Gabrielle Earnshaw
1 min readFeb 22, 2020

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For me, a ‘patch’ might be a fairly inconsequential change, maybe a small change to the UI or a small bug fix. A ‘minor’ change might be adding some new functionality, for example a new page in your app, or maybe removing some functionality that isn’t often used. A ‘major’ change might be a complete rebrand, or a rewrite to the codebase, or possibly a paid update.

To be perfectly honest though, it doesn’t really matter to anyone except you. Your users are unlikely to pay much attention to the version number, and are just as likely to upgrade or not whatever type of version change you make, unless it is a paid update (I don’t have any data to back that up, but that’s my gut feel from experience). So the main thing is that you have an incremented version number so you can link back the features to the release, and it helps to be reasonably consistent for your own records.

Contrast that with semantic versioning for an API https://semver.org, where there are very strict guidelines to allow consumers of your API to make strategic update decisions based on your versioned releases.

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Gabrielle Earnshaw
Gabrielle Earnshaw

Written by Gabrielle Earnshaw

Making Mobile Simple. Mobile App Strategy, Leadership and Engineering Expert. makingmobilesimple.com

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