Why are apps like Fairemail, Voyager, etc. updated so often? Why don’t they collect the changes and release them once a month or something like that?
It’s interesting that every time I open Voyager I see an update warnin at the bottom. Is that really required?
Because someone in the dev team had the time to hook up their continuous integration scripts with Play Store publishing API, to the despair and jealosity of dev teams of all other apps.
This is how software should be managed. You make a change to your software, push one extra button, and in one hour all your users receive it.
Non-technical explanation: because they can.
Financial explanation: Because it’s cheaper to have all your users as involuntary testers, than to actually ensure app quality in-house.
Continuous deployment pipelines usually have lots of automatic testing ensuring nothing breaks for the user.
“usually” is very generous. Automated testing takes effort to develop and maintain, a lot more than the rest of the CICD pipeline combined. And it’s only one piece of a complete qa strategy, if it’s all you have you’re still using users as testers.
In case of open-source projects like Fairemail, your budget is very likely zero or in negatives. Very often it’s one or few developers who make the app basically for their own daily use, and publish it on a ‘use at your own risk’ basis for everyone else. So yeah, if you use any open-source software, please do some testing work if you want it to improve.
QA is not a capitalizable expense or something anyways that’s why we havent given you a decent raise since you got promoted
Now get back to working your 3 jobs you software engineering qa testing devops piece of … valued member of the team