Can we talk about changelogs for a second?

Almost every major app in the play store has changelogs like "Improving your experience" or "We did some changes to enhance your experience".
Wtf is this bullshit. Is it that hard to write the actual changes in the changelogs so that I know what got changed, huh?
Guess its kinda hard to write " We are shoving more telemetry crap down your throat" in a changelog.

Fuck sake.

"fixed the bug I retardedly introduced last version because I didn't write any tests"

What the user doesn't know won't kill them.

"Bug fixes"

What fucking bugs!!!

Some don't even bother with writing any bullshit change log

"fixes a security issue"

What security issue? has it been exploited? what was the damage done? REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I hate writting changelogs, so I get it. But that's also why I force myself to write changelogs into every merge request. So It's trackable. You check the requests that went into a release and you can spit out the changes

It's not a perfect system, but I don't lead my current project and we don't have any other way to track changelogs, we just put them together at release time from memory i guess (fast releases though, so It's usually a short list anyway). Eh...

Google set a standard that users shouldn't know how apps work. No changelog, no docs, no text on buttons, only icons where a standard icon exists combined with short and vague tooltips that appear after a long delay.

Of course, all of this comes from graphic design, but they fail to understand the difference between a visual tool and a graphic.

By the way, Discord has a full changelog and it does feel a bit excessive to report that they solved minor visual glitches or edge cases that really don't appear under normal usage.

i would always forget doing the changelog so i just made a git hook that asks me to input the changes in cli on push to prod

Let's just copy paste the git messages

Oh wait those will be just as bad

Thats because the deployment is automated and some generic text is automatically used.

Like just about all the bullshit sinking up our beautiful grassy field: marketing

"Improving your experience"

...of giving our app more permissions

...of headbutting a paywall more often

...of watching looonger aaads

...of giving us more data to sell

...of donating CPU time for Ethereum mining

...of being nagged for a review even harder

...of discharging faster... but look at our battery app!

@cprn exactly..

That's because you use the wrong apps from the wrong companies. There are good alternatives for many apps nowadays.

As a mobile app developer I produce these kinds of release notes too. I have various apps in maintenance mode and that means that I have to update dependencies (libraries etc) every once in a while because the lib might have small updates that might or might not affect the users. Android apps in the Play Store are required to do an SDK upgrade every year too. This kind of maintenance happens very often and my release notes for such updates are: bug fixes and optimisations. Because that's what it is!

That's the beauty of encapsulation: my app encapsulates all kinds of libraries that are essential, but they receive maintenance in all kinds of forms. Believe me, my users, who don't even know how to update their apps, are not at all interested in the fact that some library now has new configuration options for a better app developer experience or something!

@FinlayDaG33k usually they say potential security issue, as to not freak anyone out :)