of freezing it or deleting it will fix the effing thing & they appear to have hidden the "auto updates off" feature too.

[chris285]

Can't say for certain but everytime something is added, it probably at least doubles or triples the logic paths that can be taken so more chance of things breaking or not working as expected. As stated you need rigourous testing for this which they probably don't have, apps are not high cost so they can't afford this and hence this behaviour

[loudlashadjuster]

Not that they are designated such, but there are probably four kinds of app updates

1. Constant iterative updates to add functionality or develop the app. These will be frequent for 'big' apps supported through other means (Netflix, Uber, Google stuff etc.) or paid-for apps (Tweetbot, Minecraft etc.) which have teams of developers and don't have a static app as an end goal. Updates may ad-hoc or be on weekly or fortnightly schedule.
2. Fixes to accommodate hardware, OS or API level changes. All apps are subject to this. For instance, Google/Apple may choose to abstract access to some element of hardware like the motion sensor and apps need to be recoded to adapt otherwise they will stop working when the original access methods are deprecated. You'll see a rash of these as a new OS version is released as many apps have to be changed at the same time.
3. Bug fixes. Genuine bug fixes, every software product has them. How responsive a developer is to bugs depends on many things though, many apps without a robust income stream will soldier on with many bugs simply because it's not economical for the dev to fix them. For the apps with frequent iterative updates they will usually just bundle the bug fixes in with their normal release schedule.
4. New versions. As distinct from iterative updates, these will be promoted as big changes to an app - a new UI, significantly enhanced functionality, that kind of thing, which usually mandates a major version change. These can be spun to try and increase an app's profile to increase revenue.

Many apps will have a mix of the above kinds of updates, and when you have 100+ apps on your phone (check, you'll probably be surprised how many you have!) you can see why there are so many updates.

[GetCarter]

I never update them unless there is a security issue. I have a 2013 Macbook Pro running perfectly, a 2011 Mac Pro, and an iPhone 6 - none of which have ever been updated.

FAR more trouble that it's worth IMHO

[loudlashadjuster]

GetCarter said:

I never update them unless there is a security issue. I have a 2013 Macbook Pro running perfectly, a 2011 Mac Pro, and an iPhone 6 - none of which have ever been updated.

FAR more trouble that it's worth IMHO

How would you know though? Many updates are just listed as 'bug fixes', how are you to know whether that's to fix a text spacing issue or something like Heartbleed?

I keep everything updated, don't really have a problem as most things update automatically without any intervention.

The only ones that annoy are the ones that seem to want you to re-authenticate when they update.

[Sheepshanks]

loudlashadjuster said:

1. Constant iterative updates to add functionality or develop the app.

I know it's not quite the same thing but I generally prefer things that don't change, however a family member who does corporate software development told me his current contract is a bit unusual these days as the company doesn't do constant updates.

He thought little (agile?) updates every couple of weeks were far better than significant changes months apart. I'd have thought users would get hacked off by constant changes, which is kind of the OPs point.

[GetCarter]

loudlashadjuster said:

How would you know though?.

..'cos they work perfectly

[LeoSayer]

In my experience the updates are when they find new ways of presenting ads to you.

[loudlashadjuster]

GetCarter said:

..'cos they work perfectly

..while some Russian teenager creams off your data

[loudlashadjuster]

LeoSayer said:

In my experience the updates are when they find new ways of presenting ads to you.

I try and pay for apps wherever I can, rather avoids this kind of thing

[GetCarter]

loudlashadjuster said:

GetCarter said:

..'cos they work perfectly

..while some Russian teenager creams off your data

As I said... I install all security updates.

I should point out that on my work computer, I have over a gig of software installed, a dozen different apps that all talk to each other and they all work. If I update one of them they all start not talking to each other and I spend several days uploading updates to all of them before I get back to where I was when I started.

So I don't. I spend my time earning money from it instead.

Edited by GetCarter on Friday 12th May 16:16

[LeoSayer]

loudlashadjuster said:

I try and pay for apps wherever I can, rather avoids this kind of thing

I prefer being tight and whinging