Did you know that there was a time when people actually read release notes? Not all people read them, but some regular customers did.

Since I became an iPhone user, I’ve started noticing the release notes for updated versions of iPhone apps. The only major software publisher that consistly explains what’s new in a release is… Apple itself.

  • Streamlined in-app notifications inform you when a person joins a collaborative document for the first time
  • Preseve file format and full quality when adding HEIC photos taken on iPhone or iPad
  • On iPad, press and hold the Command key on a connected keyboard to select noncontigous words, sentences, or paragraphs using a trackpad or mouse

It’s not new that the release notes are an afterthought. Too often, they are written by the developer who has been given the responsibility for actually submitting the software for distribution.

I find it hard to blame developers for not writing a release note for an iPhone app. We’ve been told over and over again that you must download the most recent version of an app. It doesn’t matter why it was changed; update this app! Update all the apps! All the time! In fact, turn on automatic updates so that apps get updated automatically!

If you own an iPhone, go to the App Store, select any app, and (if necessary) scroll to the section heading “What’s New,” you will also see a link to Version History. Which is invariably the same release note over and over.

The best you can hope for that is the company will write a message for a major release… which you will see repeated for every update until the next major release:

New ‘Save as Draft’ feature. You can now save your unfinished post to revisit later.

or

You can now learn Math and Music on Duolingo!

The most frequent text here is the standard, unhelpful message from development:

Bug fixes and performance improvements

But even those beat the unhelpful messages from marketing:

Do more with PayPal, with more power packed into a single app.

Or a trend I thought we had euthanized over 30 years ago:

Thanks for using Google Maps!

The fact is, technical writers rarely get to write release notes any more. It’s become the domain of the marketing department. (The Transit app had an in-house copywriter, Joe MacNeil.)

Whether copywriter or software developer, people who have nothing to say can choose to say nothing amusingly.

We’ve added some stability and performance improvements, taken out the trash, mown the lawn, and now we need a little nap.

Recently, this software publisher has taken to changing the ending:

…took the afternoon off.

…explored the edges of the known universe.

…drank way too much coffee.

…and more cat videos.

…repairs to the space-time continuum.

This last point brings me all the way back to the 1970s, when microcomputers became a thing, and technical writers had to write for the general public for very nearly the first time. (Up until that point, technical writers wrote for engineers.) I still remember an early Apple manual about its Disk Operating System where the writer was clearly making jokes to keep himself amused.

Long before I became a technical writer or even knew that was a thing, I remember reacting to that Apple manual. I felt as though I, the reader, was less important than the writer to the writer.

The reader is always more important than the technical writer.

Yes, it is hard–and deserves to be hard–to get the reader’s attention. When no one is reading what you write, I can’t get awfully worked up about a release note such as “We’ve updated the app to fix some crashes, make features load faster, and support iOS 17!”

But the editor in me still wants to write as well as I can. And remove unnecessary exclamation marks.