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Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

537 points by gdeglin 7y ago

whalesalad 7y ago
This is a pretty subjective take.
- starpilot 7y ago
  It's more speculative I think. The guy worked for Apple for 18 years, so he's not totally out on a limb though.
- crispinb 7y ago
  I'm wondering what an 'objective take' on such a complex topic would be. My guess (& I'm happy to admit it's no more than that) is that subjective takes is all we've got.
- kelnos 7y ago
  Nothing in that article seemed surprising or especially odd. Most software development shops operate that way, especially the bits about management and feature culling before deadlines. From talking to a few friends who work at Apple, I believe the article when it says they're not too big on automated testing, which is a shame. At any rate, nothing in there seems new, as in, that it would explain why this year's releases are particularly more buggy than in any previous year. Assuming that is actually the case; I imagine every year's releases are pretty buggy, but after the .1 release comes out, everyone forgets until the next year.
geuis 7y ago
I’ve been super annoyed at some bugs in iOS Safari. In particular, double tap to zoom on web pages is completely broken. It’s a really old feature that just suddenly stopped working in the new iOS release.
- bori5 7y ago
  Yep just noticed this today. Why remove this feature ? Did people complain about this during beta and Apple ignore it. Although zooming in by pinching and then double tapping reverts to original size which is nowhere near as useful. Fingers crossed for a point release that brings this back.
  - geuis 7y ago
    Thing is, it’s not removed. It’s just broken. Very very rarely the zoom will kind of work, just not where and when I expect it to.
  - superdisk 7y ago
    It's actually still around, however on some pages Safari will go into some sort of weird state where scrolling is slightly broken (you can't overscroll and have the page bounce back is the indicator that you're in the broken state). When you're in that state, double tapping to zoom doesn't work either. I find that I mostly encounter this bug on Reddit.
- mlang23 7y ago
  That reminds me, during iOS 8, the Safari back button was broken for VoiceOver users. For half a year. They fixed it a few months before the next release :-(
Razengan 7y ago
I can only surmise (hope) that their resources are diverted towards Something Big. Could be ARM macOS and/or AR glasses. Not that this excuses the bugginess of their current core products. Bringing up comparisons to Steve Jobs must be the tech equivalent of Godwin's Law, but if there was one thing about him, it's that he actually was a user of his own products, like us. It feels like there's no one at Apple (or other companies) like that anymore. They can only try to guess at what it must be like to be a user, so they can't nitpick all the little things that annoy us.
- p_l 7y ago
  Or because they are in endless loop of rewriting without organization or planning. Which is conclusion some pointed out based on Darwin source that we can view...
- crooked-v 7y ago
  They seem to have at least a fair bit of effort devoted to reversing earlier maligned decisions, given the new Mac Pro, thicker iPhones with larger batteries, and the rumors about ditching butterfly switches on the laptops.
- manojlds 7y ago
  With their culture, something big will be worked on by a relatively small team in total secrecy. The team, in name of secrecy, will repeat the same mistakes that some other teams are fixing elsewhere.
  - ChrisCinelli 7y ago
    Secrecy inside a company may help a team to focus on only one thing but it also prevents people from understanding the "big picture" and unless there is a special process for "sharing lessons learned", people repeats the same mistakes over and over. It is a little sad.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Norbert Wiener pointed this out 60 years ago, re: US military secrecy during WWII.
nextstep 7y ago
Are they that buggy? They seem very stable to me and I’ve been running them since the betas.
- mattbillenstein 7y ago
  Go refill your koolaid please.
  - devinegan 7y ago
    Your bias appears to be showing as well.
    - mattbillenstein 7y ago
      Oh please, the hardware, the software, the frequency of updates -- it's all been crap on the laptops and desktop type hardware for years now...
  - dang 7y ago
    Please follow the site guidelines when posting here, regardless of how wrong or annoying another comment is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- crispinb 7y ago
  Only Apple has the numbers, but reports I've heard from fellow devs don't encourage me to think I made a mistake moving away from MacOS last year.
- Razengan 7y ago
  I'm on the second-latest MacBook Pro. I completely erased my disk and installed a fresh copy of Catalina when it was released. It's been patched with the post-release update. Almost all settings are at their recommended defaults, there is no third-party stuff that modifies system behavior, and I mostly only use Apple's own apps and services for stuff like music, books, cloud, mail etc. And boy yes there are bugs. Not outright crashing/rebooting, but bugs there are. I've been using macOS since Lion and I can't recall such a dismal release as Catalina's.
Simon_says 7y ago
It’s simpler than all that. They’re buggy because Apple inexplicably decided they need to ship a new OS every year rather than when the features are ready. Reap what you sow.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sinuhe69 7y ago
All the points are sensible. But hardly any of them is new so it doesn't help explain why iOS 13 is so buggy.
aloknnikhil 7y ago
I am also finding text selection in iOS 13 hit/miss. I either cannot activate the text selection or I cannot select without the cursor jumping all over the place. Also, I miss the magnifying glass for text selection. Did Apple remove that?
- justinv 7y ago
  Hold down the space key as if you would be force touching it. It will make your finger become the "cursor". Slide it around as you see fit.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - aloknnikhil 7y ago
    I was referring to text that's not editable. I can no longer select text on the screen without peeking under my finger to see if I selected everything
    - slowmotiony 7y ago
      Yup, the magnifyig glass is gone. A horrible design choice to get rid of it IMO
  - ljsocal 7y ago
    Brilliant, thanks for this!
- gherkinnn 7y ago
  It either mistakingly selects everything or refuses to select a word and suggests a different word. It seems to work better in Safari than Whatsapp. Bloody annoying.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  Yeah, the magnifying glass is gone. The cursor will stay in the same place if you move your finger down some so it's not obscuring the selection; on a multi-line input, the first line's selection area extends down a half an inch or so, with all the lower lines displaced by a similar amount. It's not too bad when you get used to it though I still miss the glass when I'm using my phone or my smaller iPad.
jammygit 7y ago
My wife’s Iphone lost most of its battery life since the update. Very dramatic difference
- jguimont 7y ago
  That’s the new setting of the battery where the software fakes 100% at 90-80% of capacity based on the age and performance of the battery. This can be turned off in the preferences.
- checkyoursudo 7y ago
  Since the iOS 13 update, I'd had this happen almost daily: The battery level is reported as fine and everything works like normal from 100% to about 35%. At about 35% (could be 36 or 32 or whatever any given time--I can't see that the exact percentage matters), the phone crashes to powered off state. If I try to start it up with the power button, I get the "plug this in" indicator. If I start it using the hard reset method, then it'll power back up normally, and the battery will always report as 10% at this stage. It can stay like this for a few minutes up to a couple of hours, but it'll inevitably crash again if I don't plug it in. After it crashes, I can do a hard reset again and it'll come back up and the battery will often show something percentage in the 20's. Often if I try to use any app in this cycle, that'll cause a crash. If I do plug it in after a second crash, then suddenly the battery is reporting at maybe 23% again. Like, WTF? It only started happening since iOS 13. I would be happy if my iphone only lost most of its battery life. :)
threeseed 7y ago
Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one. And then a few point releases later and it's all forgotten. And then the next .0 release arrives and the blog posts reappear.
- alwillis 7y ago
  Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one. I've run and tested every release going back to 2001 and it's been a while since a macOS release has been this buggy and caused serious data loss in some cases. So even for .0 release, this has been pretty bad.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Have you forgotten about the release that melted hardware? Melted.
  - dickeytk 7y ago
    May I be Goldilocks? I’ve used basically every iOS beta. Beta 1 is always AWFUL. Then it gets better and better. iOS 13 is probably the worst, but only incrementally so. It’s hardly worth having a fuss.
    - bauerd 7y ago
      It's not a beta, it's what they encourage their users to upgrade to
      - dickeytk 7y ago
        I know. I’m talking about iOS 13 beta 1. If you think this is what a bad OS looks like, you should try that.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        iOS 12 beta 1 was a lot better, FWIW.
mlang23 7y ago
As a VoiceOver user, I can provide a lesser known perspective. I've gotten used to waiting several months until I actually install a new major release. With the exception of iOS 12, basically all releases since iOS 5 were quite buggy when it comes to apples screen reader VoiceOver. Luckily, applevis.com these days publishes a list of known problems with accessibility on iOS a few days before every major release. So those of us that depend on lesser mainstream features feel the bad release quality already since quite a long time. Still, with all the hickups that Apple has during new releases, their accessibility stack is still lightyears before Android.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > their accessibility stack is still lightyears before Android. Don't you mean "ahead of"?
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    That’s what that means, “before” being the opposite of “behind”. It’s just not as common a construction in most English locales as it used to be. It does still get more restricted usage in this sense: when considering the future, “this is what lies before us” wouldn’t sound out of place.
    - curryst 7y ago
      Out of this context, I would assume that "before" is being used as a location instead of a temporal reference. I.e. "this" referring to some kind of object; "the food was laid before us". As a temporal reference, it's definitely valid, but it bears a somewhat highfalutin connotation. It sounds like someone who is trying to wax poetic. Not that I would fault a non-native speaker for using it; it's a very nuanced and probably subjective interpretation.
  - mlang23 7y ago
    Yes, "ahead of" probably sounds better. I am not a native speaker.
ronanyeah 7y ago
TLDR, technical debt.
novok 7y ago
The way I've heard one company deal with noticing non-crashing bugs is to treat warning logs as 'crashes' with backtrace snapshots and upload them as specially tagged non-fatal crashes. Might help apple see if clients are having specific icloud issues.
- breatheoften 7y ago
  This seems like a really good idea to me. Is it possible to do in a way that preserves privacy and doesn’t basically become a hidden “telemetry” system?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Make it opt-in and require a privacy review every time something like this goes in?
    - ChrisCinelli 7y ago
      If you make it opt-in, the company will not get a lot of reports. If you want to get enough data, they should be opt-out as the others.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Opt-in analytics fail to account for people who turn them off because they don't like opt-in analytics. So you might be getting more data, but it might not necessarily be any more representative.
  - novok 7y ago
    Well it would have the same permissions as crash reports in general? It uploads the same amount of info as normal crashes right? Most apps send analytics up already if you are not already aware, most don't ask for your permission to do so.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
dplgk 7y ago
After doing some iOS/Mac development, I'd say some bugginiess is caused by changing APIs and behaviors inflicted by Apple, expected to be absorbed/dealt with by developers. They mercilessly do this with every release and no doubt that affects their internal projects. Also, xcode has gone the way of iTunes and ObjC was always a huge pain. It's a really hostile environment to develop in, where you're having to play catch up all the time.
- Svoka 7y ago
  Wow. My experience is opposite. Been in iOS development for over 10 years already, little less for Android. App made for iOS still works with very minor adjustments, while on Android it’s a mess. We was forced to change build system several times, breaking changes and just silly API renames, service depreciations, generations of push services, forcing firebase and AndroidX, change of permission model, of concurrency model. Honestly, I can’t even name single such change for iOS. At worse it is adding interface implementation. About objective c and Xcode. Just lol. I love being able to debug by pressing single button and putting breakpoint. Android studio, being abominably ugly and slow, and killing battery like in 1 hour, still struggles to do that for native code. Also, what is wrong with Objective C?
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    Unfortunately, just because the developer experience on Android can be even worse, that doesn't mean the developer experience on iOS isn't bad.
    - Svoka 7y ago
      Yes. Thing is this are de-facto only two platforms alive. Yes. Mobile (and desktop) developers life suck. But someone has to write all that software. And, IMO, iOS/macOS/Cocoa/Xcode is best out there. And most importantly - most stable. Nice boutique experience, nice API, good documentation, everything is integrated and working. Other platforms are even worse. Way worse. I am also doing Switch, KaiOS, Xbox, PS3/4, did Symbian and like dozen more obscure ones.
rnantes 7y ago
iOS 13 has been pretty much flawless for me. However, I am waiting to update to Catalina until 2020 because support for 32 bit apps and OpenGL has been pulled.
- comex 7y ago
  Catalina does not drop support for OpenGL.
- greggman2 7y ago
  OpenGL has not been pulled, only deprecated. Same as before.
alwillis 7y ago
The Apple USB keyboard on my old Mojave iMac works fine but doesn't work when I plug it into the iMac running Catalina. I submitted the bug yesterday.
- alwillis 7y ago
  The latest Catalina beta released today (build 19B86a) fixed this bug—the keyboard now works.
pknerd 7y ago
I made a mistake of installing Catalina. Since the day the system is acting up weird. Apart from rejecting 32-bits apps, Catalina is also having memory kind of issues. After working for a few hours things start getting weird, chrome's extensions start crashing, if I try to open a new tab it does not let me load the page. I also start getting messages "X Application can not be opened" where X is ANY application I wish to open. The issue got a bit better after a recent 1 GB update but the main problem persists. I am seriously considering to downgrade to Mojave.
neya 7y ago
I'm still on High Sierra on my 2015 Macbook Pro. I haven't upgraded my OS nor my machine and pretty happy with it (I only accept updates within my OS version itself) . On my home machine, I do use Mojave, which by itself is quite buggy and I'm waiting for some more fixes before I upgrade my Macbook Pro to Mojave as well. I never install Apple's newer OS'es because I have a lot of development related stuff setup on my machines and wouldn't want them to break post an update. But so far, this lag in my update schedule has served me really well for years now and looks like this won't be changing anytime soon for me, either.
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  The "Regressions Get Fixed. Old Bugs Get Ignored." thought does not help your strategy. After 6 months into the new version of iOS and MacOS, there is a lot less attention to fix problem in the previous version of the OS. It is even worse when it comes to firmware problems on older hardware. If you have a 2+ year old Apple device you need to hope that all the security bugs on your hardware are also in the latest software or hardware, otherwise it may just never be fixed.
  - coldcode 7y ago
    Google is just as bad at this and have many of the same issues of too many things being built at the same time. Googlers often lament that fixing bugs is never a priority to new features which is pretty much Apple as well. Perhaps too much complex technology is hard to do. I work for a non-tech similarly big company that uses a lot of software (that we make ourselves as well as integrating vendors) and our processes and quality are even worse than Apple and Google. But as an iOS dev I would happy if at least Xcode was built and tested properly...
- aldanor 7y ago
  Same here. The "You need a newer Xcode to compile this" pops up more and more often though (e.g. with vulkan stuff), so I guess I'll have to upgrade soon... probably to Mojave.
riffraff 7y ago
This article explains why something is buggy. Maybe why Apple's software is buggy. It does not explain why the latest stuff is so buggy. Is Catalina that much more complex than, say, Mavericks? Are managers playing deadline chicken more? I don't see evidence for this.
- yashap 7y ago
  The author used to work at Apple, but no longer does, so they probably can’t comment accurately on anything super recent. I agree with you, it doesn’t really deliver on the title, but I still found it an interesting read. But yeah, a more accurate title would be something like “common causes of quality issues in Apple software.”
- wokwokwok 7y ago
  I agree, the question is more: if that’s the culture historically, and accurately how did it ever work? This release something is different, which either vastly exacerbates the issues listed, or causes other problems. ...I am interested in what the root cause of it is, but this is just a list of symptoms, and perhaps the output of the issues listed by the OP without whatever the magical Q/A process that historically somehow got things across the line in the end.
campfireveteran 7y ago
I refuse to install iOS 13.0 because it's so buggy, and refuse to install Catalina because all it does is take away features rather than adding value. They can't seem to stop to fix what's already broken, so they add a few things, break a few more and remove some I use and say "the emperor's new clothes are awesome."
- selectodude 7y ago
  13.1 is out now, and it's pretty slick.
chubs 7y ago
I have a theory that this year tons of stuff was rewritten in Swift, because with the lockdown of the ABI it's now possible to write libraries in Swift. This might be why this year is a bumper crop of bugs.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Very little has been rewritten in Swift.
  - chubs 7y ago
    Really? I read otherwise: https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/ https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/ It'd be hard to know unless you worked there. It's just a wild theory, I might be wrong :)
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      That's a very small fraction of the binaries that ship in the OS.
    - dep_b 7y ago
      It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff that just works in Swift especially when it has a lot of low-level code. What they do sometimes is adding a Swift-friendly API layer around the Objective-C(++) code. Newer libraries that are not too low-level oriented might get written in Swift nowadays.
      - Someone 7y ago
        ”It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff” I don’t think ”for a resource constrained company” makes a difference there. That’s good, because I have a hard time thinking of Apple as resource constrained.
        saagarjha 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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tobr 7y ago
Tangentially related: GitHub has already dropped support for Mojave. The whole site is now broken in Safari 12 because it’s no longer the “current” version of the browser. Well, it is if you run Mojave, as you need to upgrade the entire system to get Safari 13. I can understand not developing new features for Safari 12, but speaking of regressions, why would you go break things that used to work a week ago?
- pfranz 7y ago
  I agree that's a rather aggressive schedule for support, but I'm running Mojave 10.14.6 (18G103) and Safari Version 13.0.2 (14608.2.40.1.2) right now.
- deleted 7y ago
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- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Well, it is if you run Mojave, as you need to upgrade the entire system to get Safari 13. You don't; Safari 13 runs on macOS Mojave (and macOS High Sierra, if you're still using that).
  - nihahs 7y ago
    I'm using High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G5019)and I don't have an update for Safari 13
    - parasubvert 7y ago
      Check the Apple App Store updates section, I believe that houses the High Sierra update, whereas Mojave uses the system update.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - nihahs 7y ago
        Thanks a bunch!
envolt 7y ago
> apart from a few specific areas, Apple doesn’t do a lot of automated testing. Apple is highly reliant on manual testing, probably too much so. That's the last thing I expected to know about such a big company.
- aaplthrow227 7y ago
  When I interviewed at Apple last year, they emphasized their use of various robotic contraptions for end-to-end testing over unit tests. One engineer remarked that 20% test coverage was considered on the high end for his team.
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  They should have more automated tests. But considering this article does not surprise me at all. That also mean probably almost no exploration/fuzzy tests. The kernel may be one of the few exceptions. Considering the secrecy infra-team I would expect almost no integration tests. That also means that Apple products are pretty bad when it come to security contrary to what Apple's marketing wants you to believe.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Considering that they own the entire stack, I honestly think that one of the unofficial integration tests for lower-level components is when the apps sitting on fail to work.
greggman2 7y ago
tvOS 13 seems to also be buggy. After the update I can no longer wake it via HDMI/CEC. Once I wake it some other (inconvenient) way then HDMI/CEC control works. Wake up was working on tvOS 12
- mrweasel 7y ago
  I had to disable HDMI/CEC a while back because the AppleTV kept switch the TV back to it's own HDMI, stealing "focus" from the PlayStation.
  - greggman2 7y ago
    strange, I haven't had that issue. I have 4 devices connected to the TV; A Mac Mini (running Ubuntu), An Apple TV, a PS4, and a Switch. If I turn any one device on it will wake up the TV if off and eventually switch to that device's input. But I haven't had any device switch the input to the TV out of order that I remember. I wonder what the issue is. My Apple TV is only used for 2 things, Kodi and Amazon Prime. I wonder if it's a particular app? I'm using the Apple TV 4k (not sure if that's the newest model or if there is another since) Frustrating that this stuff is so finicky. It seems as simple as a USB keyboard which seem to generally work everywhere so why is it so hard to make work and keep it working.
ChrisCinelli 7y ago
I did not work for Apple but this article describes exactly what I was thinking. Apple has very waterfall cycle. Everything is planned year after year to be released for the September event. When the deadline approach teams realized that are behind and they need to overwork. And when people get tired and under pressure, they usually introduce even more bugs. The article also nails the solution: a more Agile workflow. But it ain't gonna happen: "Apple could address this scheduling problem by not packing so many features into each release, but that’s just not the company culture."
- steve19 7y ago
  They could simply decouple the apps from the OS, like Android. Safari and Mail.app do not need to be tied to OS releases. Android OS releases do not get nearly as much fanfare because a lot of core functionality is decoupled from the OS: app store(s), mail clients, browsers, todo lists, even the text messaging apps and some security frameworks. Which of course is exactly why Apple keeps everything in one big release. They want lots of press talking about the brand new features.
  - emsy 7y ago
    I think you're right about the decoupling. But I don't think they do it this way for press reasons to be honest. Apple is all about integration, And it makes sense that this applies to Apps/OS as it does to OS/Hardware. Also, most buzz is generated by OS level changes (Dark mode etc.).
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Safari can actually be updated separate from the OS.
  - mason55 7y ago
    I wonder if there's some anti-trust consideration to it. If Apple were able to update all their apps separately from the OS that would mean they had accessible APIs to do it. People would complain a lot more loudly about Apple blocking replacement functionality and Apple wouldn't want to allow a replacement for, eg, the messages app. If you integrate the apps directly into the OS then you can just say that no APIs exist, those are just features of the operating system itself.
jl6 7y ago
The only iOS 13 bugs I’ve been bitten by are: 1. Safari’s back button now seems to lose the position on the previous page - sometimes. 2. The share sheet has a row of Messages contacts that I didn’t ask for, don’t want, and can’t turn off - and it creates the risk of super-inappropriate sharing, because all my work contacts are eligible for being on this row, seemingly at random.
- Engineering-MD 7y ago
  I completely agree with point 2, and I have already accidentally shared a hacker news story to a work colleague without intending to! I can’t understand why there is no option to remove it.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - netsharc 7y ago
    Slightly off-topic, but a while ago Google changed the YouTube app's sharing menu to show Google contacts first... ah yeah, just because they probably wanted to make YouTube the next social gathering space. Hit Like and Subscribe and Share! (I never do). God damned growth hackers. Imagine driving out of the highway to the exit you regularly take to get home, but wait, it now leads straight into a shopping mall, because hey, look at this new shopping mall, please spend your money here! Want to go home? Make a 3 point turn and drive that way instead!
  - DavideNL 7y ago
    > I can’t understand why there is no option to remove it. You can i think... but not sure; Settings > Siri & Search > Messages > Learn from this app < uncheck
    - pzmarzly 7y ago
      Didn't work for me. I unchecked all boxes for Contacts, Phone and Messages, rebooted my phone, it's still there.
_Codemonkeyism 7y ago
And it can't play TF2.
pcr910303 7y ago
I've having a feeling that iOS 13 & Catalina is felt buggy b.c. it's not the operating system itself that's buggy but that the updater is buggy. Many things have changed in this release, and the installer/updater had to handle too many different scenarios. For example, when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, an 'Moved Files' directory appeared that contained some files (that was once) in /usr/local/. I don't remember such directory appearing after an macOS update, and I've had many friends (that aren't really technical) appear that to them. There were lots of new applications (like Music.app and Podcasts.app), and data migration between internal databases weren't perfect. I've installed Catalina two times, first by upgrading from Mojave and second a clean re-install. When I upgraded Mojave, I found too many bugs that I was worrying about data-loss, which lead to a full backup (I do backups regularly) and a clean re-install. (Admittedly, this was my first clean reinstall for a major macOS update) I clean-installed Catalina and manually restored all of my files from the backup, and except for some minor bugs I'm good. It's a pity that updates aren't seamless, but if there's anyone having trouble with various Catalina bugs, (while Apple updates it's imperfect macOS updater) I would recommend a full clean re-install for macOS Catalina.
- jldugger 7y ago
  > For example, when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, an 'Moved Files' directory appeared that contained some files (that was once) in /usr/local/ This is a consequence of the read-only root filesystem in Catalina: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 Even with SIP disabled you can't do shit to that volume until you remount rw (at least, this was reported to work in betas, haven't seen anyone test the shipped OS).
  - pcr910303 7y ago
    > This is a consequence of the read-only root filesystem in Catalina: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 Actually, that's not the case, b.c. /usr/local/ isn't included in the read-only file system.
  - pram 7y ago
    This isn't true, /usr/local is one of the writable firmlinked directories. How else would homebrew work?
ChrisCinelli 7y ago
I expect the number of the new security vulnerabilities to be a lot more than the bugs visible to the users. Considering the MacOS track of record in the last year ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222 ), I am pretty worried. When I see a weird behavior I always wonder if it is a Apple's bug or a bug introduced by something trying to exploit a vulnerability.
ksec 7y ago
I could understand iOS 13 being buggy as they are trying cramp more features in every year. But the thing is, there is nothing on Catalina that felt new, unless you take removal of iTunes and new PodCast / Apple Music App as new. 99% of the macOS remain the same. The removal of 32bit Apps are long time coming. I just dont understand why it had so many problems.
dep_b 7y ago
iOS 13 was pretty buggy but the amount of improvements all across the system has been significant. I can live with it. But installing Catalina on my daily driver: no thanks. Xcode will force me to upgrade eventually I guess.
babesh 7y ago
I have been told by multiple sources that Apple engineering salaries are not competitive with industry leaders and haven't been for a long time. I wonder if the dissolution of the Jobs anti compete agreements exacerbated the issue. However Apple seems to be willing to pay for highly sought after skills. I have also been told that they don't have company level hiring standards so you should expect uneven abilities across different teams. I have also been told that things were being rewritten or rather that Apple likes to rewrite. Apple doesn't seem to be very good at limiting regressions caused by these rewrites. That's why there are so many crashes across the board. The crashes are caused by bugs or changes in behavior in common frameworks. This seems to jive with the author saying that Apple doesn't do enough automated testing.
- bluejekyll 7y ago
  I was just speaking with an acquaintance at Apple this weekend that works in a group in this area at Apple, and they pretty much said exactly what you just said. Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without rewriting for their own platform.
  - xhruso00 7y ago
    This is in contrast to this ex-Apple engineer. He recently quit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCGg_12gn-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCGg_12gn-s I also read on twitter that it's the Interns who deal with "fun" bugs -> not professionals! https://twitter.com/meteochu/status/1186701883429273604 https://twitter.com/meteochu/status/1186701883429273604
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      I wouldn't read too much into that tweet.
  - arvinsim 7y ago
    > Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without rewriting for their own platform. Can you expand on this? Are there limitations on MacOS that prevents them from doing so?
paulcarroty 7y ago
It's popular tendencies today: release aplha/beta stage product and get free QA from users. Apple isn't an icon of hardware/software quality anymore.
jwr 7y ago
I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch with automated or in-house testing. In contrast, big companies like Apple try very hard to avoid and ignore user bug reports. There is no way to easily E-mail them, "filing a radar" is hard, and even if you do they do their best to ignore your report. When I wrote "percentage of revenue", I meant it. In my software business (https://partsbox.io/ https://partsbox.io/), I dedicate about 10% of my time to reading, analyzing, and responding to user bug reports. Carefully thinking about every report let me catch bugs and problems that I never would have found. I also learned that every user bug report carries some information: even if something isn't actually a bug, getting multiple reports about it might point to a usability or a documentation problem. If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing bugs, they would not have a quality problem like they do now.
- mtgx 7y ago
  It's basically why Windows 10 is also so much buggier than previous versions: Nadella cut a good portion of Microsoft's Q&A team.
  - SCdF 7y ago
    If this your anecdote, or are their studies around this? I ask because anecdotally everyone I know finds Windows 10 to be the most stable Windows they've ever used.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
      Did they not use 2000? Or XP? Or even 7 for that matter?
      - SCdF 7y ago
        I've used Windows on and off since 3.11, and have used 98, xp, 7 and 10 a lot. As much fun as it is to hate on Windows, if I'm honest with myself 10 has been the most stable experience I've had with Windows, with the possible exception of 3.11 (though that was a long time ago).
ljsocal 7y ago
Apple stores are highly tuned to and responsive to customer experience in-store. The same is true with their AppleCare support online and via phone. The metric they focus on is Net Promoter Score. Maybe this same model could be applied to the OS, Apps and services. Apple user experience would be improved methinks.
- chadlavi 7y ago
  Like the guy said in the blog post, though, they don't have company wide hiring standards. Their service design is superb (and we should probably note, the service design is very close to the purchase point), but doesn't translate necessarily to their UX.
- p_l 7y ago
  As someone described, Jobs focused heavily on the sale experience - anything after that, unless someone (or his own experience with his product) convinced him, was irrelevant. The moment your money parted with you, your importance ended. This was visible, among other things, in gutting departments that kept Apple alive when literally everyone else had better hw & sw - people who did long-term accounts with for example government customers, specific market areas, etc.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jsperson 7y ago
My number one iOS bug right now: "Hey Siri call Scott's conference line" That exact text shows up on the screen...and Siri says "Calling Don's conference line". Both are in my contacts list. I have not had this problem prior to this week so it's probably a backend issue.
mikl 7y ago
Interesting insights. It’s like a laundry list of software engineering management failures.
song 7y ago
Macos used to not have a yearly schedule. New versions took the time they needed. I think it's actually a better model, it allows engineers the time to test and make sure things work. Having arbitrary deadlines just increases the amount of crunch time which usually increases the amount of bugs. Other than that, I wish that Apple did another Snow Leopard and focused for one year purely on fixing bugs in macos x instead of introducing new features.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Although I like looking forward to the next macOS name unveiling and seeing new themed wallpapers, I think operating systems should get a regular stream of small updates for individual features and builtin apps, instead of monolithic yearly releases branded as distinct products. As for API sets, SDKs and third-party app compatibility, they could still be tied to yearly milestones, e.g. "macOS 2020 January", so there would be no breaking changes for apps which advertise compatibility with that, at least until 2021. Isn't that kinda what Windows 10 does now?
  - jankassens 7y ago
    Exactly, a long time between releases pushes teams to get their feature into this release even if just 90% ready. If the Mail.app team could ship updates not just annually, I’m sure they’d make faster progress and ship more stable releases.
  - 1_player 7y ago
    Rolling updates is the reason I loved using Arch Linux instead of the more common Ubuntu. Though if quality control is bad, rolling updates means many broken updates spread over the year instead of an optional huge broken update every October. Right now I'm on Mojave, works well enough, and I can wait until next summer to update to Catalina, when hopefully the major bugs have been ironed out.
- vitaflo 7y ago
  To expand on your point, Snow Leopard came out 2 years after Leopard did.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
That doesn't make sense. None of this has changed from previous updates and all previous macOS updates were far more stable than this one. This isn't a particularly feature laden update either. But now all of a sudden we get catastrophic (deleted emails) and less catastrophic (missing Music playlists) data loss, crash bugs and generally weird behaviour of many apps. I have identified one particular area where bugs are endemic: iCloud and it's complete failure to deal with multiple OS and client app versions. This is clearly a design issue as it also manifests itself in many ways that are not bugs as such. For instance, Notes has gained the ability to share folders via iCloud. But if you create a folder and then share it from a device with the latest OS version, that folder disappears from all devices running older OS versions and importantly also from the icloud.com website. Reminders on Catalina warns you of such version incompatibilities and the wording is telling. It's talking about "converting" something to the latest version. "Conversion" shouldn't even be a thing that users need to know about where no user controlled files are involved. All indications are that there is a fundamental design error at the very core of iCloud's architecture. It feels like iCloud operates not as a single source of truth but as yet another device that participates in peer to peer syncing. This is a very complex architecture and they haven't been able to make it work. So my conclusion is that iCloud which has always been exceptionally buggy has become pervasive within Apple's ecosystem. This is what has changed.
- ChrisRR 7y ago
  I agree. I looked through that list and there's nothing in the list that doesn't apply to previous releases
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  Shortcuts are another feature where they changed the format and anything that syncs back to an iOS 12 device becomes nonfunctional Another bad piece of this release is that iOS and iPadOS were staggered: iOS 13 came out on September 19th and iPadOS on the 24th. Even if all of your devices were new enough to update, the iPad didn't have a compatible release for the better part of a week, so a bunch of features were broken.
- elicash 7y ago
m0llusk 7y ago
Is there evidence that crash reports are being systematically analyzed? It seems more likely those are collected and reviewed as convenient for the highest priority fix investigations.
pitterpatter 7y ago
Sounds a lot like Windows development haha
steipete 7y ago
I still remember at WWDC a few years back, I went with some older radars to the labs, only to get turned down with a „You already have a workaround - why do you care?“ ...that made me mostly stop filing radars for older issues.
ganzolo 7y ago
Operating system should stop trying to do everything and just focus on giving basic functionalities in almost perfect way. Let third party developer use those building blocks and add this magic!
- lioeters 7y ago
  I think this is where Apple's walled-garden approach is actively harming the growth and resilience of their operating system. Unlike GNU/Linux, only Apple's in-company devs get to work on the proprietary code base, to build features based on a small number of decision-makers, and test them before release. Questionable decisions in the core don't get questioned by a wider community of devs before they get released to the public. In Jobs' days, this approach might have worked better due to (maybe smaller code base and) higher quality and dedication of their internal dev teams. Open-sourcing macOS maybe wishful thinking, but it's not an unreasonable idea, considering it's not their main money-maker (anymore?). In my opinion, this would vastly improve its future development, active participation by motivated community, and quality control.
huffmsa 7y ago
Sounds like the past couple years of hardware "whoopsies" have come to the software side. Over-optimization of existing processes, what Mr Cook made his name doing, seem to have gone a bridge too far. Time to go back to making cool new products and not squeezing every last ounce of blood out of existing ones. And no, starting a TV production division doesn't count.
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
So a few days ago we had an article on the front page claiming Windows 10 was buggy because of automated testing, now we have an article claiming iOS is buggy because they don't use enough automated testing...
bitwize 7y ago
One of the things that I heard about Windows 10 was that Microsoft switched from testing on real hardware to virtualized testing and relying on end-user crash reports. If Apple did something similar, that would explain why more nonfatal bugs make it through to final release.
oflannabhra 7y ago
My personal feelings are that #2 (crash reporting) and #6 (complexity) are the biggest issues facing Apple software quality. Apple is a metrics-driven company, and when managers see bad metrics going down (like crashes), they think they are doing a great job. But, just like with police crime reporting, there can be an effect where metrics are massaged or are reported differently. With Apple, I think the issue is that crashes are avoided by design or by nature of growing complexity, which means that metrics will continually be going down, even if user-facing issues go up. An example being that a failed sync does not crash. Apple has attempted to get ahead of this, recently, with the new Feedback Assistant allowing beta users to grab and report sysdiagnoses, but there's still a lot of work to do. I really appreciate the point the article makes: > Besides the fact that bugs are expensive, both in support costs and engineer time, they’re starting to become a public relations concern. Apple would be wise to heed this, instead of continuing to blindly trust metrics.
KoftaBob 7y ago
It's going to take a long time before I can ever trust iCloud with my files again. Such an absolutely trash experience compared to Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
>practically impossible to create a comprehensive test suite. Maybe it’s time for the community to look deeper into formal methods.
elagost 7y ago
Yesterday a coworker was frustrated with his computers, and said something insightful: "When software gets past a certain age it just gets bad." He was referring primarily to Android and Windows (10) but it applies to every piece of software that suffers from feature creep. If it's a cash cow they have to keep stuffing new things in and periodically repainting it to make it look new again. Around 10.9, MacOS reached a "feature complete" state. Now things are just being changed for change's sake. Running older Android versions reminds me of how fast and slick they were, and how many features have since have just added complexity in meaningless ways (they've changed the "silent" mode roughly 4 times since 2011?) and introduced "features" nobody asked for. Half the features end up getting removed later. As an example of good software that doesn't perpetually introduce bugs, take venerable *nix Desktop Environment XFCE. (Screenshots here https://xfce.org/about/screenshots https://xfce.org/about/screenshots) It has a release every few years and doesn't add anything major or change in breaking ways - it works, and works the same as it always has for decades. (edit) I had another thought - since Apple the company is now so large and most of their resources are focused on churning out new products year after year, it could be that they've stretched themselves too thin and the people that could uphold the quality standard of the systems either a) aren't as much of a hardass as Jobs was and don't have as high standards, or b) just don't use the products on a regular basis. I bet you there's someone working at Apple right now getting paid >$250k/yr that hasn't touched macOS in over a year.
- ianlevesque 7y ago
  > Running older Android versions reminds me of how fast and slick they were Those are some rose-tinted glasses for sure. Android lacked basic performance and stability for years after release.
  - elagost 7y ago
    I apologize for not being clear; I was referring primarily to 4.4 "KitKat". Still have a tablet that I run with that on it (offline) to read ebooks. Quite nice. You are correct though - pre-4.0 was pretty rough.
    - 7y ago
mensetmanusman 7y ago
Has anyone done back of the envelope calculations into how much it costs Apple in bandwidth to push an update? I wonder if that is a reason there isn’t a stream of x.1 updates every few weeks as things are fixed?
- xckfs 7y ago
  this already happens, but x.1 updates are beta tested. If you’re running the beta channel, you’ll get x.1 updates shortly after launch. These beta updates can go through a couple iterations before being released to the public, which is why it seems like there’s a long delay.
m3kw9 7y ago
The bugs shows very increased complexity in the system, which causes so many exceptional scenarios that it is hard for QA to catch them all. This is the reason
- m3kw9 7y ago
  They need one year of tech debt payback to get things back on track like what happened to one of their prev releases.
temac 7y ago
Why do any SW/QA engineer routinely accept to work night and WE? Of course this is gonna be non productive and produce only buggy crap. I expect any reasonable person to understand that, and only very naive and/or junior people to not. So just don't. What is your employer going to do? Fire you? Good, you don't want to work there anyway. And especially if you work at Apple, it is going to be easy to find a new job. Refuse to ship crap. Refuse to work in insane conditions. If you don't it is not your employer's fault. It is yours. (I'm saying that in the context of highly qualified jobs, like engineering -- it does not apply to other situations where the employer has all the power and people are easily replaceable and sometimes have a hard time to find a job.)
mikestew 7y ago
But if you file a bug report, and the QA engineer determines that bug also exists in previous releases of the software, it’s marked “not a regression.” In case you were wondering why 13.1 got rolled out so fast. Snark aside, this annoys me because the message is, "haha, didn't find it fast enough, and now we don't have to fix it." And you jackasses think this clown shoes attitude should be enshrined on a t-shirt?
themagician 7y ago
Ya'll just have hindsight issues. Every MacOS upgrade has been a problem for a non-trivial number of users. It's much more likely that YOU didn't have a problem because you were new the platform and didn't have much stuff to migrate. If you just got a Mac in 2018 moving to Catalina is no problem at all. It will probably go flawlessly and the only issue you might is with Adobe software… but if you use Adobe software on any platform that's nothing new either. Moving from PowerPC to X86 had a bunch of problems. Remember when they dropped Rosetta completely? Or when they dropped support for the first Intel Macs because they were 32-bit only that was a problem. Remember when they changed QuickTime? Or dropped AFP? How about dropping Firewire? Or how about the changes to Filevualt? Or when they integrated your Apple ID into the user login and then removed it? Or how about all those times you upgraded and iTunes stopped working and you had to reinstall it manually. Oh man, how about that total abandonment of OS X Server. Apple has NEVER been good about upgrades. Ever. You buy an Apple device and it's good for that point in time. In 2-3 years when the warranty is up and the platform evolves it's anyone's guess as to what will happen.
wrs 7y ago
None of this is unique to Apple — this is all standard practice for giant mass-market software projects. The “closed, not a regression” thing used to drive me crazy at Microsoft. It makes no sense whatsoever!
temporallobe 7y ago
My wife updated her macbook to Catalina the other day and suddenly has low disk space errors popping up all the time. She stores no big files and does nothing on the laptop but school work. Turns out it created a new encrypted disk partition containing all of her personal data, and somehow it kept adding disk snapshots multiple times per day. After some research, it seems that this is a known problem! I had to disable Time Machine and do some kind of tmutil command, then delete the recent snapshots. All that and she still has very little disk space. These are the kind of shenanigans I’d expect from Microsoft, not Apple, where everything is supposed to “just work”. I’m disappointed that Apple has released such a buggy OS update. Not even the Linux distros I use have been this buggy.
- FireBeyond 7y ago
  I had that too, and 'disk write' errors (which definitely are not). Ended up repartitioning and reformatting, and they went away (though the install and upgrade process even beyond all that still seemed hugely buggy - at one time the fresh install said install couldn't complete. And then it did. With no intervention).
jmull 7y ago
This narrative repeats with every release. But is each release actually worse than the last? My guess is, not really, though the perception persists for a couple main reasons: (1) For a certain subset of people, the last release really was worse than ever before. New releases have new bugs, and those bugs will affect a certain subset of people that isn't necessarily the same as the bug from the last release. Those people complain (justifiably, I think) though of course people don't create a lot of posts to describe the problems they aren't having. (2) We all naturally forget about the annoyances of years past while focusing on the current annoyances. (Generally, that is.)
tiffanyh 7y ago
A bit ironic the author use to be on the Radar development team at Apple.
taylodl 7y ago
"No need to go into the details here, except to say that, apart from a few specific areas, Apple doesn’t do a lot of automated testing. Apple is highly reliant on manual testing, probably too much so." This tells you everything you need to know about the poor state of Apple's software. A large, untested code base that's been in development for years and years is going to reach a maximum point of complexity where the cost of adding new features exceeds the business value. The ROI turns upside down. That's when your technical debt turns into a bankruptcy and your software is kaput. It's quite conceivable that Mac OS, which is built on top of NeXTStep OS which dates back to the mid-80's, is reaching this state.

537 points by gdeglin 7y ago

whalesalad 7y ago

This is a pretty subjective take.

starpilot 7y ago
It's more speculative I think. The guy worked for Apple for 18 years, so he's not totally out on a limb though.
crispinb 7y ago
I'm wondering what an 'objective take' on such a complex topic would be. My guess (& I'm happy to admit it's no more than that) is that subjective takes is all we've got.
kelnos 7y ago
Nothing in that article seemed surprising or especially odd. Most software development shops operate that way, especially the bits about management and feature culling before deadlines. From talking to a few friends who work at Apple, I believe the article when it says they're not too big on automated testing, which is a shame. At any rate, nothing in there seems new, as in, that it would explain why this year's releases are particularly more buggy than in any previous year. Assuming that is actually the case; I imagine every year's releases are pretty buggy, but after the .1 release comes out, everyone forgets until the next year.

geuis 7y ago

I’ve been super annoyed at some bugs in iOS Safari. In particular, double tap to zoom on web pages is completely broken. It’s a really old feature that just suddenly stopped working in the new iOS release.

bori5 7y ago
Yep just noticed this today. Why remove this feature ? Did people complain about this during beta and Apple ignore it. Although zooming in by pinching and then double tapping reverts to original size which is nowhere near as useful. Fingers crossed for a point release that brings this back.
- geuis 7y ago
  Thing is, it’s not removed. It’s just broken. Very very rarely the zoom will kind of work, just not where and when I expect it to.
- superdisk 7y ago
  It's actually still around, however on some pages Safari will go into some sort of weird state where scrolling is slightly broken (you can't overscroll and have the page bounce back is the indicator that you're in the broken state). When you're in that state, double tapping to zoom doesn't work either. I find that I mostly encounter this bug on Reddit.
mlang23 7y ago
That reminds me, during iOS 8, the Safari back button was broken for VoiceOver users. For half a year. They fixed it a few months before the next release :-(

Razengan 7y ago

I can only surmise (hope) that their resources are diverted towards Something Big. Could be ARM macOS and/or AR glasses. Not that this excuses the bugginess of their current core products. Bringing up comparisons to Steve Jobs must be the tech equivalent of Godwin's Law, but if there was one thing about him, it's that he actually was a user of his own products, like us. It feels like there's no one at Apple (or other companies) like that anymore. They can only try to guess at what it must be like to be a user, so they can't nitpick all the little things that annoy us.

p_l 7y ago
Or because they are in endless loop of rewriting without organization or planning. Which is conclusion some pointed out based on Darwin source that we can view...
crooked-v 7y ago
They seem to have at least a fair bit of effort devoted to reversing earlier maligned decisions, given the new Mac Pro, thicker iPhones with larger batteries, and the rumors about ditching butterfly switches on the laptops.
manojlds 7y ago
With their culture, something big will be worked on by a relatively small team in total secrecy. The team, in name of secrecy, will repeat the same mistakes that some other teams are fixing elsewhere.
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  Secrecy inside a company may help a team to focus on only one thing but it also prevents people from understanding the "big picture" and unless there is a special process for "sharing lessons learned", people repeats the same mistakes over and over. It is a little sad.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Norbert Wiener pointed this out 60 years ago, re: US military secrecy during WWII.

nextstep 7y ago

Are they that buggy? They seem very stable to me and I’ve been running them since the betas.

mattbillenstein 7y ago
Go refill your koolaid please.
- devinegan 7y ago
  Your bias appears to be showing as well.
  - mattbillenstein 7y ago
    Oh please, the hardware, the software, the frequency of updates -- it's all been crap on the laptops and desktop type hardware for years now...
- dang 7y ago
  Please follow the site guidelines when posting here, regardless of how wrong or annoying another comment is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
crispinb 7y ago
Only Apple has the numbers, but reports I've heard from fellow devs don't encourage me to think I made a mistake moving away from MacOS last year.
Razengan 7y ago
I'm on the second-latest MacBook Pro. I completely erased my disk and installed a fresh copy of Catalina when it was released. It's been patched with the post-release update. Almost all settings are at their recommended defaults, there is no third-party stuff that modifies system behavior, and I mostly only use Apple's own apps and services for stuff like music, books, cloud, mail etc. And boy yes there are bugs. Not outright crashing/rebooting, but bugs there are. I've been using macOS since Lion and I can't recall such a dismal release as Catalina's.

Simon_says 7y ago

It’s simpler than all that. They’re buggy because Apple inexplicably decided they need to ship a new OS every year rather than when the features are ready. Reap what you sow.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

sinuhe69 7y ago

All the points are sensible. But hardly any of them is new so it doesn't help explain why iOS 13 is so buggy.

aloknnikhil 7y ago

I am also finding text selection in iOS 13 hit/miss. I either cannot activate the text selection or I cannot select without the cursor jumping all over the place. Also, I miss the magnifying glass for text selection. Did Apple remove that?

justinv 7y ago
Hold down the space key as if you would be force touching it. It will make your finger become the "cursor". Slide it around as you see fit.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- aloknnikhil 7y ago
  I was referring to text that's not editable. I can no longer select text on the screen without peeking under my finger to see if I selected everything
  - slowmotiony 7y ago
    Yup, the magnifyig glass is gone. A horrible design choice to get rid of it IMO
- ljsocal 7y ago
  Brilliant, thanks for this!
gherkinnn 7y ago
It either mistakingly selects everything or refuses to select a word and suggests a different word. It seems to work better in Safari than Whatsapp. Bloody annoying.
egypturnash 7y ago
Yeah, the magnifying glass is gone. The cursor will stay in the same place if you move your finger down some so it's not obscuring the selection; on a multi-line input, the first line's selection area extends down a half an inch or so, with all the lower lines displaced by a similar amount. It's not too bad when you get used to it though I still miss the glass when I'm using my phone or my smaller iPad.

jammygit 7y ago

My wife’s Iphone lost most of its battery life since the update. Very dramatic difference

jguimont 7y ago
That’s the new setting of the battery where the software fakes 100% at 90-80% of capacity based on the age and performance of the battery. This can be turned off in the preferences.
checkyoursudo 7y ago
Since the iOS 13 update, I'd had this happen almost daily: The battery level is reported as fine and everything works like normal from 100% to about 35%. At about 35% (could be 36 or 32 or whatever any given time--I can't see that the exact percentage matters), the phone crashes to powered off state. If I try to start it up with the power button, I get the "plug this in" indicator. If I start it using the hard reset method, then it'll power back up normally, and the battery will always report as 10% at this stage. It can stay like this for a few minutes up to a couple of hours, but it'll inevitably crash again if I don't plug it in. After it crashes, I can do a hard reset again and it'll come back up and the battery will often show something percentage in the 20's. Often if I try to use any app in this cycle, that'll cause a crash. If I do plug it in after a second crash, then suddenly the battery is reporting at maybe 23% again. Like, WTF? It only started happening since iOS 13. I would be happy if my iphone only lost most of its battery life. :)

threeseed 7y ago

Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one. And then a few point releases later and it's all forgotten. And then the next .0 release arrives and the blog posts reappear.

alwillis 7y ago
Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one. I've run and tested every release going back to 2001 and it's been a while since a macOS release has been this buggy and caused serious data loss in some cases. So even for .0 release, this has been pretty bad.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Have you forgotten about the release that melted hardware? Melted.
- dickeytk 7y ago
  May I be Goldilocks? I’ve used basically every iOS beta. Beta 1 is always AWFUL. Then it gets better and better. iOS 13 is probably the worst, but only incrementally so. It’s hardly worth having a fuss.
  - bauerd 7y ago
    It's not a beta, it's what they encourage their users to upgrade to
    - dickeytk 7y ago
      I know. I’m talking about iOS 13 beta 1. If you think this is what a bad OS looks like, you should try that.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        iOS 12 beta 1 was a lot better, FWIW.

mlang23 7y ago

As a VoiceOver user, I can provide a lesser known perspective. I've gotten used to waiting several months until I actually install a new major release. With the exception of iOS 12, basically all releases since iOS 5 were quite buggy when it comes to apples screen reader VoiceOver. Luckily, applevis.com these days publishes a list of known problems with accessibility on iOS a few days before every major release. So those of us that depend on lesser mainstream features feel the bad release quality already since quite a long time. Still, with all the hickups that Apple has during new releases, their accessibility stack is still lightyears before Android.

Razengan 7y ago
> their accessibility stack is still lightyears before Android. Don't you mean "ahead of"?
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  That’s what that means, “before” being the opposite of “behind”. It’s just not as common a construction in most English locales as it used to be. It does still get more restricted usage in this sense: when considering the future, “this is what lies before us” wouldn’t sound out of place.
  - curryst 7y ago
    Out of this context, I would assume that "before" is being used as a location instead of a temporal reference. I.e. "this" referring to some kind of object; "the food was laid before us". As a temporal reference, it's definitely valid, but it bears a somewhat highfalutin connotation. It sounds like someone who is trying to wax poetic. Not that I would fault a non-native speaker for using it; it's a very nuanced and probably subjective interpretation.
- mlang23 7y ago
  Yes, "ahead of" probably sounds better. I am not a native speaker.

ronanyeah 7y ago

TLDR, technical debt.

novok 7y ago

The way I've heard one company deal with noticing non-crashing bugs is to treat warning logs as 'crashes' with backtrace snapshots and upload them as specially tagged non-fatal crashes. Might help apple see if clients are having specific icloud issues.

breatheoften 7y ago
This seems like a really good idea to me. Is it possible to do in a way that preserves privacy and doesn’t basically become a hidden “telemetry” system?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Make it opt-in and require a privacy review every time something like this goes in?
  - ChrisCinelli 7y ago
    If you make it opt-in, the company will not get a lot of reports. If you want to get enough data, they should be opt-out as the others.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Opt-in analytics fail to account for people who turn them off because they don't like opt-in analytics. So you might be getting more data, but it might not necessarily be any more representative.
- novok 7y ago
  Well it would have the same permissions as crash reports in general? It uploads the same amount of info as normal crashes right? Most apps send analytics up already if you are not already aware, most don't ask for your permission to do so.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

dplgk 7y ago

After doing some iOS/Mac development, I'd say some bugginiess is caused by changing APIs and behaviors inflicted by Apple, expected to be absorbed/dealt with by developers. They mercilessly do this with every release and no doubt that affects their internal projects. Also, xcode has gone the way of iTunes and ObjC was always a huge pain. It's a really hostile environment to develop in, where you're having to play catch up all the time.

Svoka 7y ago
Wow. My experience is opposite. Been in iOS development for over 10 years already, little less for Android. App made for iOS still works with very minor adjustments, while on Android it’s a mess. We was forced to change build system several times, breaking changes and just silly API renames, service depreciations, generations of push services, forcing firebase and AndroidX, change of permission model, of concurrency model. Honestly, I can’t even name single such change for iOS. At worse it is adding interface implementation. About objective c and Xcode. Just lol. I love being able to debug by pressing single button and putting breakpoint. Android studio, being abominably ugly and slow, and killing battery like in 1 hour, still struggles to do that for native code. Also, what is wrong with Objective C?
- Silhouette 7y ago
  Unfortunately, just because the developer experience on Android can be even worse, that doesn't mean the developer experience on iOS isn't bad.
  - Svoka 7y ago
    Yes. Thing is this are de-facto only two platforms alive. Yes. Mobile (and desktop) developers life suck. But someone has to write all that software. And, IMO, iOS/macOS/Cocoa/Xcode is best out there. And most importantly - most stable. Nice boutique experience, nice API, good documentation, everything is integrated and working. Other platforms are even worse. Way worse. I am also doing Switch, KaiOS, Xbox, PS3/4, did Symbian and like dozen more obscure ones.

rnantes 7y ago

iOS 13 has been pretty much flawless for me. However, I am waiting to update to Catalina until 2020 because support for 32 bit apps and OpenGL has been pulled.

comex 7y ago
Catalina does not drop support for OpenGL.
greggman2 7y ago
OpenGL has not been pulled, only deprecated. Same as before.

alwillis 7y ago

The Apple USB keyboard on my old Mojave iMac works fine but doesn't work when I plug it into the iMac running Catalina. I submitted the bug yesterday.

alwillis 7y ago
The latest Catalina beta released today (build 19B86a) fixed this bug—the keyboard now works.

pknerd 7y ago

I made a mistake of installing Catalina. Since the day the system is acting up weird. Apart from rejecting 32-bits apps, Catalina is also having memory kind of issues. After working for a few hours things start getting weird, chrome's extensions start crashing, if I try to open a new tab it does not let me load the page. I also start getting messages "X Application can not be opened" where X is ANY application I wish to open. The issue got a bit better after a recent 1 GB update but the main problem persists. I am seriously considering to downgrade to Mojave.

neya 7y ago

I'm still on High Sierra on my 2015 Macbook Pro. I haven't upgraded my OS nor my machine and pretty happy with it (I only accept updates within my OS version itself) . On my home machine, I do use Mojave, which by itself is quite buggy and I'm waiting for some more fixes before I upgrade my Macbook Pro to Mojave as well. I never install Apple's newer OS'es because I have a lot of development related stuff setup on my machines and wouldn't want them to break post an update. But so far, this lag in my update schedule has served me really well for years now and looks like this won't be changing anytime soon for me, either.

ChrisCinelli 7y ago
The "Regressions Get Fixed. Old Bugs Get Ignored." thought does not help your strategy. After 6 months into the new version of iOS and MacOS, there is a lot less attention to fix problem in the previous version of the OS. It is even worse when it comes to firmware problems on older hardware. If you have a 2+ year old Apple device you need to hope that all the security bugs on your hardware are also in the latest software or hardware, otherwise it may just never be fixed.
- coldcode 7y ago
  Google is just as bad at this and have many of the same issues of too many things being built at the same time. Googlers often lament that fixing bugs is never a priority to new features which is pretty much Apple as well. Perhaps too much complex technology is hard to do. I work for a non-tech similarly big company that uses a lot of software (that we make ourselves as well as integrating vendors) and our processes and quality are even worse than Apple and Google. But as an iOS dev I would happy if at least Xcode was built and tested properly...
aldanor 7y ago
Same here. The "You need a newer Xcode to compile this" pops up more and more often though (e.g. with vulkan stuff), so I guess I'll have to upgrade soon... probably to Mojave.

riffraff 7y ago

This article explains why something is buggy. Maybe why Apple's software is buggy. It does not explain why the latest stuff is so buggy. Is Catalina that much more complex than, say, Mavericks? Are managers playing deadline chicken more? I don't see evidence for this.

yashap 7y ago
The author used to work at Apple, but no longer does, so they probably can’t comment accurately on anything super recent. I agree with you, it doesn’t really deliver on the title, but I still found it an interesting read. But yeah, a more accurate title would be something like “common causes of quality issues in Apple software.”
wokwokwok 7y ago
I agree, the question is more: if that’s the culture historically, and accurately how did it ever work? This release something is different, which either vastly exacerbates the issues listed, or causes other problems. ...I am interested in what the root cause of it is, but this is just a list of symptoms, and perhaps the output of the issues listed by the OP without whatever the magical Q/A process that historically somehow got things across the line in the end.

campfireveteran 7y ago

I refuse to install iOS 13.0 because it's so buggy, and refuse to install Catalina because all it does is take away features rather than adding value. They can't seem to stop to fix what's already broken, so they add a few things, break a few more and remove some I use and say "the emperor's new clothes are awesome."

selectodude 7y ago
13.1 is out now, and it's pretty slick.

chubs 7y ago

I have a theory that this year tons of stuff was rewritten in Swift, because with the lockdown of the ABI it's now possible to write libraries in Swift. This might be why this year is a bumper crop of bugs.

saagarjha 7y ago
Very little has been rewritten in Swift.
- chubs 7y ago
  Really? I read otherwise: https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/ https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/ It'd be hard to know unless you worked there. It's just a wild theory, I might be wrong :)
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    That's a very small fraction of the binaries that ship in the OS.
  - dep_b 7y ago
    It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff that just works in Swift especially when it has a lot of low-level code. What they do sometimes is adding a Swift-friendly API layer around the Objective-C(++) code. Newer libraries that are not too low-level oriented might get written in Swift nowadays.
    - Someone 7y ago
      ”It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff” I don’t think ”for a resource constrained company” makes a difference there. That’s good, because I have a hard time thinking of Apple as resource constrained.
      - saagarjha 7y ago

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tobr 7y ago

Tangentially related: GitHub has already dropped support for Mojave. The whole site is now broken in Safari 12 because it’s no longer the “current” version of the browser. Well, it is if you run Mojave, as you need to upgrade the entire system to get Safari 13. I can understand not developing new features for Safari 12, but speaking of regressions, why would you go break things that used to work a week ago?

pfranz 7y ago
I agree that's a rather aggressive schedule for support, but I'm running Mojave 10.14.6 (18G103) and Safari Version 13.0.2 (14608.2.40.1.2) right now.
deleted 7y ago
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saagarjha 7y ago
> Well, it is if you run Mojave, as you need to upgrade the entire system to get Safari 13. You don't; Safari 13 runs on macOS Mojave (and macOS High Sierra, if you're still using that).
- nihahs 7y ago
  I'm using High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G5019)and I don't have an update for Safari 13
  - parasubvert 7y ago
    Check the Apple App Store updates section, I believe that houses the High Sierra update, whereas Mojave uses the system update.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - nihahs 7y ago
      Thanks a bunch!

envolt 7y ago

> apart from a few specific areas, Apple doesn’t do a lot of automated testing. Apple is highly reliant on manual testing, probably too much so. That's the last thing I expected to know about such a big company.

aaplthrow227 7y ago
When I interviewed at Apple last year, they emphasized their use of various robotic contraptions for end-to-end testing over unit tests. One engineer remarked that 20% test coverage was considered on the high end for his team.
ChrisCinelli 7y ago
They should have more automated tests. But considering this article does not surprise me at all. That also mean probably almost no exploration/fuzzy tests. The kernel may be one of the few exceptions. Considering the secrecy infra-team I would expect almost no integration tests. That also means that Apple products are pretty bad when it come to security contrary to what Apple's marketing wants you to believe.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Considering that they own the entire stack, I honestly think that one of the unofficial integration tests for lower-level components is when the apps sitting on fail to work.

greggman2 7y ago

tvOS 13 seems to also be buggy. After the update I can no longer wake it via HDMI/CEC. Once I wake it some other (inconvenient) way then HDMI/CEC control works. Wake up was working on tvOS 12

mrweasel 7y ago
I had to disable HDMI/CEC a while back because the AppleTV kept switch the TV back to it's own HDMI, stealing "focus" from the PlayStation.
- greggman2 7y ago
  strange, I haven't had that issue. I have 4 devices connected to the TV; A Mac Mini (running Ubuntu), An Apple TV, a PS4, and a Switch. If I turn any one device on it will wake up the TV if off and eventually switch to that device's input. But I haven't had any device switch the input to the TV out of order that I remember. I wonder what the issue is. My Apple TV is only used for 2 things, Kodi and Amazon Prime. I wonder if it's a particular app? I'm using the Apple TV 4k (not sure if that's the newest model or if there is another since) Frustrating that this stuff is so finicky. It seems as simple as a USB keyboard which seem to generally work everywhere so why is it so hard to make work and keep it working.

ChrisCinelli 7y ago

I did not work for Apple but this article describes exactly what I was thinking. Apple has very waterfall cycle. Everything is planned year after year to be released for the September event. When the deadline approach teams realized that are behind and they need to overwork. And when people get tired and under pressure, they usually introduce even more bugs. The article also nails the solution: a more Agile workflow. But it ain't gonna happen: "Apple could address this scheduling problem by not packing so many features into each release, but that’s just not the company culture."

steve19 7y ago
They could simply decouple the apps from the OS, like Android. Safari and Mail.app do not need to be tied to OS releases. Android OS releases do not get nearly as much fanfare because a lot of core functionality is decoupled from the OS: app store(s), mail clients, browsers, todo lists, even the text messaging apps and some security frameworks. Which of course is exactly why Apple keeps everything in one big release. They want lots of press talking about the brand new features.
- emsy 7y ago
  I think you're right about the decoupling. But I don't think they do it this way for press reasons to be honest. Apple is all about integration, And it makes sense that this applies to Apps/OS as it does to OS/Hardware. Also, most buzz is generated by OS level changes (Dark mode etc.).
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Safari can actually be updated separate from the OS.
- mason55 7y ago
  I wonder if there's some anti-trust consideration to it. If Apple were able to update all their apps separately from the OS that would mean they had accessible APIs to do it. People would complain a lot more loudly about Apple blocking replacement functionality and Apple wouldn't want to allow a replacement for, eg, the messages app. If you integrate the apps directly into the OS then you can just say that no APIs exist, those are just features of the operating system itself.

jl6 7y ago

The only iOS 13 bugs I’ve been bitten by are: 1. Safari’s back button now seems to lose the position on the previous page - sometimes. 2. The share sheet has a row of Messages contacts that I didn’t ask for, don’t want, and can’t turn off - and it creates the risk of super-inappropriate sharing, because all my work contacts are eligible for being on this row, seemingly at random.

Engineering-MD 7y ago
I completely agree with point 2, and I have already accidentally shared a hacker news story to a work colleague without intending to! I can’t understand why there is no option to remove it.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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- netsharc 7y ago
  Slightly off-topic, but a while ago Google changed the YouTube app's sharing menu to show Google contacts first... ah yeah, just because they probably wanted to make YouTube the next social gathering space. Hit Like and Subscribe and Share! (I never do). God damned growth hackers. Imagine driving out of the highway to the exit you regularly take to get home, but wait, it now leads straight into a shopping mall, because hey, look at this new shopping mall, please spend your money here! Want to go home? Make a 3 point turn and drive that way instead!
- DavideNL 7y ago
  > I can’t understand why there is no option to remove it. You can i think... but not sure; Settings > Siri & Search > Messages > Learn from this app < uncheck
  - pzmarzly 7y ago
    Didn't work for me. I unchecked all boxes for Contacts, Phone and Messages, rebooted my phone, it's still there.

_Codemonkeyism 7y ago

And it can't play TF2.

pcr910303 7y ago

I've having a feeling that iOS 13 & Catalina is felt buggy b.c. it's not the operating system itself that's buggy but that the updater is buggy. Many things have changed in this release, and the installer/updater had to handle too many different scenarios. For example, when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, an 'Moved Files' directory appeared that contained some files (that was once) in /usr/local/. I don't remember such directory appearing after an macOS update, and I've had many friends (that aren't really technical) appear that to them. There were lots of new applications (like Music.app and Podcasts.app), and data migration between internal databases weren't perfect. I've installed Catalina two times, first by upgrading from Mojave and second a clean re-install. When I upgraded Mojave, I found too many bugs that I was worrying about data-loss, which lead to a full backup (I do backups regularly) and a clean re-install. (Admittedly, this was my first clean reinstall for a major macOS update) I clean-installed Catalina and manually restored all of my files from the backup, and except for some minor bugs I'm good. It's a pity that updates aren't seamless, but if there's anyone having trouble with various Catalina bugs, (while Apple updates it's imperfect macOS updater) I would recommend a full clean re-install for macOS Catalina.

jldugger 7y ago
> For example, when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, an 'Moved Files' directory appeared that contained some files (that was once) in /usr/local/ This is a consequence of the read-only root filesystem in Catalina: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 Even with SIP disabled you can't do shit to that volume until you remount rw (at least, this was reported to work in betas, haven't seen anyone test the shipped OS).
- pcr910303 7y ago
  > This is a consequence of the read-only root filesystem in Catalina: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 Actually, that's not the case, b.c. /usr/local/ isn't included in the read-only file system.
- pram 7y ago
  This isn't true, /usr/local is one of the writable firmlinked directories. How else would homebrew work?

ChrisCinelli 7y ago

I expect the number of the new security vulnerabilities to be a lot more than the bugs visible to the users. Considering the MacOS track of record in the last year ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222 ), I am pretty worried. When I see a weird behavior I always wonder if it is a Apple's bug or a bug introduced by something trying to exploit a vulnerability.

ksec 7y ago

I could understand iOS 13 being buggy as they are trying cramp more features in every year. But the thing is, there is nothing on Catalina that felt new, unless you take removal of iTunes and new PodCast / Apple Music App as new. 99% of the macOS remain the same. The removal of 32bit Apps are long time coming. I just dont understand why it had so many problems.

dep_b 7y ago

iOS 13 was pretty buggy but the amount of improvements all across the system has been significant. I can live with it. But installing Catalina on my daily driver: no thanks. Xcode will force me to upgrade eventually I guess.

babesh 7y ago

I have been told by multiple sources that Apple engineering salaries are not competitive with industry leaders and haven't been for a long time. I wonder if the dissolution of the Jobs anti compete agreements exacerbated the issue. However Apple seems to be willing to pay for highly sought after skills. I have also been told that they don't have company level hiring standards so you should expect uneven abilities across different teams. I have also been told that things were being rewritten or rather that Apple likes to rewrite. Apple doesn't seem to be very good at limiting regressions caused by these rewrites. That's why there are so many crashes across the board. The crashes are caused by bugs or changes in behavior in common frameworks. This seems to jive with the author saying that Apple doesn't do enough automated testing.

bluejekyll 7y ago
I was just speaking with an acquaintance at Apple this weekend that works in a group in this area at Apple, and they pretty much said exactly what you just said. Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without rewriting for their own platform.
- xhruso00 7y ago
  This is in contrast to this ex-Apple engineer. He recently quit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCGg_12gn-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCGg_12gn-s I also read on twitter that it's the Interns who deal with "fun" bugs -> not professionals! https://twitter.com/meteochu/status/1186701883429273604 https://twitter.com/meteochu/status/1186701883429273604
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I wouldn't read too much into that tweet.
- arvinsim 7y ago
  > Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without rewriting for their own platform. Can you expand on this? Are there limitations on MacOS that prevents them from doing so?

paulcarroty 7y ago

It's popular tendencies today: release aplha/beta stage product and get free QA from users. Apple isn't an icon of hardware/software quality anymore.

jwr 7y ago

I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch with automated or in-house testing. In contrast, big companies like Apple try very hard to avoid and ignore user bug reports. There is no way to easily E-mail them, "filing a radar" is hard, and even if you do they do their best to ignore your report. When I wrote "percentage of revenue", I meant it. In my software business (https://partsbox.io/ https://partsbox.io/), I dedicate about 10% of my time to reading, analyzing, and responding to user bug reports. Carefully thinking about every report let me catch bugs and problems that I never would have found. I also learned that every user bug report carries some information: even if something isn't actually a bug, getting multiple reports about it might point to a usability or a documentation problem. If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing bugs, they would not have a quality problem like they do now.

mtgx 7y ago
It's basically why Windows 10 is also so much buggier than previous versions: Nadella cut a good portion of Microsoft's Q&A team.
- SCdF 7y ago
  If this your anecdote, or are their studies around this? I ask because anecdotally everyone I know finds Windows 10 to be the most stable Windows they've ever used.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    Did they not use 2000? Or XP? Or even 7 for that matter?
    - SCdF 7y ago
      I've used Windows on and off since 3.11, and have used 98, xp, 7 and 10 a lot. As much fun as it is to hate on Windows, if I'm honest with myself 10 has been the most stable experience I've had with Windows, with the possible exception of 3.11 (though that was a long time ago).

ljsocal 7y ago

Apple stores are highly tuned to and responsive to customer experience in-store. The same is true with their AppleCare support online and via phone. The metric they focus on is Net Promoter Score. Maybe this same model could be applied to the OS, Apps and services. Apple user experience would be improved methinks.

chadlavi 7y ago
Like the guy said in the blog post, though, they don't have company wide hiring standards. Their service design is superb (and we should probably note, the service design is very close to the purchase point), but doesn't translate necessarily to their UX.
p_l 7y ago
As someone described, Jobs focused heavily on the sale experience - anything after that, unless someone (or his own experience with his product) convinced him, was irrelevant. The moment your money parted with you, your importance ended. This was visible, among other things, in gutting departments that kept Apple alive when literally everyone else had better hw & sw - people who did long-term accounts with for example government customers, specific market areas, etc.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jsperson 7y ago

My number one iOS bug right now: "Hey Siri call Scott's conference line" That exact text shows up on the screen...and Siri says "Calling Don's conference line". Both are in my contacts list. I have not had this problem prior to this week so it's probably a backend issue.

mikl 7y ago

Interesting insights. It’s like a laundry list of software engineering management failures.

song 7y ago

Macos used to not have a yearly schedule. New versions took the time they needed. I think it's actually a better model, it allows engineers the time to test and make sure things work. Having arbitrary deadlines just increases the amount of crunch time which usually increases the amount of bugs. Other than that, I wish that Apple did another Snow Leopard and focused for one year purely on fixing bugs in macos x instead of introducing new features.

Razengan 7y ago
Although I like looking forward to the next macOS name unveiling and seeing new themed wallpapers, I think operating systems should get a regular stream of small updates for individual features and builtin apps, instead of monolithic yearly releases branded as distinct products. As for API sets, SDKs and third-party app compatibility, they could still be tied to yearly milestones, e.g. "macOS 2020 January", so there would be no breaking changes for apps which advertise compatibility with that, at least until 2021. Isn't that kinda what Windows 10 does now?
- jankassens 7y ago
  Exactly, a long time between releases pushes teams to get their feature into this release even if just 90% ready. If the Mail.app team could ship updates not just annually, I’m sure they’d make faster progress and ship more stable releases.
- 1_player 7y ago
  Rolling updates is the reason I loved using Arch Linux instead of the more common Ubuntu. Though if quality control is bad, rolling updates means many broken updates spread over the year instead of an optional huge broken update every October. Right now I'm on Mojave, works well enough, and I can wait until next summer to update to Catalina, when hopefully the major bugs have been ironed out.
vitaflo 7y ago
To expand on your point, Snow Leopard came out 2 years after Leopard did.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago

That doesn't make sense. None of this has changed from previous updates and all previous macOS updates were far more stable than this one. This isn't a particularly feature laden update either. But now all of a sudden we get catastrophic (deleted emails) and less catastrophic (missing Music playlists) data loss, crash bugs and generally weird behaviour of many apps. I have identified one particular area where bugs are endemic: iCloud and it's complete failure to deal with multiple OS and client app versions. This is clearly a design issue as it also manifests itself in many ways that are not bugs as such. For instance, Notes has gained the ability to share folders via iCloud. But if you create a folder and then share it from a device with the latest OS version, that folder disappears from all devices running older OS versions and importantly also from the icloud.com website. Reminders on Catalina warns you of such version incompatibilities and the wording is telling. It's talking about "converting" something to the latest version. "Conversion" shouldn't even be a thing that users need to know about where no user controlled files are involved. All indications are that there is a fundamental design error at the very core of iCloud's architecture. It feels like iCloud operates not as a single source of truth but as yet another device that participates in peer to peer syncing. This is a very complex architecture and they haven't been able to make it work. So my conclusion is that iCloud which has always been exceptionally buggy has become pervasive within Apple's ecosystem. This is what has changed.

ChrisRR 7y ago
I agree. I looked through that list and there's nothing in the list that doesn't apply to previous releases
wlesieutre 7y ago
Shortcuts are another feature where they changed the format and anything that syncs back to an iOS 12 device becomes nonfunctional Another bad piece of this release is that iOS and iPadOS were staggered: iOS 13 came out on September 19th and iPadOS on the 24th. Even if all of your devices were new enough to update, the iPad didn't have a compatible release for the better part of a week, so a bunch of features were broken.
elicash 7y ago

m0llusk 7y ago

Is there evidence that crash reports are being systematically analyzed? It seems more likely those are collected and reviewed as convenient for the highest priority fix investigations.

pitterpatter 7y ago

Sounds a lot like Windows development haha

steipete 7y ago

I still remember at WWDC a few years back, I went with some older radars to the labs, only to get turned down with a „You already have a workaround - why do you care?“ ...that made me mostly stop filing radars for older issues.

ganzolo 7y ago

Operating system should stop trying to do everything and just focus on giving basic functionalities in almost perfect way. Let third party developer use those building blocks and add this magic!

lioeters 7y ago
I think this is where Apple's walled-garden approach is actively harming the growth and resilience of their operating system. Unlike GNU/Linux, only Apple's in-company devs get to work on the proprietary code base, to build features based on a small number of decision-makers, and test them before release. Questionable decisions in the core don't get questioned by a wider community of devs before they get released to the public. In Jobs' days, this approach might have worked better due to (maybe smaller code base and) higher quality and dedication of their internal dev teams. Open-sourcing macOS maybe wishful thinking, but it's not an unreasonable idea, considering it's not their main money-maker (anymore?). In my opinion, this would vastly improve its future development, active participation by motivated community, and quality control.

huffmsa 7y ago

Sounds like the past couple years of hardware "whoopsies" have come to the software side. Over-optimization of existing processes, what Mr Cook made his name doing, seem to have gone a bridge too far. Time to go back to making cool new products and not squeezing every last ounce of blood out of existing ones. And no, starting a TV production division doesn't count.

whywhywhywhy 7y ago

So a few days ago we had an article on the front page claiming Windows 10 was buggy because of automated testing, now we have an article claiming iOS is buggy because they don't use enough automated testing...

bitwize 7y ago

One of the things that I heard about Windows 10 was that Microsoft switched from testing on real hardware to virtualized testing and relying on end-user crash reports. If Apple did something similar, that would explain why more nonfatal bugs make it through to final release.

oflannabhra 7y ago

My personal feelings are that #2 (crash reporting) and #6 (complexity) are the biggest issues facing Apple software quality. Apple is a metrics-driven company, and when managers see bad metrics going down (like crashes), they think they are doing a great job. But, just like with police crime reporting, there can be an effect where metrics are massaged or are reported differently. With Apple, I think the issue is that crashes are avoided by design or by nature of growing complexity, which means that metrics will continually be going down, even if user-facing issues go up. An example being that a failed sync does not crash. Apple has attempted to get ahead of this, recently, with the new Feedback Assistant allowing beta users to grab and report sysdiagnoses, but there's still a lot of work to do. I really appreciate the point the article makes: > Besides the fact that bugs are expensive, both in support costs and engineer time, they’re starting to become a public relations concern. Apple would be wise to heed this, instead of continuing to blindly trust metrics.

KoftaBob 7y ago

It's going to take a long time before I can ever trust iCloud with my files again. Such an absolutely trash experience compared to Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

>practically impossible to create a comprehensive test suite. Maybe it’s time for the community to look deeper into formal methods.

elagost 7y ago

Yesterday a coworker was frustrated with his computers, and said something insightful: "When software gets past a certain age it just gets bad." He was referring primarily to Android and Windows (10) but it applies to every piece of software that suffers from feature creep. If it's a cash cow they have to keep stuffing new things in and periodically repainting it to make it look new again. Around 10.9, MacOS reached a "feature complete" state. Now things are just being changed for change's sake. Running older Android versions reminds me of how fast and slick they were, and how many features have since have just added complexity in meaningless ways (they've changed the "silent" mode roughly 4 times since 2011?) and introduced "features" nobody asked for. Half the features end up getting removed later. As an example of good software that doesn't perpetually introduce bugs, take venerable *nix Desktop Environment XFCE. (Screenshots here https://xfce.org/about/screenshots https://xfce.org/about/screenshots) It has a release every few years and doesn't add anything major or change in breaking ways - it works, and works the same as it always has for decades. (edit) I had another thought - since Apple the company is now so large and most of their resources are focused on churning out new products year after year, it could be that they've stretched themselves too thin and the people that could uphold the quality standard of the systems either a) aren't as much of a hardass as Jobs was and don't have as high standards, or b) just don't use the products on a regular basis. I bet you there's someone working at Apple right now getting paid >$250k/yr that hasn't touched macOS in over a year.

ianlevesque 7y ago
> Running older Android versions reminds me of how fast and slick they were Those are some rose-tinted glasses for sure. Android lacked basic performance and stability for years after release.
- elagost 7y ago
  I apologize for not being clear; I was referring primarily to 4.4 "KitKat". Still have a tablet that I run with that on it (offline) to read ebooks. Quite nice. You are correct though - pre-4.0 was pretty rough.
  - 7y ago

mensetmanusman 7y ago

Has anyone done back of the envelope calculations into how much it costs Apple in bandwidth to push an update? I wonder if that is a reason there isn’t a stream of x.1 updates every few weeks as things are fixed?

xckfs 7y ago
this already happens, but x.1 updates are beta tested. If you’re running the beta channel, you’ll get x.1 updates shortly after launch. These beta updates can go through a couple iterations before being released to the public, which is why it seems like there’s a long delay.

m3kw9 7y ago

The bugs shows very increased complexity in the system, which causes so many exceptional scenarios that it is hard for QA to catch them all. This is the reason

m3kw9 7y ago
They need one year of tech debt payback to get things back on track like what happened to one of their prev releases.

temac 7y ago

Why do any SW/QA engineer routinely accept to work night and WE? Of course this is gonna be non productive and produce only buggy crap. I expect any reasonable person to understand that, and only very naive and/or junior people to not. So just don't. What is your employer going to do? Fire you? Good, you don't want to work there anyway. And especially if you work at Apple, it is going to be easy to find a new job. Refuse to ship crap. Refuse to work in insane conditions. If you don't it is not your employer's fault. It is yours. (I'm saying that in the context of highly qualified jobs, like engineering -- it does not apply to other situations where the employer has all the power and people are easily replaceable and sometimes have a hard time to find a job.)

mikestew 7y ago

But if you file a bug report, and the QA engineer determines that bug also exists in previous releases of the software, it’s marked “not a regression.” In case you were wondering why 13.1 got rolled out so fast. Snark aside, this annoys me because the message is, "haha, didn't find it fast enough, and now we don't have to fix it." And you jackasses think this clown shoes attitude should be enshrined on a t-shirt?

themagician 7y ago

Ya'll just have hindsight issues. Every MacOS upgrade has been a problem for a non-trivial number of users. It's much more likely that YOU didn't have a problem because you were new the platform and didn't have much stuff to migrate. If you just got a Mac in 2018 moving to Catalina is no problem at all. It will probably go flawlessly and the only issue you might is with Adobe software… but if you use Adobe software on any platform that's nothing new either. Moving from PowerPC to X86 had a bunch of problems. Remember when they dropped Rosetta completely? Or when they dropped support for the first Intel Macs because they were 32-bit only that was a problem. Remember when they changed QuickTime? Or dropped AFP? How about dropping Firewire? Or how about the changes to Filevualt? Or when they integrated your Apple ID into the user login and then removed it? Or how about all those times you upgraded and iTunes stopped working and you had to reinstall it manually. Oh man, how about that total abandonment of OS X Server. Apple has NEVER been good about upgrades. Ever. You buy an Apple device and it's good for that point in time. In 2-3 years when the warranty is up and the platform evolves it's anyone's guess as to what will happen.

wrs 7y ago

None of this is unique to Apple — this is all standard practice for giant mass-market software projects. The “closed, not a regression” thing used to drive me crazy at Microsoft. It makes no sense whatsoever!

temporallobe 7y ago

My wife updated her macbook to Catalina the other day and suddenly has low disk space errors popping up all the time. She stores no big files and does nothing on the laptop but school work. Turns out it created a new encrypted disk partition containing all of her personal data, and somehow it kept adding disk snapshots multiple times per day. After some research, it seems that this is a known problem! I had to disable Time Machine and do some kind of tmutil command, then delete the recent snapshots. All that and she still has very little disk space. These are the kind of shenanigans I’d expect from Microsoft, not Apple, where everything is supposed to “just work”. I’m disappointed that Apple has released such a buggy OS update. Not even the Linux distros I use have been this buggy.

FireBeyond 7y ago
I had that too, and 'disk write' errors (which definitely are not). Ended up repartitioning and reformatting, and they went away (though the install and upgrade process even beyond all that still seemed hugely buggy - at one time the fresh install said install couldn't complete. And then it did. With no intervention).

jmull 7y ago

This narrative repeats with every release. But is each release actually worse than the last? My guess is, not really, though the perception persists for a couple main reasons: (1) For a certain subset of people, the last release really was worse than ever before. New releases have new bugs, and those bugs will affect a certain subset of people that isn't necessarily the same as the bug from the last release. Those people complain (justifiably, I think) though of course people don't create a lot of posts to describe the problems they aren't having. (2) We all naturally forget about the annoyances of years past while focusing on the current annoyances. (Generally, that is.)

tiffanyh 7y ago

A bit ironic the author use to be on the Radar development team at Apple.

taylodl 7y ago

"No need to go into the details here, except to say that, apart from a few specific areas, Apple doesn’t do a lot of automated testing. Apple is highly reliant on manual testing, probably too much so." This tells you everything you need to know about the poor state of Apple's software. A large, untested code base that's been in development for years and years is going to reach a maximum point of complexity where the cost of adding new features exceeds the business value. The ROI turns upside down. That's when your technical debt turns into a bankruptcy and your software is kaput. It's quite conceivable that Mac OS, which is built on top of NeXTStep OS which dates back to the mid-80's, is reaching this state.