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Lets talk about changelogs, or, how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements'
Published: 02-01-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
❗ This post is over three years old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed.
Table of Contents
Bugfixes & performance improvements
This is a short personal rant to start the new year off. When you're a multi
billion dollar company with more software developers than you'd ever need, how
on earth is it possible that your public changelog in an app store is just
bugfixes and performance improvements?
Everything in the above screenshot translates to 'bugfixes & performance improvements'
If that is all you're going to put there, then just leave it blank. Or be
honest and put We can't be arsed to fill this in there. For me as a technical
user it's not actionable, and your non technical users are not going to read that
page anyway.
You're using version control and a bugtracker and have one or more people
with the job title 'social media manager' or 'developer advocate', put those
together and you can probably come up with more than bugfixes and/or
performance improvements. I bet you have an internal changelog anyway.
Just put a small (or large) list with a few lines of what changes in there. Please.
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I expect nothing less then bugfixes and performance improvements each update, otherwise, why update at all? I'm one of those people that disables auto updates, manually goes through the changelog and based on that, decide if I want to update now or in the future. Not all change is progress, but please, please tell me what changed.
What I'd like to see
You don't have to be all jetbrainsy, although, for me that would be best. Just an overview for a major update and a few lines for a minor update are good enough.
Here are a few examples on the app store that have a few lines of text, it can be that simple:
You see? Not that hard right? So please, for your technical users, make this year
one where we get less bugfixes and performance improvements and more actual changelogs!