So many apps updated every day: XXX is so annoying

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WeChat just updated to version 8.0 last week, bringing new emojis, statuses, music videos and other gameplay. Until now, discussions about it have frequently been on the hot search. Although many people have complained about the long-standing function and it has not been solved, the changes in this 8.0 update are indeed not small.

However, the update description of WeChat was written in a very Buddhist way, "Several functions have been updated."

Perhaps only an app of WeChat’s scale can be so “willful” and does not need to use fancy copywriting to attract people.

After all, if you don’t update, you won’t even know what those people in the group who are posting random emojis are doing. You think they are crazy, and they think you are offline.

The more updates, the harder it is to use?

If you are a heavy mobile phone user like me, just updating apps every day will consume a lot of data.

Due to professional needs, I did not enable automatic updates. Instead, I updated manually every three days or a week. Usually the number is between 30 and 80.

This is very relaxing, but also very confusing. With such frequent updates, what exactly is being updated?

I believe many people have the same feeling. There are a lot of apps updated in mobile phones every day, but they don’t seem to bring any practical use, and may even make the phone slow.

If you are using an older model and the Android package continues to grow, sooner or later the hardware will not be able to support the needs of the software, and the system may even freeze due to excessive instantaneous data writing.

In terms of functions, many tool-type apps are already sufficient. Updating them further would be “negative optimization”, either adding advertisements or changing usage habits, and many people do not like this kind of change.

As a result, many legends about historical versions have been left on the Internet, such as the ad-free, fast-downloading Thunder Speed ​​​​version (officially removed from the shelves), and Baidu Netdisk before version 4.7 (then called Baidu Cloud Manager).

Some time ago, I spent a long time looking for a Taobao version that "supports searching for products in followed stores", but I didn't find it. It might have been a grayscale test at the time.

Software experience can't go back

Nowadays, the mobile phone ecosystem is relatively complete, and people rarely use third-party app stores. If you want to download historical versions with greater peace of mind, you can go to Wandoujia.

However, many outdated versions may not be compatible with new phones even if you find the installation package. Even if the installation is successful, many API interfaces have stopped service and cannot be used.

If you want to recreate the scenes of the past, hardware and software are actually inseparable. Unfortunately, we can get some old products through various channels, but the software experience is difficult to replicate. Compared with the discontinuation of digital products, sometimes the discontinuation of software products is more nostalgic.

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Only with updates can there be "money prospects"

For most apps, there are reasons for continuously releasing new versions. The most basic one is to fix bugs, and new mobile phones also need to adapt the UI when they are released.

Even if some apps are not updated for a long time, they will be maintained uniformly every year with the major version updates of Android and iOS.

Of course, more updates are about launching new features, users constantly trying them, and the platform accumulating data, so that it can better iterate and upgrade (make more money). So you will see that the update instructions of some apps are written very playfully, and they will push update notifications as soon as you open them, and even help you download the installation package directly. The purpose is to attract you to upgrade as soon as possible.

Some are more perfunctory, like WeChat. You should have seen similar update instructions in many apps.

Instagram was the first to do this. When mobile Internet was rising and photo apps were popular, Instagram was updated very frequently. There were no real functions, just to improve the fluency. So to save trouble, they came up with this general expression, "This update includes some bug fixes and performance improvements", which was later adopted by other apps. (Information from: "Decrypting Instagram")

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Image source: Unsplash

The whole point is useful

Today’s apps are updated too frequently and are too large (although Apple did not lift the 200M data download limit until iOS 13, WeChat still calls itself “small and beautiful”).

The actual traffic consumption is secondary. The main reason is that there are many meaningless updates, which are purely marketing in nature. For example, during various shopping festivals such as Double Eleven every year, e-commerce apps collectively change their icons. For Android, it is not so bad, as you can change the icons manually.

Apple actually also provides an interface for manually changing icons, but e-commerce apps certainly won’t give you this option.

Mini Programs have to some extent relieved the pressure of App redundancy. Some low-frequency, long-tail, and urgently needed Apps do not require frequent updates and can be replaced by Mini Programs.

The software also has various lightweight and fast versions to choose from. Of course, this is another topic and we can talk about it next time.

Manually updating apps every day and observing their upgrades is my job and also my pleasure, but too frequent updates will make the process boring. I hope to be able to do more useful things in the future.