Apple is Tightening the Rules on 'What's New' Changelogs in App Store

How about making it a requirment that apps work as described, instead of being released in an early Beta state with features broken or requiring endless updates to fix.
 
Christoffee said:
Some of them are funny! In the UK the Argos update notes always tickle me, and I make a point of reading them!

In this case, I like that despite Argos being a plc (owned by Sainsbury's) the guys developing the app are allowed a bit of personality, and those HR/marketing-types have not got their hands on them. On the other hand, perhaps those marketing-types are responsible and have tricked me! And here I am, giving the Argos app some free advertising!
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You should go read the release notes for Transit. They are very well done, including a song they wrote for Christmas.
 
Why are people talking about the content of release notes?

The only change is that editing the What’s New text will require submitting an app update, instead of developers being able to edit it any time.
 
Developers should be required to list the changes. Some just "update" regularly as a marketing ploy. I consider that fraud. Nothing really changes.
 
I have long been suspecting that “We update our app regularly” is used as a promotional tool by large companies. They don’t really update anything they just push a fake update to promote their app and and remind you to use it.
 
78Bandit said:
I don't think this policy change will fix that. I may be reading the article wrong, but it appears this only prevents updates to the "what's new" text and the "help" URL listed in the App description between actual app updates. There is nothing I see where more detailed notes are going to be required, only whatever text and URLs that are submitted with the version update cannot be changed by the developer until they submit another new version for review.
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Precisely this. It certainly reads like there are some bad actors out there that are actually doing malicious things to their support URLs, or some such, that Apple is cracking down on.

But the current bane of release notes are the companies - some quite big - that have decided that, because they're doing two week sprints in their agile process, and thus releasing a new version every two weeks, that that somehow justifies patting the user on the head and saying, "we update our app regularly to bring you wondrous improvements and bug fixes", and frees them from the burden of giving any hint of what actually changed - it's so annoying. Such development processes leave them with a nice organized list of things that were changed. If they don't want to give gory details, then summarize them at a bit higher level. But, dammit, give us a clue what changed.

Sometimes, there are apps I'm not using because some minor thing isn't working right ("I'd rather use app A, but it has X problem that annoys me, so I'm using app B until it's fixed"), or I'm avoiding using a feature of an app that doesn't work quite right sometimes... is it really that much to ask for them to finish off their release by taking a little time to make a list of bullet-points out of the list of bugs fixed and features added/tweaked that they already have in hand? Who decided that switching to meaningless-but-cheery marketing-written boilerplate instead of actual release notes was just fine? At best it saves someone 15 minutes per release (sure, you could spend longer writing release notes, but translating the list of titles of accepted changes into user-ese, possibly combining related changes into one, is not that hard - it just takes the existing internal list of changes and someone who is familiar with developing the app and can write reasonably well).
 
Yes it would also be good if it is required to post what features they are removing from an app in order to add it later as a paid feature.
 
Wish developers would actually tell us what has changed. Shouldn't be allowed to say crap like

just a few minor things behind the scenes
we're always making improvements blah blah
or they use it as an opportunity to be humorous - not cute
 
jsmith189 said:
Like already stated, Facebook are the absolute worst at this. I already have zero trust in them, and the fact that they release bi-weekly updates but haven't told us anything that they're adding to our phones for years... shady. I hate that they could be forcing new features onto customers weeks in advance of releasing them, just to trick people into changing to whatever they want ahead of time whether we want it or not. Wish that's what Apple were implementing.
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To bad because of who they are Apple will probably let them along with the other big names still do it. I came here to say Facebook is the absolute worst at these.
 
78Bandit said:
I don't think this policy change will fix that. I may be reading the article wrong, but it appears this only prevents updates to the "what's new" text and the "help" URL listed in the App description between actual app updates. There is nothing I see where more detailed notes are going to be required, only whatever text and URLs that are submitted with the version update cannot be changed by the developer until they submit another new version for review.
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Exactly this. Outlook, for example, will still say 'this is another of our weekly releases'!

Apple should really clamp down on release notes and ask developers to tell us, the people who buy apps what the fixes are instead of general B.S.
 
az431 said:
Obviously no one read the article because the changes have nothing to do with the what’s new section being overbroad, not detailed enough, too funny, or too long. Apple already reviews the what’s new section when the app is submitted for review, and none of that will change.
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Well, they should be more detailed, so maybe the next directive to developers from Apple should be that. Just adding ‘bug fixes’ and nothing else is BS.
 
its not gonna do anything tho, dev can just reuse the previous changelog and there is nothing you can do about it. they could add something new like always on background but dont mention it in the changelog, what are you going to do about it? its not like apple is able to go through the entire code to see what is new.

pretty sure some of the indie dev that started out small and great started to do **** like this and it just makes me regret supporting them in the first place. that is why I never buy apps anymore, just pirate it so they dont do **** like this
 
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