Software updates are one of the most valuable customer experience moments that brands keep overlooking. Every update is an opportunity to build or lose trust, but many organisations never test the experience that keeps customers coming back.
For digital businesses, updates are one of the few interactions that happen repeatedly throughout the customer relationship. Unlike a marketing campaign or an interaction with a salesperson, they arrive while someone is actively using your product. That makes every update an opportunity to strengthen confidence or introduce friction.
However, UserTesting’s latest research found that Australians are extremely hesitant when it comes to software updates. The data showed that 85% of Australians would not update their devices unless they have a clear reason to do so, making us more cautious than the UK (81%) and US (78%). It boils down to a trust issue, as more than half (53%) of Aussies believe apps and software are deliberately made worse over time to push people towards paid upgrades.
This is a sign that the update experience has become a weak point in the customer journey for many brands. As AI accelerates development cycles and software evolves more frequently, every update should be treated as another customer experience to test and refine before release. The businesses that do this well will strengthen customer confidence with every release, while those that don’t will fall behind.
Updates deserve the same testing discipline as launches
Most brands wouldn’t launch a product without testing the message or explaining the value to customers. They refine everything from onboarding journeys to checkout experiences before anything reaches the market. At the same time, many still release software updates with vague release notes and expect customers to simply trust the change.
Release notes that simply say “bug fixes and performance improvements” ask customers to trust a change without explaining why it’s worth making. When customers don’t understand the value of change, every interaction becomes fatiguing. Already, more than half (55%) of Australians believe companies release software updates too often, and 61% believe updates are designed only to make sense to younger users. That tells us many updates are reaching customers before organisations fully understand how they’ll be experienced.
Every software update asks customers to trust that your product will be better tomorrow than it is today. When the experience doesn’t match that expectation, customers become more cautious the next time they’re asked to update. That trust is far easier to lose than it is to rebuild.
To maintain, and ideally strengthen, customer confidence, brands need to validate the experience before it reaches customers. That means testing whether people understand the value of an update, whether changes to familiar workflows create unnecessary friction, and whether the communication builds confidence rather than uncertainty.
Customers shouldn’t be the first people to tell you whether an update works. By the time an update reaches millions of devices, it should already be clear how customers will experience it.
Familiarity is part of the customer experience
The best digital experiences eventually become invisible. Customers stop thinking about where to tap or how to complete a task because they’ve done it hundreds of times before. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of Australians say they’ve developed muscle memory around where their apps and features live. That’s often the clearest sign of good customer experience, where the product has become familiar enough to fade into the background of everyday life.
When product teams release an update, they’re naturally focused on what has improved. In contrast, customers are noticing that a button has moved or a feature they relied on has been renamed. It’s hardly surprising, then, that moving familiar buttons leaves 40% of Australians feeling annoyed and 38% frustrated. Even when those changes are well-intentioned, they interrupt habits that have taken months or years to build.
It’s tempting to assume customers will adapt over time, and many eventually do. However, that overlooks the experience you’ve created in the process. Every unnecessary moment of confusion becomes another interaction in which the user feels the brand has not kept their needs and preferences in mind.
Larger changes can be introduced more gradually and tested with customers before they’re rolled out at scale, allowing product teams to identify where familiar behaviours are disrupted and refine the experience before it reaches millions of users. Familiarity deserves to be treated as part of the product experience, because every unnecessary change asks customers to spend time relearning something they had already mastered.
Trust compounds, and so does friction
Each software update changes how customers feel about the next one. Customer trust isn’t won or lost in a single software update. It accumulates over time, meaning every positive experience makes the next update feel lower-risk, while every frustrating experience makes customers more hesitant to accept the next change.
We are already seeing how poor update experiences are resulting in hesitancy. More than a third (36%) of Australians have experienced an update that made an everyday task harder to complete, while more than a quarter have delayed or avoided updates because they were worried it would make their device unusable.
Customers who have already experienced a disrupted workflow or an unexpected redesign naturally approach future updates with more caution, often waiting until they become unavoidable before installing them. That hesitation makes each subsequent release harder for brands to land and the benefits of new features more difficult for customers to appreciate.
Delayed updates mean customers miss improvements that businesses have already invested time and money in building. This delays product adoption, increases support requests as customers struggle with unexpected changes, and invites greater scepticism for future updates.
AI is allowing product teams to introduce new capabilities at a much faster pace. This increases the number of moments customers are asked to adapt to change and trust that clicking the ‘update’ button for the fourth time that month will genuinely improve their experience. As products evolve more quickly, the update experience becomes part of the product experience. Brands that invest in both will sustain customer confidence long after the feature has shipped.
Make every update earn trust
The encouraging part is that Australians aren’t rejecting software updates altogether. More than three-quarters (77%) of Australians say they would install an update if it improved their device’s security, even if it slightly changed the design. When the value is obvious, customers are willing to adapt.
That’s why product teams should treat every update as another opportunity to strengthen the relationship they’ve already built with customers. The technology behind an update matters, but so does the experience of discovering it, understanding it and adapting to it. Those moments shape whether customers approach the next release with confidence or hesitation.
Software updates have become one of the most frequent touchpoints in the customer journey. Brands that recognise them as customer experiences, rather than engineering milestones, will be better placed to earn trust every time their products evolve.