Software is, in a sense, a living thing. Applications don’t die once they are released, but rather they continue to evolve. They do so thanks to updates, which are an ideal mechanism for correcting potential errors and adding new functions and features… or removing them.
Just recently, a developer named Dylan McDonald posted a message on X (formerly Twitter) in which he complained about an increasingly common situation in the Apple App Store: many apps are updated, but when trying to find out what has changed, they give no information.
Instead, they focus on generic messages like the ones in the image. The example shows updates to Google’s mobile apps, but this is true for many others. These usually contain messages like “bug fixes and performance improvements,” but without any further details.
McDonald complained that this is really inconvenient for him, and tried to encourage his fellow developers to take the time to show details about the update.
Other users responded by saying that if a developer gave details of the update, it could lead to their app being rejected from the App Store if there was something that didn’t sit well with Apple’s censors. McDonald replied by saying that he had been doing this for 10 years and had never had any problems with Apple’s mobile app store.
Information is power
I don’t know if any of you read the details of the software updates on your devices. At least I don’t usually do it: I have so many applications installed on my mobile and on my computers that I simply “trust” the developer and trust that they are actually correcting errors and improving performance with each new version.
There are times, though, when I do check those details to find out if a new feature ends up coming to my phone, for example. It’s not the most common thing, but I do do it from time to time.
It is true that, as McDonald said, there are many developers who, at least in the App Store, do not show this information, but then we have the other extreme: there are platforms and developments that – logically and fortunately – do offer all kinds of details regarding each update.
This is the case of Microsoft, which on its support website shows all the details of each new update to its operating system. We have a good example in the “small” latest update of Windows 11, which shows that the Redmond company takes the documentation of these changes very seriously.
The update document is a great source of information for users, but especially for Microsoft itself, which can thus keep a detailed record of the changes.
Information here is power (“ipsa scientia potestas est”), as Sir Francis Bacon (supposedly) wrote in his 1597 work ‘Meditationes Sacrae’: it may not add much to many people’s minds, but all those details can end up being very useful, especially to those in charge of those updates.
The problem is that the details about updates are usually not particularly entertaining. The texts in these “release notes” are descriptive, but often formal and, let’s face it, boring.
But be careful, because there are (increasingly) exceptions.
Slack gives a different tone to updates
Although, as we say, there are many good examples of developments that do provide detailed information about the changes between one version and the next, the tone is informative but can become somewhat tedious.
Slack has been taking a very different tone for a long time now. In fact, Slack release notes have become a topic of discussion on Reddit, because some people hate them and some people love them. And rightly so, because they don’t feel like release notes. Or they hardly feel like one.
We have good examples in the Android app release notes. In its latest update, on September 18, 2024, the information shown is as follows:
“All the bugs fixed in this release were tiny little things that were barely noticeable and impossible to describe in a way that wouldn’t make us sound like complete geeks. Still, we got our hands dirty, worked hard, and the app now runs a little bit better.”
We have to give the author credit for at least having a fun way of explaining that the changes are so boring that it’s almost better not to go into detail. However, that’s a problem, because although the text may be entertaining, it doesn’t help us at all to understand what has changed.
Sometimes, however, they do offer details in a relaxed and entertaining way. This happened with the previous version, from September 11, which, for example, introduced a change in the behavior of one of the buttons:
“There are certain things that are just worth admiring. For example, great works of art, animals in their natural habitat, a person trying to parallel park… However, excessively long URLs are not one of these things. So we would like to apologize for not including Continue or Cancel buttons on the “Check this link” popup.”
It’s clear that for Slack, release notes are more of a marketing tool than a tool for documenting changes between releases in a technical and detailed way. It’s clear that they do this detailed control as well, but they probably do it internally.
The wonderful world of release notes
Although we have pointed to Microsoft or Slack as quite opposite examples of how update information is offered, the truth is that managing release notes is a world unto itself.
In fact, we have a hybrid example of the two above in Discord. This company tries to give a more entertaining tone to its press releases, as for example happened with the last update on August 28. The tone of the text is relaxed, but also very informative, so they combine that part of offering details about the changes with that of making that information “digestible.”
But as we say, there are many styles and examples in which this type of detail is a hallmark for platforms. This was discussed at LaunchNotes, which specifically offers communication and organisation services to companies and whose blog gave various examples of applications and platforms with particularly striking release note announcements.
For example, Airtable uses its own tool and organizes the information of its updates in one of its “airtables.” In HEY, the email client, they use a visual timeline and short, visual descriptions, and in Notion they do like the guys at Airtable and use their own app to display that information.
Meanwhile, GitHub takes advantage of a very visual and powerful format that is a kind of “Tumblr” adapted to that function of showing the details of the version notes in a concise way.
1Password is another example of concise and informative language, and Stripe’s layout of information about these updates is also clear and to the point. At Postmark—an email marketing platform—the short blog format and categorization especially shine.
There are many more examples, but as we can see, although there are developments that, at least in the App Store, do not seem to want to show details about the changes made, many others do. And not only do they do it: they do it in an exemplary way.
What Sir Francis said. Information is power.
Image | Mika Baumeister
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