How often do you update your product? Balancing speed vs. stability
Hi PH community,
As an app owner, I’ve been thinking about version update strategies—specifically, how to strike the right balance between:
Keeping users engaged with regular improvements
Avoiding update fatigue or quality issues
I’ve seen teams release updates anywhere from weekly to quarterly while the others ship features once when they’re ready.
I’d love to open a discussion to hear each other's experiences.
What’s worked well for your product? 🚀
Let’s exchange insights. ♥
(Bonus if anyone has metrics on how update frequency affects retention!)
Replies
Nomadful
I'm an app developer too. I release a Nomadful update once every month or every two months. They're usually just bug fixes or app availability in new languages and regions. However, when building a major update, I do take some time to make sure it works at its finest, and release when 100% ready. I'm aware that keeping apps updated also contributes positively to product growth.
@manuelzarroca Thanks for sharing the insights with us! And good lucks to your new launch!
Nomadful
Clueso
Great question! As a young startup, we like moving really fast and our current release cycle is weekly/biweekly.
For context: We're a B2B Saas+AI, so our customers are all startups or enterprises too.
With most of our customers, we have a dedicated Slack/Teams/WhatsApp channel created. And we have built an internal tool that can send broadcast messages on all the channels across Slack/Teams/Whatsapp. So whenever we launch a new feature, we just type out a release message along with the release video (which we create with Clueso xD) and send it on all channels with just a click using our internal tool. Here's a screenshot of one such updates from one of our Slack channels:
This has been really helpful for us to keep our customers updated and also get their feedback directly! If you're a B2B product, would really recommend you try this out!
Sharing from our experience: We've been doing bi-weekly updates with optional upgrades on WeatherStone.
And our data shows it hasn't hurt retention at all - if anything, we've seen a slight positive trend. Hope this helps others working on their release schedule
IXORD
Practice shows that constant updates are not a guarantee of success, but it is important to have a stable product in functionality
@ixord
Thanks for sharing your perspective! You're absolutely right – stability is fundamental. I'm curious, have you found an optimal update frequency that balances both stability and innovation for your product?
In our case with WeatherStone (a weather app that blends utility with playful personalization), we've been testing bi-weekly updates mainly for fun features (like more weather-based interactive witty captions), and it works well and boosted engagement by 300%(ofc we are at quite the early stage)
Would love to hear if you've experimented with similar approaches!