Why App Updates Fail: The Redesigns Users Never Forgave
Snapchat's 2018 redesign got over 1.2 million people to sign a petition begging them to undo it. Think about
Snapchat’s 2018 redesign got over 1.2 million people to sign a petition begging them to undo it. Think about that for a second. Over a million people were so angry about an app update that they took time out of their day to formally complain about it.
The petition didn’t work. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel basically told everyone it would “grow on you” and refused to roll it back. Usage fell for the first time since the app launched in 2013.
This keeps happening. Companies push updates that nobody asked for, remove features people actually used, and then act surprised when users revolt. Sometimes they apologize and fix things. More often, they double down and insist you’ll get used to it.
You rarely do. Understanding why app updates fail starts with looking at the disasters companies created by ignoring their users.
When They Removed What Actually Worked
Sonos sold premium speakers for years on a simple promise: they just work. You set them up once, and they play music flawlessly. The app was never amazing, but it did what it needed to do.
Then in May 2024, Sonos released a completely redesigned app. It removed basic features like sleep timers and alarms. Queue management disappeared. For many users with older devices, their entire speaker systems stopped working properly.
The backlash was instant and brutal. Within days, over 30,000 customers flooded forums and social media with complaints. As frustration spread, the Sonos subreddit turned into a support group for users whose expensive speakers had effectively become costly paperweights after a software update they never chose.
At the same time, Sonos couldn’t simply roll the update back. The new app’s architecture was fundamentally incompatible with the old system. Worse still, the company had already updated its cloud services to support the new setup. As a result, there was no easy escape. Sonos was forced to fix the problems on the fly, even as customer anger continued to grow.
By January 2025, the disaster had wiped nearly $500 million from the company’s market value and cost CEO Patrick Spence his job. Sonos later admitted that developers had consistently warned leadership the app wasn’t ready, but the deadline was tied to new hardware launches and couldn’t be moved.
So they shipped it anyway. Missing features, broken functionality, and all.
The Start Button That Wasn’t
Microsoft’s Windows 8 decision to remove the Start button in 2012 remains one of the most catastrophic interface changes in computing history.
The Start button had been part of Windows since 1995. It was how people navigated the operating system. It was muscle memory. You needed to launch a programme? Click Start. Simple.
Windows 8 ditched it entirely, replacing it with a full-screen Start Screen optimised for touch devices. Desktop users with mice and keyboards were left confused and frustrated. The backlash was immediate.
Third-party developers rushed to create Start button replacements. Tools like Classic Shell and Start8 became essential downloads for Windows 8 users who just wanted their computers to work the way they had for nearly two decades.
Microsoft eventually brought the Start button back in Windows 8.1, but the damage was done. Windows 8 is remembered as a failure, a lesson in how not to redesign an interface that millions of people use every day.
The irony? Microsoft’s own data showed Start menu usage was declining because people were pinning apps to the taskbar. But that didn’t mean people wanted it gone entirely. They wanted options, not forced changes.
When Free Wallpapers Cost $50 a Year
Marques Brownlee built his reputation as MKBHD by being brutally honest about tech products. His reviews have been credited with damaging companies like Humane AI and Fisker. When he launched his own app in September 2024, he faced the same scrutiny he’d given others.
Panels was a wallpaper app. It charged $50 per year or $12 per month for access to high-resolution images. The free version offered lower-quality wallpapers, but you had to watch two ads before downloading anything.
The response was swift and harsh. People roasted it as tone-deaf and out-of-touch. Wallpapers aren’t something most people think they should pay for, especially not subscription fees. The app also requested extensive data permissions that seemed unnecessary for downloading images.
Brownlee quickly tried to fix things. He dropped the monthly price to $2. He made more wallpapers free without ads. He addressed privacy concerns. But it didn’t matter. The damage to his credibility was done.
In December 2025, just 15 months after launch, Brownlee announced Panels was shutting down. The app had about 900,000 downloads and generated roughly $95,000 in revenue. For someone with over 20 million YouTube subscribers, those numbers were dismal.
“We knew it was niche, but we made mistakes in making our first app,” he admitted in a video. The code will be open-sourced, but the lesson is clear: even the most trusted voices can’t convince people to pay for something they don’t value.
The Redesign Nobody Wanted
Instagram changed its icon in 2016 from a retro camera to a gradient design. People hated it at first. The backlash was loud and immediate.
But something different happened. Over time, people accepted it. The new icon became normal. Now if you showed someone the old Instagram icon, it would look dated and strange.
This is what companies bet on every time they push an unpopular update: that you’ll eventually get used to it. Sometimes they’re right. Most of the time, they’re not.
The difference is whether the change actually improves something or just changes it for the sake of changing it. Instagram’s icon didn’t affect how the app worked. Snapchat’s redesign made the app harder to use. Sonos removed features people relied on daily. Windows 8 forced desktop users to navigate an interface designed for tablets.
When an update makes things objectively worse, “you’ll get used to it” isn’t an answer. It’s an insult.
Why This Keeps Happening
Companies don’t push terrible updates because they’re stupid or malicious. They do it because their incentives are broken. And this explains exactly why app updates fail over and over again.
Wall Street wants growth. Existing users aren’t growth. They’re retention. New users are growth. So companies redesign apps to appeal to people who don’t use them yet, at the expense of people who already do.
Snapchat’s 2018 redesign was explicitly about attracting older users who found the app confusing. It worked for that goal. The problem was it alienated the younger users who made Snapchat popular in the first place. An analyst at Forrester Research put it bluntly: “Snap’s new product strategy runs counter to why Snapchat was appealing to its younger demographic in the first place.”
Microsoft wanted Windows 8 to work on tablets to compete with the iPad. They prioritised that over the desktop users who made up the vast majority of their customer base. When you chase new markets, you risk losing the market you already have.
Sonos rushed their app update to coincide with launching their first headphones. The hardware deadline couldn’t move, so software quality got sacrificed. Leadership ignored warnings from developers. They shipped knowing it was broken.
This pattern repeats endlessly. Companies convince themselves that the update is necessary for strategic reasons, that users will adapt, that the vocal minority complaining doesn’t represent everyone. Sometimes they’re right. Usually, they’re not.
The Arrogance of “It’ll Grow on You”
When Snapchat faced backlash over their 2018 redesign, CEO Evan Spiegel said “It’ll take time for people to adjust, but for me using it for a couple months I feel way more attached to the service.”
This is the problem in a nutshell. The CEO used the new version for months before launch. Of course he got used to it. But regular users didn’t get months of adjustment. They woke up one day and their app was different.
Companies test updates internally. They know changes are coming. They have time to adapt. Users don’t. They get ambushed by updates they didn’t ask for and can’t undo.
Sonos’ chief product officer told The Verge that redesigning the app “took courage.” Telling customers that removing basic features from a product they paid hundreds or thousands of pounds for required bravery is spectacularly tone-deaf.
Courage would have been admitting the update wasn’t ready and delaying it. Courage would have been letting users choose whether to update. What Sonos did wasn’t courageous. It was reckless.
What Actually Happens When You Ruin an Update
The Snapchat redesign didn’t just annoy people. It measurably damaged the brand. Research firm YouGov tracked how Millennials viewed Snapchat before and after the update. Positive perception dropped from 30 to 8. Satisfaction scores fell from 27 to 12.
Kylie Jenner tweeted “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore?” Her single tweet reportedly wiped $1.3 billion off Snap’s market value. That’s the power of one influential person expressing what millions of regular users felt.
Publishers saw engagement with their Snapchat content drop by 50% or more. User growth slowed to a crawl, rising just 2% in the quarter after the redesign. Snap eventually walked back many of the changes, but the damage lingered.
Windows 8 was such a failure that Microsoft essentially skipped Windows 9 and went straight to Windows 10 to distance themselves from it. Sales were disappointing. Adoption was slow. The Start button debacle became shorthand for how not to handle a major interface change.
Sonos lost half a billion in market value and their CEO. MKBHD damaged his reputation and shut down his app. These aren’t minor consequences. These are company-defining failures that take years to recover from, if they ever do.
The Updates That Actually Work
Not all redesigns fail. Facebook introduced the News Feed in 2006 to massive backlash. Over a million people joined groups protesting the change. Facebook didn’t revert it. Now it’s the core of how Facebook works.
The difference? News Feed added functionality. It didn’t remove it. People could still do everything they did before. They just had a new way to see updates from friends. Over time, the value became obvious.
Compare that to Snapchat literally making it harder to see your friends’ Stories, or Sonos removing the ability to set alarms, or Windows forcing desktop users into a tablet interface. Those changes made things worse. They removed value instead of adding it.
Good updates give you new capabilities whilst preserving what already worked. Bad updates take away features you relied on in exchange for things you didn’t ask for. That’s the fundamental pattern of why app updates fail.
Why They Can’t Just Roll It Back
The most frustrating thing about bad updates is when companies say they can’t reverse them even when they want to.
Sonos couldn’t roll back because their cloud infrastructure had changed. The old app and new app were architecturally incompatible. Going backwards would have broken things even more.
This is a choice companies make. They could maintain backward compatibility. They could let users opt into updates. They could run both versions in parallel during a transition period.
But that’s more expensive. It takes more time. It requires more infrastructure. So companies push updates that are one-way doors. Once you go through, you can’t go back.
Then when it turns out the update was terrible, they’re stuck telling angry customers there’s nothing they can do. The update is forced. The features are gone. Your choice is to accept it or stop using the product.
That’s not how you treat customers. That’s how you lose them.
The Pattern Nobody Seems to Learn From
You’d think companies would learn from these disasters. Snapchat’s redesign failed. Microsoft’s Start button removal failed. Sonos’ app relaunch failed. The pattern is obvious.
Yet it keeps happening. Reddit redesigned their interface. Spotify constantly moves features around. Discord changes things users don’t want changed. Twitter became X and… well, that’s a whole other disaster.
Why? Because the people making these decisions aren’t the people using the products daily. Executives and product managers convince themselves they know better than users. They have data. They have strategy. They have vision.
What they don’t have is perspective. They can’t see what it’s like to wake up and find your app doesn’t work the way it did yesterday. To lose features you depended on. To navigate an interface that feels foreign and wrong.
So the cycle continues. Companies push updates. Users revolt. Companies either backtrack or insist people will adapt. Sometimes they do. Usually, they just find alternatives. This is why app updates fail repeatedly—the lessons never get learned.
What This Means for the Future
The trend is clear: companies are prioritising growth over existing users, new features over stability, strategic goals over customer satisfaction.
This works until it doesn’t. Until the backlash is too severe. Until market value drops. Until the CEO gets fired. Until users leave en masse.
Some updates recover. Facebook’s News Feed became essential. Instagram’s icon became normal. But those are the exceptions.
Most bad updates just stay bad. They’re the permanent scar on a product that used to be better. The moment when users realised the company doesn’t actually care what they think.
And here’s the thing: users remember. They remember when Snapchat ruined their app. They remember when Windows 8 removed the Start button. They remember when Sonos broke their speakers.
Those aren’t just product failures. They’re trust failures. And trust, once broken, is incredibly hard to rebuild.
Companies would do well to remember that before they ship the next update nobody asked for. Because understanding why app updates fail isn’t complicated—it’s about listening to users instead of ignoring them.
