I can understand a banking app such as Chime* wanting to obfuscate whatever bugs or potential exploits they’ve come across and patched - to prevent users on older versions from being targeted; but the rest of those examples are utterly bullshit.

I put forward Duolingo as another egregious example of this bullshit:

You expect them to admit:

• Implemented more aggressive collection of personal data to sell to advertisers.

• Advertisers of medical and beauty supplements are now suggested to your teenage daughter if she deleted her picture minutes after not receieving likes.

• Users who advocate for neonazi and genocidal idologies now get suggested to each other to better promote and organize which returns higher profit of targetted advertisements as their usage time and activities increase together.

• As part of our new monitoring and speech policy, users are now allowed to use the word retard, removed, f-word, tranny, and n-word with hard R without their posts getting flagged or reviewed which allows for better targetted advertisements and higher revenue for the Zuck.

• Data collection now includes geophraphical tracking of your friends and intrests of people you follow giving higher revenue for shareholders.

• Implemented analysis of background data collection of users usage and screen time, which gives higher profits per click to our targetted adveretisers.

The obvious answer is there's no human at the helm recording changes, it's just the next build. You'll take it and you'll like it.

Facebook is one of the worst:

That Chime one is the sloppest AI slop I've seen today.

OMG, thank you! Until now I thought I was the only person to be fucking annoyed by this shit.

• more ads
• more pointless notifications
• taken out that one thing you actually liked and put it behind a paywall

Hey, Chime? You can work on your creative writing when the changelog is done.

"General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience."

We made our interface SUCK! Can you change it back? NO!

FUCK YOU

This sort of shit ought to be banned.

Patch notes:

• A bunch of stuff you won't like it need

"Bugfixes and performance improvements"

I see that one all the time from big companies because it sounds nice and tells you nothing.

One of those updates a few years included embedding adware. So, thanks for that... jackhole

I would rather no change log than the LLM generated fall thing… that was a waste of time to read.

“We’re updating the segmentation logic of our A/B test infrastructure to downgrade its respect for the CloudFlare score when deciding whether or not to mark a session as coming from a bot. This was skewing the data on several of our start screen UI experiments, particularly within APAC data.”

Sometimes, you really don’t want to hear it ;D

Even Google does the same with almost every app like Maps, Files, Chrome.

I 100% agree that proper changelog should be provided, but to defend devs a litte, the play store changelog character limit makes it almost useless for anything but very small changes.

Though doing funny haha in the changelog is so dumb, they should be like "this changelog field can't handle the changes, please see the changelog inside the app"

For apps with generic update messages that also have source control and changelogs available: check to see how often the updates are just a manifest version bump and nothing more. Way greater than zero.

Most version revs for apps are just to reset review count and bury negative reviews with “review of an older version”.

It’s all gamification of walled gardens. Walled gardens that need to die.

"performance improvements and bug fixes"

Ahow many updates receives an app, is now considered a "good" metric somehow now. So now if dependabot pushes a PR, it's a new release on the app stores (of course without testing)

The algorithms on the app stores now consider the app "active" and push the app "up" in ranking

There was a certain billionaire bragging about his app getting 3 vibe-coded updates a day while the competition "only" got 3 a week

So, they can't write a real change log. What can they write? "Dependabot updated leftpad from 1.1.3.2 to 1.1.3.3" "untested: updated Gradle from 8.14.2 to 8.14.3" "200mb update to change a comma in the Hungarian translation"

changelogs should be legally mandated on app stores

Modern mobile app development almost always releases features gradually behind feature flags, so changelogging things is not necessarily practical to do.

chime: a PM asked an AI to write this after the only dev that knew how to do this quit

Discord: The PM was frustrated with the devs not summarizing this release crap that no one cares about anyway and hid it behind a link ah that's so much cleaner now.

Instagram: fuck you

Linphone:

My bank's app recently went like "We've implemented a feature if you use our widget, and also one hidden feature." Like fucking just tell me what the fuck that's about? I'm not looking for easter eggs in my fucking bank app.

Youtube also does this. Basically it says "To see list of changes, look in the app guide" or something like that; no morons, I want to know what you changed BEFORE updating.