Almost constant update of apps

dastardly00

Is anyone else getting tired of their apps being updated every few days? It's kind of annoying.

I've noticed in the last couple of weeks that the my apps have received a lot of updates. Yesterday and today for example: Adobe Reader; Angry Birds Go!; MyFitnessPal; Cut the Rope; Dropbox; Google Play Books; Hailo; IMDB; OfficeSuite 7; Pocket Mine; Spotify; TripAdvisor; Viber; WhatsApp; Youtube; and Zedge.

Is it because an update of KitKat was released last week or what?

Professey Chin

I don't mind it since it shows the devs are actively working on them which I'd prefer to abandonware.
Only issue I have is most of them don't bother putting any details in the changelogs

KazDub

Go into the app settings and turn off 'auto update'. It's ticked by default and stays that way until you change it.

dastardly00

KazDub wrote: »

Go into the app settings and turn off 'auto update'. It's ticked by default and stays that way until you change it.

It's not the auto-updating that's annoying me. It's the case of app XYZ updating say today, then a few days laters, then again a few days after that.

Markx

I work as an Android developer and I have to say the amount of updating some apps do amazes me. It points to a possible lack of quality although sheer number of Android devices and API versions is responsible to an extent.

In a lot of cases there may be a lack of detail because a developer doesn't want to put 'Bug Fixes' in the detail section.

Atomic Pineapple

Markx highlighted the reason for so many updates and you will see them being more frequent as new OS versions get released. The issue is that no matter how much in house testing you do you can't cover the vast range of Android devices there are so when an app gets a major update you will see frequent ripple updates as they deal with users complaints and bugs that get found after the release on the many many devices out there.

Idleater

Iterative development is good and keeps customers involved in the product.
What would be cool, from a development point of view would be modular updates as opposed to entire applications.
Google is tending to go down this route breaking the bundled dependence on core application framework and services and I understand the impracticality for third party apps, but as a developer, that's how I work.

Professey Chin

Idleater wrote: »

Iterative development is good and keeps customers involved in the product.
What would be cool, from a development point of view would be modular updates as opposed to entire applications.
Google is tending to go down this route breaking the bundled dependence on core application framework and services and I understand the impracticality for third party apps, but as a developer, that's how I work.

The Play Store already has delta updates or do you mean as for devs to upload?

Idleater

The Dark Lord Cthulhu wrote: »

The Play Store already has delta updates or do you mean as for devs to upload?

As a developer.
In the codebase I work on, if there is an update to one module, say some db schema gets a new field, three out of 20 other modules require updating. The "release" therefore is much smaller than the complete product.
Most android apps are fully packaged so a small fix incurres a full deployment. Google is in the process of splitting it's services into smaller interoperable processes.
Of course, the advantages of a single deployable is content provider management and compiled code optimisation.

Markx

Just noticed the Journal.ie app icon has a santa hat on it now!! Removing the hat will involve another release.

If product/business told me to do this I would argue until 2015 not to do it ..........

It may be because i come from iOs land and am new to droid generally, but i don't like/don't trust auto updating. To me it's synonymous with software that was once working fine breaking and developing new bugs, and making more new code run on your old hardware and draining your battery faster.

I've seen too many apple firmware updates turn once useful iOs devices into stuttering, stumbling, battery-hungry messes.

I've disabled auto updates on all my droid apps, and installed a notification manager that allows me to remove notifications for app and firmware updates. If something about one of my apps is annoying me I'll look for a fix and update it manually, but for now my nexus 7 is running Droid 4.3 and it's lean and agile, and all my apps work perfectly, and that's the way things are going to stay.