[lolsal]

In larger organizations it is very easy to not have any idea what version is currently deployed. I worked for a company that cut SaaS releases every two weeks, but for various reasons the deployed version might be 1-4 months behind current repo HEAD in engineering. It got even more cumbersome deploying different versions for US vs EU and GOV environments.

It's definitely not ideal, but I'd bet it happens more often than we'd like to admit as professionals.

Another thought - at that same company there were I think 5 or 6 different maintained enterprise mobile apps. Jumping between repos and dealing with the various app stores/approval processes it was easy to get lost regarding what was in production.

[flukus]

In everything I've worked on where we cared about the version it has been baked into the binary in an about dialog or info page somewhere, so they only way to not be able to tell which version you were using was if you didn't have access to the app.

This of course relies on having the automated builds set the version numbers properly, it breaks down if it's a manual step, which I'm all too familiar with.