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This seems to confirm my suspicions about Apple's software quality: it has fallen off a cliff over the past 2 years. I'm not sure what's even happening. iOS use

This seems to confirm my suspicions about Apple's software quality: it has fallen off a cliff over the past 2 years. I'm not sure what's even happening. iOS used to "just work", and now I have daily crashes and freezes on a brand new phone. I literally cannot use Snapchat and Tinder at the same time - it causes them both to crash. Turning off wifi and bluetooth no longer actually turns them off, and so I have lost all control over my own device's power usage. I have been a faithful iOS user since the 3G, and yet the SE I just bought will probably be my last iPhone. Everything since iOS 8 has just been a travesty. Can anyone explain this?

Klonoar 9y ago
I find this to be one of those things in life where people with negative experiences are just significantly louder than people with positive ones. It's like hunting for an apartment - you're only going to find bad reviews, because when something works as expected people don't usually feel the need to praise it. I've had a generally rock solid experience with iOS11 so far (and I have a 6+ with a degraded battery to boot - things still operate fine, never needed to reinstall fresh or anything). I _will_ say that Tinder has a huge issue in their app, where whatever the hell they're doing in the background balloons out of control and seems to cause some kind of memory pressure on the device. I don't use Snapchat so I can't comment if it's the same issue there, but on my phone it's Tinder-specific: literally no other app has this issue, but the simple act of opening Tinder and swiping through a few will cause the device to go crazy and silently kill other apps in the background for some reason. I originally thought this was just my 6+ (i.e, maybe the degraded battery or something), but I've tried it on some development devices I have and it exhibits the same thing for me. My best guess is that the crowd that uses Tinder is willing to ignore that kind of issue because... well, it's Tinder, people are on there for a reason. Re: wifi/bluetooth, I actually vastly prefer the way it is now. It took some getting used to but it just makes more sense. Of course, your mileage and experiences may vary, so what do I know.
- brazzledazzle 9y ago
  With Apple I feel like it’s more about whether or not you deviate from the golden path they develop and test for. It’s harder to stray from it on iOS but not impossible and doing so results in a very frustrating experience.
- raquo 9y ago
  Well it can go either way. I'm fed up with misguided developments in both hardware and software of smartphones – both Apple and Androids – and have lost all excitement I used to have about that. Same goes for some of my family. I am not loud about that because I don't care anymore because none of the devices on the market suit my needs, and I gave up on that ever changing. I think my case is more common than any loud opinions out there.
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    > [I] have lost all excitement I used to have about that. Same goes for some of my family. I actually think this is a part of the problem. We watched essentially a completely new product category invented in front of our eyes and watched it mature. The lowest hanging fruit were picked years ago (by 2012, in fact![1]). Android caught up to iPhone in a very serious way. What's left to do? I feel like both platforms are in a state where they're 'innovating' just for the sake of it, for marketing, because people still expect the giant leaps that we had in the earlier years. Everyone knows this (Apple made a whole ad about 'not much has changed'[2]). [1]: https://daringfireball.net/2012/05/ios_low_hanging_fruit https://daringfireball.net/2012/05/ios_low_hanging_fruit [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwQjHZp9I6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwQjHZp9I6w
    - icantdrive55 9y ago
      I wish they would stop tinkering, and go on a immediate software diet. I was very happy with my devices in 2008. Yes--I was younger, and had more money, but I liked the web better, my devices, and my software. "My software"--oops! And most of my devices I don't really own.
    - hrktb 9y ago
      I still think a awful lot of things are left to do that are not moonshots. Phones physically break a lot. There should be better ways than rubber cases or glued rings to help people not drop the gigantic phones we have now. Wearable integration is limited and uninspired. Aside from bulky watches and bracelets nothing got attention. Bluetooth connectivity still seems like a dumpster fire, things like airpod are coming, but it’s far from a solved problem in my opinion. In the same vain communication among devices owned by the smae person is still primitive. We now have computers, phones, tablets, speaking cylinders, NAS and media serveds and short of buying every single one of them from the same company they won’t speak together.
- jwagenet 9y ago
  If I am using my 6 when the battery is <50% and the phone has gotten too cold, I can reliably cause the phone to shut down if I try to use Snapchat. In combination with your Tinder experiences, this can confirm OP's experience using both apps, where each seems to be using an outsize portion of system resources.
  - Klonoar 9y ago
    This is very interesting, and I'd love to see if other people experience this... wonder what they could be doing that's causing it?
- jrs95 9y ago
  This is definitely true imo. But regardless, the amount of issues I’ve had with macOS especially have been pretty bad recently, and getting worse with each release.
  - Klonoar 9y ago
    If we're talking macOS, I agree - my initial comment was specifically re: iOS. :) Could talk at length about what macOS needs better... although I still don't think it's worse than Windows or Linux/BSD, like some might.
    - jrs95 9y ago
      Personally I’m kind of torn at this point. I definitely don’t like the potential driver issues that often come with Linux. But in my recent experience, macOS is now less reliable than most Linux installations I’ve had were.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  I have a 6 (for work) and a 6S (for me). Both batteries are still in good (and very good for the 6S) condition. I run pretty much stock phones; I don't install many apps and the ones I do are generally well behaved (nothing like Facebook, Snapchat, etc). iOS 11 on the 6S was (is?) a complete sh%$show. Very unstable. Tried normal releases, betas, dev betas, DFU after DFU after DFU. Nothing helped. I finally went back to 10.3.3 and could not be happier. The 6 is running fine on ios 11. It lags when opening iMessage or email, but that's probably more due to the 1GB RAM than anything else.
  - KSS42 9y ago
    I have 3.5 yr old 6+. With old battery, it was throttled to 600MHz. Changed battery(just before prices dropped) and now runs at 1400MHz again. It runs great. (Still on 10.3.3) Rock solid.
alexkavon 9y ago
I stayed on iOS 10 because of these reasons. As for the wifi/Bluetooth issue. I can't believe someone at Apple can't figure out a triple toggle: On/Disconnect/Off
- newscracker 9y ago
  I'd suggest that people who don't like the new behavior of the WiFi/Bluetooth toggles provide feedback to Apple. [1] There's no feedback page for iOS that I know of. So provide the feedback for both iPhone and iPad. If thousands of users do it, then it might probably help change the minds of those deciding how iOS should work. [1]: https://www.apple.com/feedback/ https://www.apple.com/feedback/
epistasis 9y ago
I have an SE as well, have experienced similar terrible quality in software experience. It may be that the SE is an ignored and untested platform. A lot of native Apple software is just poorly designed for it. By which I mean super low density information display, that leaves touch controls squeezed down to unusable sizes. And some of the controls are just buggy. The audio controls in portrait mode from the slide up pane overlap in their hit targets, making it unreliable to play pause etc. I suspect many of these issues go away on the bigger phones. I just really don't want a bigger phone. And seeing the low quality trend of all of Apple's software these days, Android is looking more and more appealing. If I'm going to have to buy a bigger phone, I'll probably just jump ship entirely to check it out, as I feel that i have nothing to lose on the software quality side anymore.
- mrkstu 9y ago
  I've noted that my wife has had a much easier experience with her iPhone X than I've had with my 7 Plus with the latest OS. I don't think its just size, its the focus is one the latest and greatest only...
  - epistasis 9y ago
    Funny, playing with an X in the store was also kind of the last straw for me. Too many animations that make the phone unresponsive. I miss the old days, before unnecessary animation permeated and degraded the UI.
    - tcfunk 9y ago
      You can turn off some of the excess animation in the accessibility settings. They get replaced with a sort of weird fade in/out, but so far I've preferred it to things flying all over the place, and my phone feels more responsive. (iPhone 6+)
checker659 9y ago
Could Swift be the reason why Apple software post 2010ish has been so buggy? I'm just trying to put 2 and 2 together here because Swift was released with iOS7 circa 2010.
- mcphage 9y ago
  I’m not sure how much Apple uses it internally, to be honest.
- JimDabell 9y ago
  No, the Swift project was started in 2010, it was only released in 2014, and it was new to most of Apple at that time. Apple didn't start shipping things built with Swift until 2015, and even then it was only a tiny proportion of their software. Even today, the vast majority of their software is Objective-C, because Apple aren't just going to rewrite everything in Swift just because.
  - checker659 9y ago
    I'm sorry, I mentioned the wrong date. iOS 7 and Swift were both released in 2014 (and not 2010).
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  I suspect it is because they transitioned away from 32 bit. Maybe they had to rewrite some older, debugged, 32bit libraries.
  - checker659 9y ago
    Didn't that happen circa osx 10.6? Mid 2009? Also, snow leopard was a great stable release.
    - newscracker 9y ago
      That was only for OS X/macOS. The transition for iOS started much later, with iOS 11 being 64-bit only for apps.
kakarot 9y ago
> I literally cannot use Snapchat and Tinder at the same time FWIW, I've had trouble with this in the past on an Android. It seems both Snapchat and Tinder are terribly inefficient and highly problematic. I'm willing to give Apple this one, those two apps are mainly at fault here.
coldtea 9y ago
>This seems to confirm my suspicions about Apple's software quality: it has fallen off a cliff over the past 2 years. I'm not sure what's even happening. iOS used to "just work", and now I have daily crashes and freezes on a brand new phone. For what it's worth, I have seen nothing of the short. So where that leaves us? >* I literally cannot use Snapchat and Tinder at the same time - it causes them both to crash.* So maybe that's in Tinder and Snapchat? Why would it be the iOS's fault? I use 100s of other apps (never used those 2), and don't have a problem. >Turning off wifi and bluetooth no longer actually turns them off, and so I have lost all control over my own device's power usage. That's an explicit decision from Apple, and is meant to make it easier to use their BT/WiFi based peripherals, not some software fault caused by a bug. Besides that's only true for the shortcut menu -- you can still switch off both totally from the Preferences.

Klonoar 9y ago

I find this to be one of those things in life where people with negative experiences are just significantly louder than people with positive ones. It's like hunting for an apartment - you're only going to find bad reviews, because when something works as expected people don't usually feel the need to praise it. I've had a generally rock solid experience with iOS11 so far (and I have a 6+ with a degraded battery to boot - things still operate fine, never needed to reinstall fresh or anything). I _will_ say that Tinder has a huge issue in their app, where whatever the hell they're doing in the background balloons out of control and seems to cause some kind of memory pressure on the device. I don't use Snapchat so I can't comment if it's the same issue there, but on my phone it's Tinder-specific: literally no other app has this issue, but the simple act of opening Tinder and swiping through a few will cause the device to go crazy and silently kill other apps in the background for some reason. I originally thought this was just my 6+ (i.e, maybe the degraded battery or something), but I've tried it on some development devices I have and it exhibits the same thing for me. My best guess is that the crowd that uses Tinder is willing to ignore that kind of issue because... well, it's Tinder, people are on there for a reason. Re: wifi/bluetooth, I actually vastly prefer the way it is now. It took some getting used to but it just makes more sense. Of course, your mileage and experiences may vary, so what do I know.

brazzledazzle 9y ago
With Apple I feel like it’s more about whether or not you deviate from the golden path they develop and test for. It’s harder to stray from it on iOS but not impossible and doing so results in a very frustrating experience.
raquo 9y ago
Well it can go either way. I'm fed up with misguided developments in both hardware and software of smartphones – both Apple and Androids – and have lost all excitement I used to have about that. Same goes for some of my family. I am not loud about that because I don't care anymore because none of the devices on the market suit my needs, and I gave up on that ever changing. I think my case is more common than any loud opinions out there.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  > [I] have lost all excitement I used to have about that. Same goes for some of my family. I actually think this is a part of the problem. We watched essentially a completely new product category invented in front of our eyes and watched it mature. The lowest hanging fruit were picked years ago (by 2012, in fact![1]). Android caught up to iPhone in a very serious way. What's left to do? I feel like both platforms are in a state where they're 'innovating' just for the sake of it, for marketing, because people still expect the giant leaps that we had in the earlier years. Everyone knows this (Apple made a whole ad about 'not much has changed'[2]). [1]: https://daringfireball.net/2012/05/ios_low_hanging_fruit https://daringfireball.net/2012/05/ios_low_hanging_fruit [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwQjHZp9I6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwQjHZp9I6w
  - icantdrive55 9y ago
    I wish they would stop tinkering, and go on a immediate software diet. I was very happy with my devices in 2008. Yes--I was younger, and had more money, but I liked the web better, my devices, and my software. "My software"--oops! And most of my devices I don't really own.
  - hrktb 9y ago
    I still think a awful lot of things are left to do that are not moonshots. Phones physically break a lot. There should be better ways than rubber cases or glued rings to help people not drop the gigantic phones we have now. Wearable integration is limited and uninspired. Aside from bulky watches and bracelets nothing got attention. Bluetooth connectivity still seems like a dumpster fire, things like airpod are coming, but it’s far from a solved problem in my opinion. In the same vain communication among devices owned by the smae person is still primitive. We now have computers, phones, tablets, speaking cylinders, NAS and media serveds and short of buying every single one of them from the same company they won’t speak together.
jwagenet 9y ago
If I am using my 6 when the battery is <50% and the phone has gotten too cold, I can reliably cause the phone to shut down if I try to use Snapchat. In combination with your Tinder experiences, this can confirm OP's experience using both apps, where each seems to be using an outsize portion of system resources.
- Klonoar 9y ago
  This is very interesting, and I'd love to see if other people experience this... wonder what they could be doing that's causing it?
jrs95 9y ago
This is definitely true imo. But regardless, the amount of issues I’ve had with macOS especially have been pretty bad recently, and getting worse with each release.
- Klonoar 9y ago
  If we're talking macOS, I agree - my initial comment was specifically re: iOS. :) Could talk at length about what macOS needs better... although I still don't think it's worse than Windows or Linux/BSD, like some might.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    Personally I’m kind of torn at this point. I definitely don’t like the potential driver issues that often come with Linux. But in my recent experience, macOS is now less reliable than most Linux installations I’ve had were.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
I have a 6 (for work) and a 6S (for me). Both batteries are still in good (and very good for the 6S) condition. I run pretty much stock phones; I don't install many apps and the ones I do are generally well behaved (nothing like Facebook, Snapchat, etc). iOS 11 on the 6S was (is?) a complete sh%$show. Very unstable. Tried normal releases, betas, dev betas, DFU after DFU after DFU. Nothing helped. I finally went back to 10.3.3 and could not be happier. The 6 is running fine on ios 11. It lags when opening iMessage or email, but that's probably more due to the 1GB RAM than anything else.
- KSS42 9y ago
  I have 3.5 yr old 6+. With old battery, it was throttled to 600MHz. Changed battery(just before prices dropped) and now runs at 1400MHz again. It runs great. (Still on 10.3.3) Rock solid.

alexkavon 9y ago

I stayed on iOS 10 because of these reasons. As for the wifi/Bluetooth issue. I can't believe someone at Apple can't figure out a triple toggle: On/Disconnect/Off

newscracker 9y ago
I'd suggest that people who don't like the new behavior of the WiFi/Bluetooth toggles provide feedback to Apple. [1] There's no feedback page for iOS that I know of. So provide the feedback for both iPhone and iPad. If thousands of users do it, then it might probably help change the minds of those deciding how iOS should work. [1]: https://www.apple.com/feedback/ https://www.apple.com/feedback/

epistasis 9y ago

I have an SE as well, have experienced similar terrible quality in software experience. It may be that the SE is an ignored and untested platform. A lot of native Apple software is just poorly designed for it. By which I mean super low density information display, that leaves touch controls squeezed down to unusable sizes. And some of the controls are just buggy. The audio controls in portrait mode from the slide up pane overlap in their hit targets, making it unreliable to play pause etc. I suspect many of these issues go away on the bigger phones. I just really don't want a bigger phone. And seeing the low quality trend of all of Apple's software these days, Android is looking more and more appealing. If I'm going to have to buy a bigger phone, I'll probably just jump ship entirely to check it out, as I feel that i have nothing to lose on the software quality side anymore.

mrkstu 9y ago
I've noted that my wife has had a much easier experience with her iPhone X than I've had with my 7 Plus with the latest OS. I don't think its just size, its the focus is one the latest and greatest only...
- epistasis 9y ago
  Funny, playing with an X in the store was also kind of the last straw for me. Too many animations that make the phone unresponsive. I miss the old days, before unnecessary animation permeated and degraded the UI.
  - tcfunk 9y ago
    You can turn off some of the excess animation in the accessibility settings. They get replaced with a sort of weird fade in/out, but so far I've preferred it to things flying all over the place, and my phone feels more responsive. (iPhone 6+)

checker659 9y ago

Could Swift be the reason why Apple software post 2010ish has been so buggy? I'm just trying to put 2 and 2 together here because Swift was released with iOS7 circa 2010.

mcphage 9y ago
I’m not sure how much Apple uses it internally, to be honest.
JimDabell 9y ago
No, the Swift project was started in 2010, it was only released in 2014, and it was new to most of Apple at that time. Apple didn't start shipping things built with Swift until 2015, and even then it was only a tiny proportion of their software. Even today, the vast majority of their software is Objective-C, because Apple aren't just going to rewrite everything in Swift just because.
- checker659 9y ago
  I'm sorry, I mentioned the wrong date. iOS 7 and Swift were both released in 2014 (and not 2010).
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
I suspect it is because they transitioned away from 32 bit. Maybe they had to rewrite some older, debugged, 32bit libraries.
- checker659 9y ago
  Didn't that happen circa osx 10.6? Mid 2009? Also, snow leopard was a great stable release.
  - newscracker 9y ago
    That was only for OS X/macOS. The transition for iOS started much later, with iOS 11 being 64-bit only for apps.

kakarot 9y ago

> I literally cannot use Snapchat and Tinder at the same time FWIW, I've had trouble with this in the past on an Android. It seems both Snapchat and Tinder are terribly inefficient and highly problematic. I'm willing to give Apple this one, those two apps are mainly at fault here.

coldtea 9y ago

>This seems to confirm my suspicions about Apple's software quality: it has fallen off a cliff over the past 2 years. I'm not sure what's even happening. iOS used to "just work", and now I have daily crashes and freezes on a brand new phone. For what it's worth, I have seen nothing of the short. So where that leaves us? >* I literally cannot use Snapchat and Tinder at the same time - it causes them both to crash.* So maybe that's in Tinder and Snapchat? Why would it be the iOS's fault? I use 100s of other apps (never used those 2), and don't have a problem. >Turning off wifi and bluetooth no longer actually turns them off, and so I have lost all control over my own device's power usage. That's an explicit decision from Apple, and is meant to make it easier to use their BT/WiFi based peripherals, not some software fault caused by a bug. Besides that's only true for the shortcut menu -- you can still switch off both totally from the Preferences.