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Yikes, this is very unfortunate timing for the regions who have holidays this time of year. This reinforces my constant reluctance to update anything around ho

by toofy 8y ago

Yikes, this is very unfortunate timing for the regions who have holidays this time of year. This reinforces my constant reluctance to update anything around holidays or other chaotic travel periods. I wonder if Apple shouldn’t have waited until after the holiday season to push major updates. I mean, we all know stuff happens, this is just reality, but waiting a few measly days would not only have saved the inconvenience for the iOS team members who were surely pulled in to work during family holiday time, but probably more important to Apple, it would have saved the customers ability to communicate during the busiest family travel time of the year.

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago
I read a rumor that Apple pushed this update to work around Qualcomm patents so they can keep selling iPhones in China. Would explain why the update appears rushed. Must suck for the devs to be called back to work over the holidays.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  That would make a lot of sense. I bet they've re-written big chunks of the LTE stack in a real hurry to work around various patents. Mobile standards and modems are a massive kludge of compatibility layers and hacks. Just look at the 'Hacks' section of the mediatek modem engineering app and you'll see all kinds of tweaks to allow the phone to connect to a certain network in a certain country which does something slightly wonky. My guess is that hurried rewriting of bits of a mobile stack probably led to them not perfectly replicating all those hacks, so certain phones with certain combinations of base stations, mobile networks, sim card models and authentication servers no longer connect properly. On the plus side, most of those mobile networks will probably now be snowed under with complaints from angry iphone owners, so rapidly updating their systems to become compatible again, even if apple refuses to re-implement the hacks.

by toofy 8y ago

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago

I read a rumor that Apple pushed this update to work around Qualcomm patents so they can keep selling iPhones in China. Would explain why the update appears rushed. Must suck for the devs to be called back to work over the holidays.

londons_explore 8y ago
That would make a lot of sense. I bet they've re-written big chunks of the LTE stack in a real hurry to work around various patents. Mobile standards and modems are a massive kludge of compatibility layers and hacks. Just look at the 'Hacks' section of the mediatek modem engineering app and you'll see all kinds of tweaks to allow the phone to connect to a certain network in a certain country which does something slightly wonky. My guess is that hurried rewriting of bits of a mobile stack probably led to them not perfectly replicating all those hacks, so certain phones with certain combinations of base stations, mobile networks, sim card models and authentication servers no longer connect properly. On the plus side, most of those mobile networks will probably now be snowed under with complaints from angry iphone owners, so rapidly updating their systems to become compatible again, even if apple refuses to re-implement the hacks.