Research
What’s New reads the release notes of about 1,700 products. That corpus can answer a few questions nobody else is placed to answer, and the answers are measurements rather than opinions about how changelogs ought to work.
Every number here is computed from the catalog when the page is built rather than typed in, and each one links to the releases behind it. Where a measurement has a limit, the page says so.
The release note clarity gap
How often does a release note fail to say what changed, and does it depend on where the vendor publishes it?
Most release notes say something. The average buries the interesting part: consumer app stores are many times worse at this than developer forges, and a large share of the rest are notes that link to the changelog instead of summarising it.
Recomputed every week.
When software ships
When does software actually get released, and does the rule against shipping on Friday show up in the data?
Releases follow the working calendar rather than anything about the software. The middle of the week carries far more than its share, the weekend almost nothing, and the fortnight after December 18 slows down every year. Friday is the surprise: it is an ordinary day, not the taboo its reputation suggests.
Recomputed every week.
How software is versioned
What does a version number actually look like across the software world, and how much of it writes one the way SemVer says to?
Three numbers, spelled the way SemVer spells them, is the convention almost everywhere, as a grammar if not as a promise. The v in front is a coin flip that turns out to be a GitHub habit. A small minority of versions are dates, and a large share of releases carry no version at all because their channel has nowhere to put one.
Recomputed every week.
These pages exist alongside Declarative Changelogs, a proposal for how release notes could be published. It needs some account of how they are published now, which is what these pages are for.