It seems like every time I look at my phone (Droid Bionic) there is a notification that x number of apps have updates available. And x is usually at least 3 or 4.
Coming from my PC background, this seems nuts. Are the apps really that updated? Most of them I never notice any increased functionality after the update.
Plus it’s a pain to update them all - I’ve got the Android marketplace set to update automatically, but I haven’t figured out how to do so for Amazon’s market yet. So for Amazon, even on wi-fi, it’s tap, update, wait, repeat.
You are probably not noticing the smartphone apps that don’t update frequently.
Different vendors will update at different rates. Some (especially small ones) put out lots of tiny updates, which is certainly infuriating.
You don’t notice it on a PC because there is no centralized update system. Most of the software on your PC is probably out of date, but unless you go to the vendor’s website and check, you’d never notice. Smartphones, in an attempt to be “better”, make it very easy for you to see when an update is available.
I can certainly think of a few programs on my computer that have their own update-alert system built in, and constantly piss me off because they always demand updating when I start them.
I was wondering the same thing. Maybe it just has to do with how many apps we have on our phones so there’s always something updating. On my last phone I just set as many of them as I could to “Auto-Update” that way instead of seeing a notification that I had to update it and then going through all the steps to do it and then getting a notification that it was updated, all I got was the final notification that it was updated.
What I wouldn’t mind is a setting (and maybe there is one) that would only allow the phone to check for updates at a certain time. Say once a day at a certain time or once a week etc. That way I could take care of it when it’s convenient for me instead of scattered throughout the day. Especially since if I get a notification that something needs to be updated and I’m busy so I ignore it I have no idea when it’ll show back up.
Also, for some odd reason, for a while I was getting a phantom one. I’d get a notification that I had an update, but when I clicked on it, there wouldn’t be anything to update. Or it would say that I had 4 updates, but there would only be 3 things to update. I knew full well that the only thing I could do was ignore it and wait for it to pop back up a few days later. Eventually it stopped. I assume it either stopped because I reset my phone or because the next patch was release for the same app.
Also, I too have the Bionic and it’s possible there are more updates for this then other phones as more developers are release patches specifically for the Bionic. I know a lot of Apps for older Androids weren’t playing nice with the Bionic when it was first released.
If you click on update link in the App program they list what the alterations are in the update. Often they’re absurdly trivial things like “changed icon” or “altered welcome screen message”. Sometimes they’re absolutely massive, like the recent total overhaul of the Facebook app.
There’s a lot of pressure on mobile developers to launch new apps and features as quickly as possible. That’s partly because of heavy competition and the considerable advantages of being first in a particular niche. But also because mobile/web/online developers are now taking advantage of a much better feedback loop: they can collect stats on what users are doing with their apps in near-real-time, and quickly make improvements based on what they see.
Trivial example from the web world: say you have a hunch that people aren’t using a particular feature because the button is too small. You randomly divide your users into two groups, A and B. Group A sees the old button, Group B sees the new one. If you discover that Group B is 15% more likely to click the button, you conclude that your hunch was right, so you include that change in the next release cycle. There are tools that do most of this for you. I’m not sure how things are done in mobile development, but I’d bet some of the more savvy developers do something along these lines.
No, this ain’t it. I’m a fiend about having always the latest drivers and software updates. And I build my own compys, so I know exactly what needs updating - GPU, mobo, Win7, soundcard, network card, router, etc. At all times.
This smartphone nonsense is new to me, and I’m still trying to figure it all out.
Sometimes app makers pay the phone companies to put them on their phones. Or they make other arrangements with them so they have to put them on their and keep them on there.
The updates may seem confusing, but you really don’t see what you’re updating as easily as on a computer.
Computer programs will generally say, major update, important update, minor update. I recall once I had an update to my Windows and it was for the abilty to read Burmese characters. Like I need that
So if someone is trying to make a virus for an applications it’s essential they patch it and you update it. If it’s an update so you can read a particular font, who cares? But often you don’t know what it is for
The key thing is that most smartphone apps are web-based.
In a traditional web site accessed with a traditional browser the developers can subtly change the website every day. And they often do. You as the user don’t have to update your browser to take advantage of the changes in any particular web site.
Most smartphone apps are in some sense just very specialized browsers. A browser which knows how to interact with exactly one website, the one belonging to the app author.
The tradeoff for the developer is they can put more “brains” in the client app & less in the server. The smarter the client can be, the more responsive & flashy the UI can be. Which makes for that *Ooh Wow, Shiny!! *positive experience for the users.
And also means less content actually has to be transmitted over the wire. Only the raw data flows back & forth, not all the details of UI presentation. Which means in turn that a server of a particular size can support a lot more smart apps than it could traditional browsers. So the app company saves on equipment & bandwidth at their end. The savings can be dramatic, 80-95%, which is another way of saying supporting 5x to 20x customers at no additional cost. That’s huge.
The downside with this model is the version of the smart client is closely coupled to the version of the website. So in many cases where they provide a small change to the website, a corresponding change to the smart client is required. And to the end user that appears as their app needs updating.
With the decoupled model it also means that lots of minor cosmetic changes that used to happen to websites every day are now an app update instead. All the consmetics are in the app, not the web site which just serves unadorned raw data.
It’s kinda funny because in the early 2000s everybody was extolling the power of websites as THE new way to do business & consumer apps precisely because the use of a single universal browser to access any / all websites meant that there was no longer any need for devs & admins to worry about client side configuration, client updates, etc. Just change the web site & all users get the new behaviors with no additional hassle.
Once again we’ve come full circle. The best UI we can do with a browser & javascript and flash or the equivalent just isn’t as nice / powerful / reliable as a dedicated client side app. So we’re going back to dedicated client side apps.
Last of all, the business types never liked the idea that with customers using a browser, their strongest competitor was just one click away. But with apps we have a lot more opportunity for customer lock-in. Once you have a DIY app from, say Home Depot, you’re unlikely to also get the corresponding one from Lowes. Less comparison shopping & less seeing the other guy’s name & logo is all good for would-be monopolists. And all businesspeople are would-be monopolists.
It is especially fun when you go through the motions of updating the apps and typing in your password to iTunes, only to find out that the iTunes terms and conditions have changed, and you have to approve that. Then you get to go through the entire process again.
On Android you often post just one app for every device and firmware version (with backwards compatibility taken care of by the reflection). This means they might be adding a few features or bugfixes for newly released devices in the update that does not affect you at all. However if it affects a sizable number of people it is reasonable for them to push it.
Trivial updates are often done so the app can appear again on websites that track new and updated apps, thus giving free advertising. Before the rise of the smartphone I remember some developers being accused of this on MacUpdate, that tracks updates to Mac programs. There was a scanning application that was particularly notorious for this.
One thing I enjoy about having an iPhone is that all of my updates go through iOS’ app store. A little badge appears over the app store icon denoting how many updates I have waiting - I can choose to ignore it as long as I’d like or I can open the app store and tap “update all” and enter my credentials only once regardless of how many apps are being updated. It’s centralized and very convenient, like some of the Android systems I’ve seen… so I know at least some OSs do it. Does Windows Phone 7?
It doesn’t seem too out of character if you consider PC apps with auto-update systems. Adobe products are about the worst, with Flash and Reader updates often coming less than a week apart. FileZilla updates basically every time I use it, since I only need an FTP app once or twice a month. VLC updates pretty often. WinAmp used to, but the updates seemed to have died down recently. Chrome and Firefox update pretty regularly–frankly, Chrome is in a “Chrome needs to restart to apply the update” more than half the time, since I so rarely restart my browser.
also, some of them do minor updates and rotate price changes to ping those monitoring price drops; some even appear to do so just to reset the bad reviews.
I think the updating frequency is partially based on how easy the smartphone OS folks have made it for application developers to perform updates. All you have to do as an application developer is to move an updated version of your app to the app store and the app store / OS folks take care of everything for you.
If you’re a PC applications developer updating your apps involves a lot more work.