Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Bad Release Notes

Bad Release Notes:

Bug fixes and performance improvements

Dedicated to shaming apps for their bad release notes.

Submissions are welcome by email or Twitter.

Damien Petrilli:

Translation:

“The goal is to use this site as a reference when Apple deny your App update because of the release notes being not descriptive enough”

Previously:

Update (2019-03-22): Jeff Johnson:

* We had to ship an update to change the Description field in App Store Connect.

Update (2019-04-10): Tanner Bennett:

Why are App Store change logs even mandatory if companies can put whatever the hell they want in them? Just make them optional so we can be spared the frustration of wasting our time reading these void ramblings.

Update (2023-03-02): Adam Chandler:

It’s official. 2023 is the year the App Store ChangeLogs are dead.

Over 45 updates today and none of them indicate what changes were made. This has been getting worse for years.

My pet peeve is when I update which is a destructive action only to discover a feature I used is missing or there are new ads or features that I don’t want. Time to turn off auto updates. If you don’t publish what changed, I’m not going to update.

Update (2023-07-26): Jesse Squires:

why put official release notes in the App Store when a random employee can share them on social media

Update (2024-02-07): Paul Haddad:

I had 30+ app store updates pending. A whopping 2 of them had release notes that weren't some form of “bug fixes and performance improvements”.

1 Comment RSS · Twitter

A majority (well over half; probably more) of the apps I have on my iPhone provide vacant and insubstantial release notes. Some of them (Transit App, I'm looking at you) take a different tack and instead try to run a self-indulgent Vaudeville comedy act with useful information occasionally hidden therein.

I would so much love it if Apple would start enforcing meaningful release notes (right after they fix bug reporting and start fixing their own bugs).

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