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Comment by grahamm | Hacker News Reader

The whole update world is messed up IMHO. My phone shows me multiple pending updates each day. What I notice is some apps updates are pushed out religiously every couple of days. I suspect most are legit but some I am not sure about, in fact I even think it's so my phone reminds me that I have app or game "X" installed. When I look at the reason for the update all it says is "Bug fixes" or "Information not provided by user". I feel it's more about reminding you that app is there than actually fixing issues and delivering new features.

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Updates are too easy and it makes developers sloppy when they can just push changes so often.

I think some consoles used to charge a lot of money to vet an update for a game. I wonder if that pushed devs to update less often and test/prepare more.

Making it artificially harder to push out an update doesn't sound like much of a good idea, if that is what you are suggesting.

No suggestions. Just a thought on cause and effect.

I don't think regular updates are abused to remind you because it's pretty trivial for the application to pester you with notifications itself. I think the updates are a combination of wanting to keep the app fresh and "normal" bug fixes/features that, especially since "nobody" cares about details, developers never bother writing details for.

If you're on Android, you can disable update notifications from the app store settings.

> I don't think regular updates are abused to remind you because it's pretty trivial for the application to pester you with notifications itself.

If you get gratuitous notifications from an app to remind you of its existence, you'll blame the app for being annoying.

The same stigma doesn't get attached to app updates.

I can't swear that developers are setting updates to reengage users. My first suspicion would instead be that very frequent updates without obvious impact are either bugfixes, or somebody running/settling A/B tests via pushed updates.

That said, I have seen mobile game devs show daily user charts that rise (relative to installs) after updates. It wouldn't shock me if people had decided to capitalize on that.

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