Warning labels on breaking changes

1 minute read

Developers get changelogs.

They get deprecation notices months in advance, before they even have to worry about updating to a new version that has breaking changes. They get detailed migration paths and support forums and stack overflow threads about how to handle the transition.

Not users though.

Users get a popup that says "We've updated our app!" with a button that says "Okay."

There's no choice of whether to update. There's no warning about what stopped working. No heads-up that the thing they relied on yesterday is gone today.

It's just a lot of corporate enthusiasm and excitement about "improvements."

What if companies had to put a warning label on updates that break accessibility?

I'm not talking about burring them deep in release notes nobody reads. I'm talking right there when you open the app. Something like "This update removes keyboard navigation from the checkout process."

Would they still ship the damn thing?

Or would seeing it written out in big bold letters, admitting what they're taking away, make someone in that room say "wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't do this yet?"

Sent on

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