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Any Apple employee (or really, any large-company employee) would agree that this change is months of work. From the original problem statement (people get spam

Any Apple employee (or really, any large-company employee) would agree that this change is months of work. From the original problem statement (people get spammed when they leave AirDrop set to Everyone), to many strongly-opinionated discussions on how to solve (There's not a problem; Pop up a reminder to disable after an hour; Enable only for some period of time [5 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, user-configured]), and then arguments about how to phrase the UI (yes, even for something this small) and mock-ups and product reviews, and then development + QA and internal/Livability testing, and then coordinating for the actual iOS release. It's a mountain of work, which would have kicked off a long time before any of these protests.

randyrand 4y ago
I worked at Apple. It really depends on how big a change this is under the hood. iOS already has similar infrastructure for bluetooth toggles. If it is low risk, it could make it into a dot release with minimal effort. But yes, minimum time frame a month standard, maybe a couple weeks if it came from high up (which it did) and was time sensitive.
jsnell 4y ago
And is it standard procedure for Apple to release these kinds of changes only in China? They're clearly putting massive priority on this change launching in that geography ASAP (for one reason or another), so it doesn't seem hard to believe that this bypassed most of their other process as well.
ipsum2 4y ago
Normally it would be several months of work, but if it was a top level company directive (e.g. from the CEO) it would probably take 3-4 weeks at minimum. Note that protests have been going on sporadically for this entire year. See this article about a protest from Peking university from May 2022: https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-shanghai-china-cbcac582b7d8a92af0ce76e14847b1af https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-shanghai-china-cbcac... and Shanghai in April 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/shanghai-videos-residents-clash-police-china-covid-protest-rcna24520 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/shanghai-videos-residents... And in Henan in June 2022: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61793149 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61793149
- bb88 4y ago
  > it would probably take 3-4 weeks at minimum Maybe even less than that. I can't imagine the prototype would take longer than a day.
  - ipsum2 4y ago
    I can see a prototype being done in a day, but getting it past content review, legal, QA, etc will take some time.

randyrand 4y ago

I worked at Apple. It really depends on how big a change this is under the hood. iOS already has similar infrastructure for bluetooth toggles. If it is low risk, it could make it into a dot release with minimal effort. But yes, minimum time frame a month standard, maybe a couple weeks if it came from high up (which it did) and was time sensitive.

jsnell 4y ago

And is it standard procedure for Apple to release these kinds of changes only in China? They're clearly putting massive priority on this change launching in that geography ASAP (for one reason or another), so it doesn't seem hard to believe that this bypassed most of their other process as well.

ipsum2 4y ago

Normally it would be several months of work, but if it was a top level company directive (e.g. from the CEO) it would probably take 3-4 weeks at minimum. Note that protests have been going on sporadically for this entire year. See this article about a protest from Peking university from May 2022: https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-shanghai-china-cbcac582b7d8a92af0ce76e14847b1af https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-shanghai-china-cbcac... and Shanghai in April 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/shanghai-videos-residents-clash-police-china-covid-protest-rcna24520 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/shanghai-videos-residents... And in Henan in June 2022: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61793149 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61793149

bb88 4y ago
> it would probably take 3-4 weeks at minimum Maybe even less than that. I can't imagine the prototype would take longer than a day.
- ipsum2 4y ago
  I can see a prototype being done in a day, but getting it past content review, legal, QA, etc will take some time.