On my Android phone, running Marshmallow, I often get notifications from the Play Store that an app I recently updated needs a new update. For example, I just updated YouTube some 19 hours ago and it’s asking me to update again. I updated Google Photos yesterday and now I’m being asked to update that again. It’s no big deal for me to update apps, but I’m curious. Why do some have such a short frequency?
Because their developers are not very good at planning more reasonable release schedules, or sometimes because they want to release critical bugfixes right away.
A program is like a box. Most of what happens occurs in the inner area or the sides. But boxes have edges and corners which can sometimes be confounding to the programmer. They try to pay attention to edge cases and corner cases, but sometimes there are more of them than they can see. When a program is released, it gets to an element called “wetware”, which is very much like a liquid in that it fills the volume of the box and finds any weak spot in the edges and corners. So that is how programmers most easily discover the weaknesses in their program. And sometimes taping up one edge makes another one weaker (by increasing relative pressure).
There are very few finished programs. The whole marketplace of software is in various stages of beta, and you are the beta testers.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that the developers aren’t good at planning. They’ve just made a different value judgment, and the economics are changing.
Lots of small releases is better in several ways, the most important one being that users get new features and bugfixes faster. Why should feature A have to wait until feature B is ready to go?
The old way of packaging things into larger releases had to contend with the economics of physically printing and shipping stuff.
For most people bandwidth is cheap and the updates happen overnight automatically. The minority of people who need to conserve bandwidth can turn off automatic updates and just check every month or whatever. And if bandwidth really becomes a constraint, shipping diffs isn’t that hard to implement.
There are cases where you want to update things more slowly for stability reasons, but for most apps, more frequent is better.
I’ve always assumed it was so that they could erase my settings to give their crapware more free range on my phone. I’m looking at you, bloatware Peel Remote.
It’s not necessarily bad planning. The new(ish) agile programming philosophy is all about short sprints and quick releases.
In some ways this is better, in other ways, not so much.
some things I’ve learned.
never have auto update on and
never update apps the second the update is released. always wait, then read the comments to see if anyone is having problems. let the masses be the guinea pigs.
I’ve had good apps get sold to larger, data mining companies, who filled the once awesome app with crapware. everyone hated it. not me and the other smart people.
I’ve had apps that performed functions that Google frowned on, so they had to alter the app by taking away said function. didn’t affect me.
always look at permissions when installing originally & never update blindly.
Not to mention a lot of apps have dependencies on other software external to them. If Mint makes an API call to, say, eTrade, and eTrade changes its API, then Mint has no choice but to update. And that’s just one app to one app. Many, many apps are dependent on databases and lookups that you can’t even see or would know about, and if those have a code update, then the app has to change, too.
If your friend moves, you have update your contacts and send their birthday card to a different address. Same thing.