How often to update your apps has always been a hard decision.

There are a number of different options. Should you update:

• On a regular schedule;
• When a major feature is ready; or,
• Just whenever you feel like it?

With a website, you can deploy multiple times a day without the end user noticing. But the app review process means it’s not quite so straightforward.

Then, there are other considerations.

• The ratings and reviews for the ‘current version’ of your app reset after release. This means a drop off in downloads until there’s enough new ones to not look like a ghost town (luckily Apple fixed this in iOS 11).
• Then, there are the grumpy customers who think they’re downloading the entire app all the time, even though with app thinning it’s likely a lot less than they expect.
• Finally, and maybe most importantly, there’s the usual risks of a new version, new bugs, crashes and sleepless nights.

With all of that in mind, what are the top charting apps doing? I went and crunched some numbers to find out.

The Process

I grabbed the data for the top 200 apps on the App Store (free, paid and grossing) for their releases. I could only easily grab up to the last 25 releases.

Top Free

Looking at the top 200 free apps (actually the top 195 apps that have done at least one update) gave some pretty interesting insights.

Last Update

On average it had been 22 days since the last update of the apps. More interestingly the median was 7.8 days. Ranges included from updated that day to 420 days ago for Google Earth.

84% of the apps had been updated in the preceding month!

Number of Updates

Given some of the apps were relatively new, it was surprising that 75% of the apps had been updated 25 or more times. The majority of the rest had been released in 2017.

Update Frequency

The median days between updates for the top free apps was 18 days.

But there were apps that managed to get updates out every 3.5 days on average!

On the flipside, there are also apps that have maintained their top position with years between releases.

There are a number of apps that appear to work on approximately 7 day release cycle.

One interesting point on the minimum number of days between updates is if you zoom in. Two thirds of apps had updated within 3 days of the previous release.

I like to refer to this as the “OH SHIT WE BROKE ALL THE THINGS, REQUEST AN EXPEDITED REVIEW!!” release.

It’s reassuring to know that even the world’s most popular apps with large testing teams and unlimited resources still mess up now and again.

Release Notes

I love release notes. I read them religiously for the apps I use regularly. I’m frequently told I am in the minority.

Companies like Facebook argue that release notes are useless because they release regularly and flag the changes with the app. They also don’t release features to everyone at the same time.

At Appbot our customers tell us they love the change logs we send out.

In the App Store on iOS 11 the version history is getting a lot more focus. Hopefully this means developers will start to take it more seriously. I’m probably dreaming.

Something that bugs (pun intended) me is the standard “bug fixes and performance improvements”.

40% of release notes mention “bug fixes” and 14% mention “performance improvements”.

Only 13% of apps had unique text on every app update. Obviously it’s not worth the effort for most companies.

Top Grossing

It’s probably not much of surprise, given there is a lot of overlap, the top grossing charts have very similar results to the top free.

Top Paid

The paid charts in contrast to top grossing were quite different.

Last Update

13 apps were still on their first release. The average time since the last release was 186 days and then median 85 days. Significantly longer than the top free apps.

One of the apps, Call of Duty: Zombies, hadn’t been updated for 6 years! That’s a pretty decent return on investment.

Number of Updates

The number of updates was also a lot less. Only 30% had been updated 25 or more times, compared with 75% of free apps.

Update Frequency

Paid apps were also updated a lot less often with an average of 89 days and a median of 55 days. Three times less often than free apps.

How often should you update your app?

Like everything the answer is ‘it depends’. But I think it’s safe to say you should be updating as often as possible.

‘As often as possible’ most likely comes down to the resources that are available to you. Companies like Facebook can release weekly with their large teams and resources.

Paid updates tend to release every couple of months. Most likely after major features are completed. I’d guess this is due to their generally smaller team sizes.

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About The Author

Stuart is co-founder & CEO @ Appbot : take the pain out of managing your app reviews. You can connect with him on Twitter.