The bug fix that wasn’t
A few months ago, I downloaded this free weather app called YoCelsi that appealed to me via its clean and simple layout. The weather where I live in India, is uniformly hot and humid throughout the year. So about the only thing I need from a weather app is the rain forecast, and this app did that well. The best part was the app had no ads to mar its simplicity.
Some time later, the app showed an update for a bug fix. I dutifully updated it, and the next thing I know is the app has morphed from a clean one into an ad-infested one, with a distracting gif banner at the bottom that intermittently changed into a full screen pop up. Seems the developer was pulling a fast one. By promising a bug fix, he was getting users to update the free app into an ad-driven model.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I know developers need to make money and can’t keep giving away their apps for free. What I disagreed was the underhanded way he had gone about the whole thing. The clean look which had hooked me to the app was gone. And there was no option to pay to get rid of the ads. So I deleted the app and restored the previous ad-free version backed up on my Mac, to regain its minimalistic simplicity.
The issue is if the developer had mentioned that the update was going to turn the app into a blinking, popping monstrosity, I wouldn’t have updated it. So being honest would have backfired on the developer. In short, the current update model in the App Store forces the developer to be dishonest, and that is not a good thing.
What I would like from Apple is an option to revert to the previous version of an app in case an update messes it up in some way. Which in this case, is the look. That way, developers will play nice and give me an option of paying to remove ads, instead of forcing me to put up with the nasty pop ups. Lots of times, updates also have functional bugs and a revert option would really help. There is a workaround right now. Just download a copy of every app that you like, in iTunes on your computer. And restore that version if an update goes bad. That’s what I did in this case but it’s not an optimal solution.
Is that too much to expect of Apple?
Before the bug fix
After the bug fix