More support is needed to ensure apps have changelogs

One of the biggest things I hate about Android’s Play Store is how the changelog on most apps has become useless, and many apps just put “Various improvements and bug fixes” for every update and just expect you to keep updating.

Flathub is similar in that most apps don’t have a changelog at all - it’s just blank. This hurts discovery of new features, satisfaction from bug fixes and enjoyment of enhancements. More should be done to help ensure apps have changelogs.

I’m not sure what the best approach to improving this is. There already is some documentation which points to 3rd-party docs, so maybe one or both these docs need improving.

For apps where the upstream doesn’t have a metainfo there perhaps needs to be a tool created to help extract changelogs from commonly used sources e.g. GitHub releases page for open-source apps, text files formatted as changelogs, webpages, etc. Whatever the solution(s) are I think at least getting full coverage for the open-source apps should be a goal.

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Updating docs on that, is very unlikely to improve the status quo. I don’t think it’s a doc problem.

A good start would be, if GitHub - flathub-infra/flatpak-external-data-checker: A tool for checking if the external data used in Flatpak manifests is still up to date supported autofilling these. But that would also heavily depend on the used source and you would run into other problems. Like the descriptions getting too long etc.

Working on Allow projects to specify CHANGELOG location · Issue #237 · fedora-infra/anitya · GitHub would also help big time

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