"Bug fixes and performance improvements" is the most-shipped sentence in software
Open the update history for almost any app on your phone and it's the same line, week after week. Bug fixes and performance improvements. Sometimes with a cheerful "we update the app regularly to make it better for you."
Meanwhile the app keeps changing in ways you'd actually want to know about. A setting moves or disappears. A feature you used gets pulled into a paid tier. A new data-sharing toggle shows up, already switched on. None of it makes the notes, because the notes stopped being written for the person installing the update.
Part of it is auto-updates. Release notes used to be a pitch — here's why you should upgrade. Once upgrading stopped being a choice, the pitch had no job left. The other part: a specific changelog is a record, and a record is something people can point at later. "Improvements" can't be quoted back at anyone.
Plenty of open source projects still do this right — real changelogs, breaking changes called out, sometimes a migration note. So it's clearly not hard, just not rewarded.
Is there a consumer app you use that still writes honest release notes? And would it change anything if app stores made them list what actually changed?
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