11 ms·

While not directly related to OP's issue, after using Apple Watch Ultra and seeing how buggy and crappy everything about it is for a several months with literal

While not directly related to OP's issue, after using Apple Watch Ultra and seeing how buggy and crappy everything about it is for a several months with literally zero fixes (not just me, but several friends who has Ultra too), I'm convinced that QA at Apple is run by primate apes. There is no sensible explanation that a flagship device can be full of bugs and inferior quality to its 3-year older non-flagship counterparts.

SahAssar 2y ago
> I'm convinced that QA at Apple is run by primate apes. If you yourself is not a primate ape I would be surprised and call every news agency available to tell them a new species is using written language and the internet.
- awesomeMilou 2y ago
  I tried to report issues with a broken VP9 decoder causing system instability in MediaToolBox on my Mac Mini but I need to pay 100$ to even get a chance for an Apple tech to see this issue in their developer forums (not that they engage much with their developer community at all). Apple is shipping broken software left and right ever since the ARM transition and it's become noticeable.
  - SahAssar 2y ago
    I was mostly replying to the implication that apple would be using anything other than primate apes for QA. What other species/order than primate apes do you think would be suitable for apple QA?
  - dwaite 2y ago
    You are as likely to have an Apple engineer create a bug report for you on Apple's forums as you are here. http://feedbackassistant.apple.com http://feedbackassistant.apple.com is where you file such requests. Just keep in mind that the wall they have between public and internal systems means you may not get updates unless you periodically ask for them.
    - slater 2y ago
      a little bit of irony, considering this submission's website: https://lapcatsoftware.com/FeedbackAssistantBoycott/ https://lapcatsoftware.com/FeedbackAssistantBoycott/
- genevra 2y ago
  "if you yourself is not a primate ape"?
  - SahAssar 2y ago
    I was unsure of choosing "is"/"are" (is this not the third person singular present tense correct usage?), but besides that I felt like it was a coherent enough expression. The "yourself" might feel awkward but is required to ensure that I am talking about the specific poster instead of something like "if you are not a X" in which case it would read like a general you. If you understood what I was expressing and have a better and more succinct way to express it let me know.
- karunamurti 2y ago
  Yeah, I would be surprised if they managed to have QA from species other than the species from Hominoidea family.
- can16358p 2y ago
  I consider myself above average intellectual level with more than enough capacity to spot and fix those bugs or at least report findings to people who should, which probably puts me hopefully on a better level than a primate ape. But based on your comment, unfortunatelly I can't say the same for you.
  - SahAssar 2y ago
    You are a primate ape. Literally. I'm not sure what is so hard about this, the parent poster referred to a set (primate ape) that includes both humans and many other apes. If they are not part of that set then it would surprise me.
WWLink 2y ago
The regular apple watch has some bugs that have been around for years, too. One of my favorite features is on the mickey/minnie watch face, they verbally tell you the time if you tap them..... except when they don't. Sometimes they just stop working until you power cycle the watch lol. Also phone calls to/from the watch seem to go through fits of random failure. Like at least once a week it'll inexplicably fail to get notifications or fail to answer phone calls. And then once a month I'll have to power cycle both the watch and the phone because they fall into a trap where any call in/out fails. I first noticed these bugs on my s4 and iphone xs. I'm currently using an s8 and iphone 13. Still got those bugs lol. Oh I thought of one more. Any iOS device with a home button and an alphanumeric password won't show you the keyboard when it first starts up. You have to hit the power button and then wake it with the home button to see the keyboard lol.
- dukeofdoom 2y ago
  I just got a regular mouse ear alarm clock. The phone one has bugged out on me before, can't trust it now.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    What's a mouse ear alarm clock?
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Alarm_Clocks_20101107a.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Alarm_Cl...
  - WWLink 2y ago
    hahaha That's so classic Apple. It used to happen very often with daylight savings time. The funny part is I use the sleep app and the alarms. When I'm really worried about missing an alarm I set my android phone too, or the alarm clock by my bed lol. That rarely is needed.
- walterbell 2y ago
samatman 2y ago
I have seen absolutely nothing of the sort. My experience is that other than a larger screen and an extra button, the Ultra is just like the normal Apple watch which preceded it: reliable to an almost boring degree. To the point where I want to include some sort of caveat or flaw in my reply, lest I be accused of the dreaded fanboyism. Problem with that is that I don't have one. I can't think of a single bug or glitch in the 18 months I've had it. I guess I have one kvetch: there was a major OS version bump during which they disabled swiping between faces. They added it back as an option, which I promptly turned on, and that was that.
- averyhighbar 2y ago
  > which they disabled swiping between faces There was significant backlash about the removal of swiping faces. I'm also glad they brought it back. I used that feature professionally to swipe to an ugly watch face that showed seconds.
Rinzler89 2y ago
> I'm convinced that QA at Apple is run by primate apes. Big-tech sees no value in QA thee days when they already have monopolies over huge markets, so these jobs get cut. And even when they don't get cut, since such jobs are dead-end for your career there anyway ... you get what happens. So a lot of QA is actually outsourced to third party body shops where employees don't care beyond shoveling some tests out the door to get home quick and get paid.
squirtle24 2y ago
I know someone who works at Apple QA. A lot of it is done by wholly unqualified contractors who blindly check off test cases as passed. Sad to say it, but most of these contractors aren't very bright and have zero experience or training, let alone interest in doing a good job; strange why apple continues to work with the sourcing firm.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  I’ve worked with (as in, directly on their team) some of Apple’s QA when I was an intern. They were quite bright and dedicated people. It’s just that their job truly sucks and the rest of the company doesn’t value them. When I was there their daily task was to run the same runbook of basic actions from 8 AM to the afternoon. It used to be to the end of the day, actually, until someone wrote up a Python script for them to save several hours on some of the checks. I had a chat with the actual engineers writing the code they were testing, vaguely pointing towards “hey I heard about CI and automated tests, wouldn’t this make things a lot better?” and he just point-blank rejected it. QA was there to test the code he wrote. There was zero self-reflection on how he could improve or that this process sucked. My impression is that a lot of Apple has a similar mindset which they are slowly working to change.
  - mikalauskas 2y ago
    "until someone wrote up a Python script for them ” Doesn't seem like a very bright QA team if someone had to write for them some python script
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      There are more ways to measure intelligence than being able to code.
    - tpmoney 2y ago
      Far and away the best "QA" people I ever worked with were people who couldn't write a line of code. Because they didn't have a programmer mindset, they also didn't approach using the software like a programmer, which is exactly the sort of person you want doing QA for you.
threeseed 2y ago
Be curious what bugs you are referring to. I've had an Ultra since it launched and it's been no different to any other Apple Watch.
- gandalfgreybeer 2y ago
  I have the exact same experience as you. I usually take comments like this with a grain of salt, especially if it’s a very general and non-specific complaint.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
    This is a phenomenon about Apple and some other companies I’ve never fully understood: charitably, there just are people with 1% setups that hit a whole class of bugs in Apple devices that I haven’t seen in 15 years or so
  - can16358p 2y ago
    Good for you. Go for open water swimming every day (which Ultra should be perfectly capable of) and see if GPS works reliably. See my reply to parent comment for more bugs.
- can16358p 2y ago
  GPS/distance going terribly wrong when swimmimg, action button sometimes just not doing anything, screen going blank (thinking I'm not wearing it) after workouts randomly, not to mention the original Alpine loop started to break completely in 6-7 months. I had NONE of these problems with older watches despite doing the exact same things.
015a 2y ago
I recently had my Apple Watch (Series 9, few months old) touch screen refuse to respond to touch input, and instead issue seemingly random pokes and drags until it eventually worked its way toward calling 911. After assuring the operator that it was just my nearly-new Apple Watch freaking out, I was able to dig up an Apple Support article that outlined how to hard reset it with the physical buttons, which still worked. Apple's quality control has been getting worse every year. This is something we say every year; that's because its true every year. They started the highest coming out of the 2000s, plenty big laurels to rest on. But their (and Microsoft's) software has gotten so bad nowadays that linux desktops are starting to look stable (and don't interpret that as an endorsement of the improvements in stability of the linux desktop experience, not even close, year of the linux desktop might happen but only because everything is so shit that you might as well at least use the shit that isn't taking screenshots of your desktop or resurfacing photos you deleted five years ago).
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  > resurfacing photos you deleted five years ago Yikes. That seems so wrong.I havent had this happen. For me the final straw was Windows Defender sending files to be analyzed, without letting you audit which files have been sent over.
  - goosedragons 2y ago
    It's a reference to an iOS 17.5 bug if you haven't heard. Apparently it even transcends phone upgrades!
    - Tagbert 2y ago
      It’s about photos in the Photos app that were not properly deleted, not photo files. The Photos app has an internal analog to the trashcan. When you delete a photo, the photo is removed from the normal photos index and moved to a Recently Deleted list. After 30 days, the actual photo file will be deleted if you don’t change your mind. There is an automated process that looks for photos tagged for deletion and deletes them on schedule. There has been an unknown bug for a few years where, sometimes, the process that is supposed to tag the photo for deletion removes it from the list but doesn’t add the right tag for deletion and the schedule process never noticed them and never told the OS to delete the files. They just sat there in the photos library folder, sometimes for years. The files were never actually deleted, just removed from the photos list. Later another process was deployed that saw unreferenced photos and added them into the photos index. That freaked some people out, particularly if they really had wanted to get rid of those photos. This all happened as a higher level than the OS. The OS file deletion process was never invoked for these photos.
dmz73 2y ago
Careful about negative comments about testers - Apple (as well as all other companies) is now testing in production so users are Apple's testers.
- lhamil64 2y ago
  But that implies they'll fix the bugs that get reported! I have a Google Pixel 6a, and for probably close to a year now I've had this weird issue where vibration randomly stops working, but only when I'm not connected to wifi. Rebooting the phone fixes it temporarily. I've submitted feedback in the settings to report it multiple times and it's still not fixed. I've had another bug where people get a sporadic echo when I'm on the phone with them, but it doesn't happen when I'm on speaker or using a different app to call (like Discord). I'm thinking of changing brands when I upgrade. Guess I shouldn't look too closely at getting an iPhone either...
  - DANmode 2y ago
    GrapheneOS.org Five min install, Play Store works great, difficult to find apps that intentionally break themselves due to not being Google Android.
TexanFeller 2y ago
YMMV. Both my Ultra and Ultra2 worked perfectly.
tiltowait 2y ago
My watch decided to stop correctly syncing DND mode. It would turn on with the phone but not turn off. This would happen 3-4 times a week—enough to be far more aggravating than it really should be. Then Apple made some annoying decisions with watchOS 10, and I stopped using it altogether.
hulitu 2y ago
> There is no sensible explanation that a flagship device can be full of bugs and inferior quality to its 3-year older non-flagship counterparts. The rich customer does not buy Apple because of the quality, but because of the price. /s
aldur 2y ago
I have experienced multiple iCloud-related bugs across all devices, not just Apple Watch. First I had Keychain taking a full core on _all_ my devices and had to go through a rabbit hole to fix it [0], then I had “fileproviderd “ do the same (again, across all devices) and had to delete iCloud DB to fix it. I wonder how less tech-savvy users are supposed to notice the issue (and maybe fix them). [0]: https://aldur.pages.dev/articles/2024/05/22/secd https://aldur.pages.dev/articles/2024/05/22/secd
- can16358p 2y ago
  My favorite nowadays is my iPhone completely enabling Auto-join for a Wi-Fi network (that I created at second story) and joining it instead of my living room Wi-Fi, whereas I constantly keep disabling auto-join for that network. Of course, this is just one of the thousands of bugs.

SahAssar 2y ago

> I'm convinced that QA at Apple is run by primate apes. If you yourself is not a primate ape I would be surprised and call every news agency available to tell them a new species is using written language and the internet.

awesomeMilou 2y ago
I tried to report issues with a broken VP9 decoder causing system instability in MediaToolBox on my Mac Mini but I need to pay 100$ to even get a chance for an Apple tech to see this issue in their developer forums (not that they engage much with their developer community at all). Apple is shipping broken software left and right ever since the ARM transition and it's become noticeable.
- SahAssar 2y ago
  I was mostly replying to the implication that apple would be using anything other than primate apes for QA. What other species/order than primate apes do you think would be suitable for apple QA?
- dwaite 2y ago
  You are as likely to have an Apple engineer create a bug report for you on Apple's forums as you are here. http://feedbackassistant.apple.com http://feedbackassistant.apple.com is where you file such requests. Just keep in mind that the wall they have between public and internal systems means you may not get updates unless you periodically ask for them.
  - slater 2y ago
    a little bit of irony, considering this submission's website: https://lapcatsoftware.com/FeedbackAssistantBoycott/ https://lapcatsoftware.com/FeedbackAssistantBoycott/
genevra 2y ago
"if you yourself is not a primate ape"?
- SahAssar 2y ago
  I was unsure of choosing "is"/"are" (is this not the third person singular present tense correct usage?), but besides that I felt like it was a coherent enough expression. The "yourself" might feel awkward but is required to ensure that I am talking about the specific poster instead of something like "if you are not a X" in which case it would read like a general you. If you understood what I was expressing and have a better and more succinct way to express it let me know.
karunamurti 2y ago
Yeah, I would be surprised if they managed to have QA from species other than the species from Hominoidea family.
can16358p 2y ago
I consider myself above average intellectual level with more than enough capacity to spot and fix those bugs or at least report findings to people who should, which probably puts me hopefully on a better level than a primate ape. But based on your comment, unfortunatelly I can't say the same for you.
- SahAssar 2y ago
  You are a primate ape. Literally. I'm not sure what is so hard about this, the parent poster referred to a set (primate ape) that includes both humans and many other apes. If they are not part of that set then it would surprise me.

WWLink 2y ago

The regular apple watch has some bugs that have been around for years, too. One of my favorite features is on the mickey/minnie watch face, they verbally tell you the time if you tap them..... except when they don't. Sometimes they just stop working until you power cycle the watch lol. Also phone calls to/from the watch seem to go through fits of random failure. Like at least once a week it'll inexplicably fail to get notifications or fail to answer phone calls. And then once a month I'll have to power cycle both the watch and the phone because they fall into a trap where any call in/out fails. I first noticed these bugs on my s4 and iphone xs. I'm currently using an s8 and iphone 13. Still got those bugs lol. Oh I thought of one more. Any iOS device with a home button and an alphanumeric password won't show you the keyboard when it first starts up. You have to hit the power button and then wake it with the home button to see the keyboard lol.

dukeofdoom 2y ago
I just got a regular mouse ear alarm clock. The phone one has bugged out on me before, can't trust it now.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  What's a mouse ear alarm clock?
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Alarm_Clocks_20101107a.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Alarm_Cl...
- WWLink 2y ago
  hahaha That's so classic Apple. It used to happen very often with daylight savings time. The funny part is I use the sleep app and the alarms. When I'm really worried about missing an alarm I set my android phone too, or the alarm clock by my bed lol. That rarely is needed.
walterbell 2y ago

samatman 2y ago

I have seen absolutely nothing of the sort. My experience is that other than a larger screen and an extra button, the Ultra is just like the normal Apple watch which preceded it: reliable to an almost boring degree. To the point where I want to include some sort of caveat or flaw in my reply, lest I be accused of the dreaded fanboyism. Problem with that is that I don't have one. I can't think of a single bug or glitch in the 18 months I've had it. I guess I have one kvetch: there was a major OS version bump during which they disabled swiping between faces. They added it back as an option, which I promptly turned on, and that was that.

averyhighbar 2y ago
> which they disabled swiping between faces There was significant backlash about the removal of swiping faces. I'm also glad they brought it back. I used that feature professionally to swipe to an ugly watch face that showed seconds.

Rinzler89 2y ago

> I'm convinced that QA at Apple is run by primate apes. Big-tech sees no value in QA thee days when they already have monopolies over huge markets, so these jobs get cut. And even when they don't get cut, since such jobs are dead-end for your career there anyway ... you get what happens. So a lot of QA is actually outsourced to third party body shops where employees don't care beyond shoveling some tests out the door to get home quick and get paid.

squirtle24 2y ago

I know someone who works at Apple QA. A lot of it is done by wholly unqualified contractors who blindly check off test cases as passed. Sad to say it, but most of these contractors aren't very bright and have zero experience or training, let alone interest in doing a good job; strange why apple continues to work with the sourcing firm.

saagarjha 2y ago
I’ve worked with (as in, directly on their team) some of Apple’s QA when I was an intern. They were quite bright and dedicated people. It’s just that their job truly sucks and the rest of the company doesn’t value them. When I was there their daily task was to run the same runbook of basic actions from 8 AM to the afternoon. It used to be to the end of the day, actually, until someone wrote up a Python script for them to save several hours on some of the checks. I had a chat with the actual engineers writing the code they were testing, vaguely pointing towards “hey I heard about CI and automated tests, wouldn’t this make things a lot better?” and he just point-blank rejected it. QA was there to test the code he wrote. There was zero self-reflection on how he could improve or that this process sucked. My impression is that a lot of Apple has a similar mindset which they are slowly working to change.
- mikalauskas 2y ago
  "until someone wrote up a Python script for them ” Doesn't seem like a very bright QA team if someone had to write for them some python script
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    There are more ways to measure intelligence than being able to code.
  - tpmoney 2y ago
    Far and away the best "QA" people I ever worked with were people who couldn't write a line of code. Because they didn't have a programmer mindset, they also didn't approach using the software like a programmer, which is exactly the sort of person you want doing QA for you.

threeseed 2y ago

Be curious what bugs you are referring to. I've had an Ultra since it launched and it's been no different to any other Apple Watch.

gandalfgreybeer 2y ago
I have the exact same experience as you. I usually take comments like this with a grain of salt, especially if it’s a very general and non-specific complaint.
- fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
  This is a phenomenon about Apple and some other companies I’ve never fully understood: charitably, there just are people with 1% setups that hit a whole class of bugs in Apple devices that I haven’t seen in 15 years or so
- can16358p 2y ago
  Good for you. Go for open water swimming every day (which Ultra should be perfectly capable of) and see if GPS works reliably. See my reply to parent comment for more bugs.
can16358p 2y ago
GPS/distance going terribly wrong when swimmimg, action button sometimes just not doing anything, screen going blank (thinking I'm not wearing it) after workouts randomly, not to mention the original Alpine loop started to break completely in 6-7 months. I had NONE of these problems with older watches despite doing the exact same things.

015a 2y ago

I recently had my Apple Watch (Series 9, few months old) touch screen refuse to respond to touch input, and instead issue seemingly random pokes and drags until it eventually worked its way toward calling 911. After assuring the operator that it was just my nearly-new Apple Watch freaking out, I was able to dig up an Apple Support article that outlined how to hard reset it with the physical buttons, which still worked. Apple's quality control has been getting worse every year. This is something we say every year; that's because its true every year. They started the highest coming out of the 2000s, plenty big laurels to rest on. But their (and Microsoft's) software has gotten so bad nowadays that linux desktops are starting to look stable (and don't interpret that as an endorsement of the improvements in stability of the linux desktop experience, not even close, year of the linux desktop might happen but only because everything is so shit that you might as well at least use the shit that isn't taking screenshots of your desktop or resurfacing photos you deleted five years ago).

giancarlostoro 2y ago
> resurfacing photos you deleted five years ago Yikes. That seems so wrong.I havent had this happen. For me the final straw was Windows Defender sending files to be analyzed, without letting you audit which files have been sent over.
- goosedragons 2y ago
  It's a reference to an iOS 17.5 bug if you haven't heard. Apparently it even transcends phone upgrades!
  - Tagbert 2y ago
    It’s about photos in the Photos app that were not properly deleted, not photo files. The Photos app has an internal analog to the trashcan. When you delete a photo, the photo is removed from the normal photos index and moved to a Recently Deleted list. After 30 days, the actual photo file will be deleted if you don’t change your mind. There is an automated process that looks for photos tagged for deletion and deletes them on schedule. There has been an unknown bug for a few years where, sometimes, the process that is supposed to tag the photo for deletion removes it from the list but doesn’t add the right tag for deletion and the schedule process never noticed them and never told the OS to delete the files. They just sat there in the photos library folder, sometimes for years. The files were never actually deleted, just removed from the photos list. Later another process was deployed that saw unreferenced photos and added them into the photos index. That freaked some people out, particularly if they really had wanted to get rid of those photos. This all happened as a higher level than the OS. The OS file deletion process was never invoked for these photos.

dmz73 2y ago

Careful about negative comments about testers - Apple (as well as all other companies) is now testing in production so users are Apple's testers.

lhamil64 2y ago
But that implies they'll fix the bugs that get reported! I have a Google Pixel 6a, and for probably close to a year now I've had this weird issue where vibration randomly stops working, but only when I'm not connected to wifi. Rebooting the phone fixes it temporarily. I've submitted feedback in the settings to report it multiple times and it's still not fixed. I've had another bug where people get a sporadic echo when I'm on the phone with them, but it doesn't happen when I'm on speaker or using a different app to call (like Discord). I'm thinking of changing brands when I upgrade. Guess I shouldn't look too closely at getting an iPhone either...
- DANmode 2y ago
  GrapheneOS.org Five min install, Play Store works great, difficult to find apps that intentionally break themselves due to not being Google Android.

TexanFeller 2y ago

YMMV. Both my Ultra and Ultra2 worked perfectly.

tiltowait 2y ago

My watch decided to stop correctly syncing DND mode. It would turn on with the phone but not turn off. This would happen 3-4 times a week—enough to be far more aggravating than it really should be. Then Apple made some annoying decisions with watchOS 10, and I stopped using it altogether.

hulitu 2y ago

> There is no sensible explanation that a flagship device can be full of bugs and inferior quality to its 3-year older non-flagship counterparts. The rich customer does not buy Apple because of the quality, but because of the price. /s

aldur 2y ago

I have experienced multiple iCloud-related bugs across all devices, not just Apple Watch. First I had Keychain taking a full core on _all_ my devices and had to go through a rabbit hole to fix it [0], then I had “fileproviderd “ do the same (again, across all devices) and had to delete iCloud DB to fix it. I wonder how less tech-savvy users are supposed to notice the issue (and maybe fix them). [0]: https://aldur.pages.dev/articles/2024/05/22/secd https://aldur.pages.dev/articles/2024/05/22/secd

can16358p 2y ago
My favorite nowadays is my iPhone completely enabling Auto-join for a Wi-Fi network (that I created at second story) and joining it instead of my living room Wi-Fi, whereas I constantly keep disabling auto-join for that network. Of course, this is just one of the thousands of bugs.