Recently, a photo editing app I use came out with an updated version. Only it wasn’t one of the run-of-the-mill updates designed to fix some minor bugs. It was one of those more substantial updates that overhauls the app, creating a new interface, new controls, and different functionality. When I opened up the app after downloading it, I was met with a screen I didn’t recognize and prompted to reconfigure my account. Confused but intrigued, I obliged.

Immediately after the release of the updated version, the backlash on the app store started. One-star review after one-star review criticized the developers for ruining a good thing. Users lamented how they no longer knew how to use the app and how certain features, which they had come to rely on, had been removed. It was no longer intuitive, so they said. Worst of all, they pointed out, the change was utterly gratuitous as there had been nothing wrong with the previous version of the app.

This response was predictable and, I’ll admit, not entirely unjustified. Still, I felt solidarity with the developers. In re-designing their app they had done what we all need to do from time to time: self-reinvention. As a wise man counseled in offering life advice, people have to periodically renew themselves. Remaining on the same path is a recipe for stagnation and boredom. As in the case of the app, things might be going perfectly well, with no pressing need to change anything. Still, there comes a point when sentiments of staleness and restlessness begin to appear. There’s the feeling that you’ve gone as far as desired on the current path, having mastered its contours and realized its potential. In these moments, you can choose comfort and assurance or instead make a wager on growth.

Ironically, it’s often the peak that marks the occasion to initiate a change. Ferran Adrià decided to close his world-renowned restaurant, El Bulli, at the height of its popularity. Such change is all the more painful for the increased resistance it elicits from the observers who’ve come to depend on the old incarnation of the person or product. Sometimes the decision is born of exceptional courage and sometimes of a simpler inner compulsion. Apps, as malleable as they are, probably represent this trend carried to the extreme, but they do still illustrate the importance of periodic reinvention, and, every so often, the fruits it can bring as well.