We live in the time of “now, gimme, I want something new”. Everything seems to lose its value immediately – material or not. Long gone are the days of old programs or computer games where the product remained the same. And that’s great, right? Or… is it? Because when there is no need to change something, when you fix something that isn’t broken, then constant updates only lead to mediocrity.
Just ask yourself, how many times one of your Android apps updated itself and the newer iteration proved to be inferior? Perhaps you ended up with a bloated app that did the same thing, only now it took more space on your phone. If you were more unlucky, the app might have even messed up something in your workflow, which made it harder for you to use it.
As someone who has experienced this from both sides of the equation – as a user as well as programmer – I can confirm two things:
- Users often want constant updates just for the sake of updating, without necessarily having any specific plan in mind.
- Developers, to please their audience, offer such updates without necessarily having a clear picture of what will occur down the road.
As I said, I’ve been there myself. I’ve even made the mistake myself – thankfully only briefly, however. As I’ve mentioned in my post on why I stopped working on my Android apps, at some point I got enough of mediocrity and stupidity, and thought “fuck it, I’m done”.
But let’s take a closer look, to see how this perceived need for constant updates operates, and why it’s so insidious – both in terms of programming and in how it affects us socially.
