I suspect that approximately no one reads that "What's new" section, and they know it. Even Google just leaves it with whatever happened to be in the field in summer of 2018 when they stopped updating it.
Quality of changelogs has a big impact on how trustworthy I perceive a project to be. Releasing new versions without a (meaningful) changelog says that you expect blind trust from your users; that you expect them to update anyway regardless of the changelog content; or that you don't consider them able to evaluate whether updating is in their best interest -- in summary, "we know what's best for our users better than they do." Whether or not that's true, the attitude strikes me as vaguely paternalistic. It feels to me that a developer who thinks so little of their users would be more inclined to try and pull a fast one.
As an example, Signal has recently stopped writing changelogs for many of their beta releases, and it has affected my trust in them, and willingness to install said updates.
Let me be very clear: I am NOT saying lack of changelogs makes a developer less trustworthy. I AM talking about how they make me feel about them. I'm also well aware that this is an indirect measurement, so there's some variability and Goodhart's law applies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law).
WHAT'S NEW
• Bug fixes and performance improvements.
Actual updates: Version number bump. In my experience outside of the Big Tech releases the most egregious offenders seem to be Credit and Banking Apps with auto expiration. I loathe that feature, it's bitten me in low connectivity areas.
And then the vendors (and the security people) claim that automatic updates are fundamental, because otherwise people wouldn't install them. But maybe, just maybe, people don't want to install updates because they're being force-fed them, with no information about what to expect, and half of the time the update makes the experience worse.
The road to a better user/vendor interaction starts with providing meaningful changelogs and dropping the paternalistic attitude about updates.
> dropping the paternalistic attitude about updates.
Now that we are trying to treat everyone equally, shouldn't we find a better word instead of blaming it all on the dads? ;-)
At least were I came from I cannot remember this attitude come from my dad.
I have adapted kind of the same attitude: As the one who brings most money to the table I demand a final say on anything major, but in reality my wife has found our last 3 cars, do the majority of the shopping etc, I mostly just rubberstamp and sign and keep telling my kids to respect their mum.
So far it has worked fine : )
Uber are pretty bad at it as well
Personally I give that award to Spotify.
In this one case they are right.
it was game-over to your opinion when you purchased their product and use a proprietary client to connect to the their proprietary servers.
If they want to break every single feature, while also denying access to older versions of the client, there's nothing you can do. Besides cancelling the membership, that is. But in this case there is nothing the changelog that would have helped you.
...all that is the complete opposite of Mozilla though.
""" Fix bug where sync could fail in Android 7 devices
Also, for a few users we rolled the following experimental changes:
* X, Y and ZYes, this is a complete and total pain in the neck, but it has saved me in the past. Jailbroken devices can also use tweaks that allow downgrading right from the App Store.
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[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208079
P.S. There's actually one more way to downgrade apps—use a version of iTunes from before Apple introduced certificate pinning (iTunes 7 worked for me) and use Charles Proxy to edit the request so Apple gives you an old version. This worked for me as of last fall—but in this case, "pain in the neck" does not even begin to describe it. :)
ALL the majors apps I am familiar with basically launch new features in the same way : first under a feature flag (e.g. the feature code is in the app but deactivated by default, we control its activation server side). We open up the feature to a small percentage of users, look at how it is behaving (bugs, crashes, impact on metrics) and then decide whether we want to open it up to more users or not.
With such a system where your version number does not mean much, at best release notes would be "we added a new feature, you might or might not see it".
I love reading the what's new copy. Some companies put a lot of effort into it, like Signal/Slack (when I still had it installed) Some companies leave it empty which I think is very bad
But the worst are companies that put a constant what's new section like "we're constantly updating our app to make it better for you" bullshit - Uber. This just feels condescending to me.
Overall I think it's a prime channel to let people who are interested in your app to know ... what's new
Sadly, people have been trained not to because devs always say, "Bug fixes and improvements".
Some people really do want to know what changed.
Same thing on iOS to be fair.