Bummer app updates

We mobile app users are learning something about updates after a year or two at this.

Sure, updates often improve user experience. But increasingly often, updates are more about a company's ambitions, monetization or partnerships, and the user can be left wishing she could revert to the app's prior version.

An example - and I hate to pick on Evernote, because it is my most important creative tool and I am sure the company will fix this - is an update to Evernote that rendered it impossible for me to draft and save prospective blog posts in HTML. Very frustrating. (Fortunately I have another smart phone on which I have retained the older version.)

I'm trying to remind myself: it can't be all about the user, not in the short term, not all the time. Check that: the best companies will find a way to pull it off, to keep growing while staying ruthlessly loyal to the user's experience. But many services will compromise optimal user delight as required to try to stay in business. And that serves users, too, if in a way we may not acknowledge when wishing we hadn't installed the bummer update.

Photo: I live in Seattle and don't need to be told where the nearest Starbucks is.