That's another great reason to be vague, because even if you were able to launch your updates at the same time on all platforms, at least on mobile the adoption rate can be relatively slow - on mobile I've measured that it takes about a week to get 80% of users to update and 2 weeks for 90%, which could leave a sizable vulnerable population.
There are quite a few reasons to have release notes like this:
1. Major apps often do phased rollouts of features in order to react to potential production issues, or to make certain features available to a limited subset of users or regions without having to do an emergency binary release if things go wrong.
2. The new build contains an A/B experiment, and you don't want to tell users that feature X was revamped because the experiment might not even go anywhere and only a small number of users will see it, anyways.
3. Your app is stable enough to have a regular release cadence e.g. monthly or biweekly, and you actually are just shipping whatever bugfixes made it into master since the last release with the major feature changes hidden behind feature flags until they are ready for 1. or 2.
4. The vast, vast, majority of users never read the update notes on the app store. They have automatic updates enabled, and your app updates at 3AM when their phone is plugged in on wifi and they are fast asleep.
5. Building on 4, if you actually want to advertise new features to users, it is better to build a native experience into the app either building a UI highlighting what has changed in the new version, or just popping up a dialog to show the patch notes (can be coupled with 1. and 2. to only show the dialog to users who have gotten the new feature enabled in the phased rollout or experiment). Discord is an example of an app that does this well.
6. Also building on 4., the changes are so minor that they are not worth paying a translation service to translate your patch notes if you are offering your app in multiple languages.
Sure, I'm aware of those reasons (and can think of many more). As a user/customer, I don't care about any of those details. I still want to know what's changing when I click "Update".
If users have automatic/background updates, sure, they apparently don't care about release notes. For everyone else, the release notes are really the only way to know what changes are going to happen upon clicking "Update". Having those notes be [effectively] blank is a substantial disservice to the user.
It's depressingly frequent that an app I used to enjoy takes a major dive in user experience. For a contrived example, I don't like finding out I am now suddenly blocked from using my messaging app because they force me to use a new cloud-based account system I can't opt out of, and none of this was mentioned before I clicked Update. Or another favorite: an update that does nothing more than introduce in-app advertisements.
Which category is bigger?
1. Citizens who want to invest their money
2. Citizens who work in the financial services industry
It's #1, by several orders of magnitude. I would still argue that it's not a mistake, but that's because a mistake would mean they didn't intend to help category #2.
Yeah, I remember seeing the anti-scanning measure in another game circa 2009. IAT hooks were hot then too. I wonder if they run a CRC on sections of the game code as well (also pretty trivial to defeat).
I also used an XPS 15 for personal and work before switching to a Macbook, and it was also much thicker than a retina MBP. I didn't have a touchscreen model, but the touchpad was probably the best touchpad I have used on a windows machine (it even had good gesture support, like 4 finger swipe to switch programs). It did have some weird quirks like the optical drive would make a loud mechanical noise whenever you turned it on, and the screen would often get dust stuck behind it which was basically impossible to clean.
By the way, all Macbook pro models still have the 3.5mm audio jack.
KotakuInAction is an alt-right cesspool. It contributed to the rise of breitbart, and Milo Yannopolis got famous by writing articles about gamergate targetted to their audience.
I speak as someone who checked it occasionally during the whole debacle - gamergate quickly became a referendum on feminism and women's place in the games industry, and I was disgusted by what I read, so I stopped going there.
If you're on iOS, I recommend Apollo for reddit, I actually was using Alien Blue for the longest time because I also hated the official app, but I switched to Apollo a few months ago and it has been great.
