7 ms·

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality

by yalok 2y ago

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality. Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps. Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they lived with a bug where a text note may just become blank - and only restarting Notes app makes it visible again. Or AppStore - if an app has to be updated (I have auto updates off) - and I press Update - it gets downloaded, installed - and then AppStore is back to showing “Update” button! If you just go to the app, it’s a new version. But if you press that “Update”, it will redo update from scratch. Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… but knowing Apple secrecy culture/silos, it’s not going to work, and requires change in their hiring process/perf review/QA.

MarcelOlsz 2y ago
My favourite one is getting voicemail spam with no records in my call log for a number to block. Lovely.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Spam callers rotate the fake numbers they use for Caller ID, so blocking individual numbers doesn't work.
  - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
    I'm cooked then.
walterbell 2y ago
Current head of Apple hardware is in the line of CEO succession. If he becomes CEO at some point in the future, could he have a positive influence on software culture within Apple?
- schnable 2y ago
  In my experience, hardware people in the top decision making roles are the cause of degradation of software quality, not the solution. They often don't understand the nature of software and software product management.
  - matwood 2y ago
    Depends on the person. The CEO position is about setting a vision and hiring the right people to execute.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  Under this climate? Very hard I think.
latexr 2y ago
> Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… Those aren’t options, they’re fantasies. Like dreaming of suing out of existence a company that wronged you, or fixing the world by ruling it, or winning the lottery without playing. Android isn’t perfect either, it’s a different set of frustrations. And why would Apple ever need to hire you for that specific task, do you really believe there aren’t engineers inside just as frustrated as we are? The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame. No one inside the company has time to do anything properly anymore. Features are announced and rushed every year, and we’re reaching the point where by the time something which was announced at a WWDC is out of beta, we’re preparing for the next one. What these companies need to do is slow down and stop chasing every shiny thing. You know, like Apple used to do with macOS. Tim Cook needs to go.
- whstl 2y ago
  While I agree that it's Tim Cook's responsibility to set the course and influence the culture, I doubt a new CEO will be able to so. I'm not saying nobody can be like Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs was an anomaly when it comes to C-Levels, and even when it comes to management in general, at least from reading things like www.folkore.org and interviews with people who worked with him. And I'm not even talking about talent or vision or whatever, it's just about saying no to pointless features that are there for someone's ego or so that someone can get a promotion.
  - latexr 2y ago
    Tim Cook overrides the advice of high-ranking employees in the name of greed and profit, even when warned such decisions will sour long term relationships. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/26/testimony-on-external-purchase-fee-and-scare-screens/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/26/testimony-on-external-pur... I’m not saying anyone will be better than Tim Cook, I’m saying he’s actively bad. Will his successor be actively bad too? Maybe, but the sooner we find out, the better.
    - alt227 2y ago
flessner 2y ago
I have run into these same issues, it's particularly frustrating once you see a Reddit thread from a couple years ago outlining the exact issue. For a large consumer-focused company like Apple this can only be explained by ignorance. From a developer perspective many of these inconsistencies are rooting from inconsistent access patterns - operating system (ABI?), applications (ICP?), remote (TCP, HTTP, LDAP, FTP, ...?). All of these are "execution" or "information" but have to be programmed against differently.
- lynx97 2y ago
  [dead]
- leeoniya 2y ago
  > this can only be explained by ignorance. s/ignorance/apathy
henry_viii 2y ago
On Notes: 1. If you copy some text 2. Select other text 3. Paste the text you copied to replace the selected text Notes will crash. This has been known for years. Also if you turn off all suggestions in Spotlight on iOS and just use it as an app launcher, it will still take seconds for Spotlight to show you the results. For something that's supposed to be an indexed look up.
- geden 2y ago
  I cannot reproduce that Notes crash.
- jeffhuys 2y ago
  I can't reproduce the crash. Does it happen every time for you or only after a few times?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  Select/Copy/Paste has been bad from the start on iOS, another I can’t get over is how the backspace behavior has the absolute worst timings for jumping to words and paragraphs.
  - meindnoch 2y ago
    >I can’t get over is how the backspace behavior has the absolute worst timings for jumping to words and paragraphs. I wish they implemented backspace like they do with fine scrubbing on seekbars. i.e. you could move your finger up & down while holding the backspace key to select the granularity of deletion between letters, words and paragraphs.
  - ljm 2y ago
    And the auto complete on proper nouns. I'm typing someone's name and it'll often get corrected and will take more than one attempt for what you actually intended to stick. No, Ellie isn't a typo and I didn't actually mean Emma.
RubberbandSoul 2y ago
> can’t make regular calls over cellular That's extremely serious because the call you're trying to make could be an emergency call. A bug like that would have top priority in the org I used to work in. If I'd had to guess it cancels the call because there's a crash in a process somewhere. Possibly because of audio handover between apps.
- fmajid 2y ago
  I did a MS in Telecoms Engineering. Our Telephony teacher Claude Rigault drummed it into us that when people can't make emergency calls, pople die, thus the importance of reliability.
ant6n 2y ago
There are also a bunch little of usability bugs related to selecting, copying and pasting text. The auto-complete has become more adversarial then helpful. There are bugs related to search in pdf documents in safari. There are (or at least were until recently) bugs when searching for settings in the settings app. Can't think of any more at the top of my head ... it feels a lot like Windows, where there are a bunch of eternal bugs one just sort of knows and works around, even though it's a kind of shitty and occasionally very frustrating experience.
tallytarik 2y ago
Notes is so bad. Often copy and paste just breaks. It will copy some string of characters from a different part of the note than you selected, until you restart. Reminders too. For at least 5 years, creating multiple reminders in a certain order will not create multiple reminders, and will just append the text to the end of the first one. Surprise — hope you didn’t set any important reminders in that batch! And the great thing about their standardization between iOS and macOS code means the exact same bugs exist in both versions. Yay.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  One of the weirdest regressions is basic search on iOS. Just clicking into the search screen takes 1s before I see anything (it's probably booting up internally). And each keypress sometimes seems to take another 1s before it updates the results. Sometimes 3s will pass before I even see anything after I've already typed in my search term (I'm always searching for a local app btw - it's how I open apps). It's like it waits on an http request for every keystroke. Also, you used to be able to search for an app in any of the secondary languages you have in your settings. Which is great because apps have different names in different languages (Settings vs Configuración vs Réglages), so it would be annoying to have to remember which word to search based on which language is primary. For years it would show you multilingual results (e.g. you can search for "Settings" as long as English is one of your secondary iPhone languages yet "Configuración" or "Réglages" would still show up). It was the sort of polish I came to expect from Apple. Well, that stopped working a couple years ago.
  - ElliotM 2y ago
    Try disabling everything labeled “suggestion” in settings. This drove me crazy too and pretty much went away after I disabled Siri and safari suggestions.
ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 2y ago
The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis. I’ve only ever noticed maybe like a few actually bothersome bugs in the however many years I’ve been using iPhones which is pretty impressive. Anyway, hope they get it together. Performance and optimization are a very difficult and very thankless job that might not get you promoted the same way cool sexy feature work does. Such is corporate life I guess.
- virtualmic 2y ago
  > The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis. I face none of the issues on my Samsung S23 phone, which the parent commentator describes - no issues in phones calls (I make 4-5 calls daily, mix of WhatsApp & regular calls), no major issues in Google Keep (which I use 2-3 times daily, specially never of a note becoming "blank"), and again no major issues in the Google App Store or updates (which I use on an average once a week). So maybe, the software quality varies by user experience rather than one platform being universally better.
  - nwatson 2y ago
    I use Apple-Silicon MacBook Pro and Mac Mini for software development. I hardly ever use Apple software for business/personal/productivity. Jetbrains IDE tools, Docker, Homebrew work great. I install Chrome browser and use Google services, AWS and GCP consoles, etc. via the browser. YouTube for video, Google Music app. As for all Apple software, I might use Preview or Numbers (spreadsheets) on occasion, and I'm forced to use Finder, which I hate. And Terminal works well. I avoid Safari. Apple "PC" hardware is solid. I use third party apps though, little Apple software, there are better alternatives. I've used Android since the HTC Dream (I think it was the first Android phone in the USA) and have stuck with Android since, with few problems. Edit: I thought the Apple Vision Pro would be interesting (I couldn't justify the expense) but I saw the value supposedly would be greatest for those fully bought into the integrated Apple app ecosystem and iCloud. I'm not the target user.
ramraj07 2y ago
I moved out of iPhone because of one such thing: the call log can only be 100 items long, like what? The most powerful processor ever, hundreds of GB and i can't see who I called last month?? I was done at that moment.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Angostura 2y ago
  That doesn’t seem to be correct (any more?) I just spent a while scrolling back through the call log. It goes back to 2019 - certainly more than 100 calls
  - giantscastle 2y ago
    Indeed, this restriction was eased in a recent iOS version. Prior to this update, it was true that only the most recent 100 records could be displayed. Moreover, it is amusing to note that after deleting the first most recent record, one can still view the 100th record. This effectively displays 101 records. It is perplexing why this decision was made, as it deliberately limits the user interface to display only 100 records.
  - ramraj07 2y ago
    God damn lol. I'm interestingly not regretting the shift though. It truly is useful more often than I thought to request desktop sites and actually see desktop sites, or open two apps side by side.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
dumbfounder 2y ago
The notes bug drives me nuts when I am working on a longer document.
hbosch 2y ago
>phone app I'm triggered. How many times have you reached for the 'end call' button, but the other person ended the call a moment earlier than you, and as you press down the screen immediately flips to your "recent calls" screen and you call a random person straight away? This is such a common and terrifying experience for me, and yet it's been the default UX on the Phone app since probably day 1.
- kobalsky 2y ago
  the ipad skype apps puts the call button where the hangup button is, so if someone hangs up right when you are going to click it, you call them again. and this is such an easy fix, just don't make components touchable for X milliseconds after they are visible, some value below average human reaction time. this could of course get in the way of people quickly navigating via muscle memory, but there's a probably a threshold where it can prevent one without affecting the other.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    I literally posted about this issue with pretty much the exact same proposed solution in 2017 https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5 https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5
- kruuuder 2y ago
  This happened so often for me. But lo and behold, they fixed it. I recently installed iOS 18, and the phone app now prevents accidental touch input after the other person has ended the call. This took almost 18 years!
- pmarreck 2y ago
  This is a symptom of a more general problem that I named (clumsily... "Rerender/Reflow/Repopulation Delayed Interaction Timeout Missing") in a 2017 blog post! https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5 https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5 I consider it by far the most annoying bug in touch UI's today. Solution: There must be a small interaction-ignoring delay instituted when any control has just moved to its final rendered location.
xmddmx 2y ago
Here's my favorite UI/UX bug which has been there for years: In Calendar (macOS) create a new event. In the start or end time, type in the Minutes field, but type slowly. For example, type "2" pause a bit, then type "1" If there's more than ~300msec pause between the two keypresses, the 2 changes into "02" and then the 1 overrides it, so you end up with "01" instead of 21. Works with any two kepresses. Same problem in the date fields. Completely wrong, and super bad for accessibility.
BeFlatXIII 2y ago
Same feeling about Mac OS. What am I going to do? Move to Windows? I suppose I could install Gentoo or read the entire Arch wiki. However, I am no longer an unemployed 23-year-old. Don't have the time or care to bother with recreational sysadminning.

by yalok 2y ago

MarcelOlsz 2y ago

My favourite one is getting voicemail spam with no records in my call log for a number to block. Lovely.

ryandrake 2y ago
Spam callers rotate the fake numbers they use for Caller ID, so blocking individual numbers doesn't work.
- MarcelOlsz 2y ago
  I'm cooked then.

walterbell 2y ago

Current head of Apple hardware is in the line of CEO succession. If he becomes CEO at some point in the future, could he have a positive influence on software culture within Apple?

schnable 2y ago
In my experience, hardware people in the top decision making roles are the cause of degradation of software quality, not the solution. They often don't understand the nature of software and software product management.
- matwood 2y ago
  Depends on the person. The CEO position is about setting a vision and hiring the right people to execute.
markus_zhang 2y ago
Under this climate? Very hard I think.

latexr 2y ago

> Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… Those aren’t options, they’re fantasies. Like dreaming of suing out of existence a company that wronged you, or fixing the world by ruling it, or winning the lottery without playing. Android isn’t perfect either, it’s a different set of frustrations. And why would Apple ever need to hire you for that specific task, do you really believe there aren’t engineers inside just as frustrated as we are? The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame. No one inside the company has time to do anything properly anymore. Features are announced and rushed every year, and we’re reaching the point where by the time something which was announced at a WWDC is out of beta, we’re preparing for the next one. What these companies need to do is slow down and stop chasing every shiny thing. You know, like Apple used to do with macOS. Tim Cook needs to go.

whstl 2y ago
While I agree that it's Tim Cook's responsibility to set the course and influence the culture, I doubt a new CEO will be able to so. I'm not saying nobody can be like Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs was an anomaly when it comes to C-Levels, and even when it comes to management in general, at least from reading things like www.folkore.org and interviews with people who worked with him. And I'm not even talking about talent or vision or whatever, it's just about saying no to pointless features that are there for someone's ego or so that someone can get a promotion.
- latexr 2y ago
  Tim Cook overrides the advice of high-ranking employees in the name of greed and profit, even when warned such decisions will sour long term relationships. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/26/testimony-on-external-purchase-fee-and-scare-screens/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/26/testimony-on-external-pur... I’m not saying anyone will be better than Tim Cook, I’m saying he’s actively bad. Will his successor be actively bad too? Maybe, but the sooner we find out, the better.
  - alt227 2y ago

flessner 2y ago

I have run into these same issues, it's particularly frustrating once you see a Reddit thread from a couple years ago outlining the exact issue. For a large consumer-focused company like Apple this can only be explained by ignorance. From a developer perspective many of these inconsistencies are rooting from inconsistent access patterns - operating system (ABI?), applications (ICP?), remote (TCP, HTTP, LDAP, FTP, ...?). All of these are "execution" or "information" but have to be programmed against differently.

lynx97 2y ago
[dead]
leeoniya 2y ago
> this can only be explained by ignorance. s/ignorance/apathy

henry_viii 2y ago

On Notes: 1. If you copy some text 2. Select other text 3. Paste the text you copied to replace the selected text Notes will crash. This has been known for years. Also if you turn off all suggestions in Spotlight on iOS and just use it as an app launcher, it will still take seconds for Spotlight to show you the results. For something that's supposed to be an indexed look up.

geden 2y ago
I cannot reproduce that Notes crash.
jeffhuys 2y ago
I can't reproduce the crash. Does it happen every time for you or only after a few times?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
Select/Copy/Paste has been bad from the start on iOS, another I can’t get over is how the backspace behavior has the absolute worst timings for jumping to words and paragraphs.
- meindnoch 2y ago
  >I can’t get over is how the backspace behavior has the absolute worst timings for jumping to words and paragraphs. I wish they implemented backspace like they do with fine scrubbing on seekbars. i.e. you could move your finger up & down while holding the backspace key to select the granularity of deletion between letters, words and paragraphs.
- ljm 2y ago
  And the auto complete on proper nouns. I'm typing someone's name and it'll often get corrected and will take more than one attempt for what you actually intended to stick. No, Ellie isn't a typo and I didn't actually mean Emma.

RubberbandSoul 2y ago

> can’t make regular calls over cellular That's extremely serious because the call you're trying to make could be an emergency call. A bug like that would have top priority in the org I used to work in. If I'd had to guess it cancels the call because there's a crash in a process somewhere. Possibly because of audio handover between apps.

fmajid 2y ago
I did a MS in Telecoms Engineering. Our Telephony teacher Claude Rigault drummed it into us that when people can't make emergency calls, pople die, thus the importance of reliability.

ant6n 2y ago

There are also a bunch little of usability bugs related to selecting, copying and pasting text. The auto-complete has become more adversarial then helpful. There are bugs related to search in pdf documents in safari. There are (or at least were until recently) bugs when searching for settings in the settings app. Can't think of any more at the top of my head ... it feels a lot like Windows, where there are a bunch of eternal bugs one just sort of knows and works around, even though it's a kind of shitty and occasionally very frustrating experience.

tallytarik 2y ago

Notes is so bad. Often copy and paste just breaks. It will copy some string of characters from a different part of the note than you selected, until you restart. Reminders too. For at least 5 years, creating multiple reminders in a certain order will not create multiple reminders, and will just append the text to the end of the first one. Surprise — hope you didn’t set any important reminders in that batch! And the great thing about their standardization between iOS and macOS code means the exact same bugs exist in both versions. Yay.

hombre_fatal 2y ago
One of the weirdest regressions is basic search on iOS. Just clicking into the search screen takes 1s before I see anything (it's probably booting up internally). And each keypress sometimes seems to take another 1s before it updates the results. Sometimes 3s will pass before I even see anything after I've already typed in my search term (I'm always searching for a local app btw - it's how I open apps). It's like it waits on an http request for every keystroke. Also, you used to be able to search for an app in any of the secondary languages you have in your settings. Which is great because apps have different names in different languages (Settings vs Configuración vs Réglages), so it would be annoying to have to remember which word to search based on which language is primary. For years it would show you multilingual results (e.g. you can search for "Settings" as long as English is one of your secondary iPhone languages yet "Configuración" or "Réglages" would still show up). It was the sort of polish I came to expect from Apple. Well, that stopped working a couple years ago.
- ElliotM 2y ago
  Try disabling everything labeled “suggestion” in settings. This drove me crazy too and pretty much went away after I disabled Siri and safari suggestions.

ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 2y ago

The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis. I’ve only ever noticed maybe like a few actually bothersome bugs in the however many years I’ve been using iPhones which is pretty impressive. Anyway, hope they get it together. Performance and optimization are a very difficult and very thankless job that might not get you promoted the same way cool sexy feature work does. Such is corporate life I guess.

virtualmic 2y ago
> The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis. I face none of the issues on my Samsung S23 phone, which the parent commentator describes - no issues in phones calls (I make 4-5 calls daily, mix of WhatsApp & regular calls), no major issues in Google Keep (which I use 2-3 times daily, specially never of a note becoming "blank"), and again no major issues in the Google App Store or updates (which I use on an average once a week). So maybe, the software quality varies by user experience rather than one platform being universally better.
- nwatson 2y ago
  I use Apple-Silicon MacBook Pro and Mac Mini for software development. I hardly ever use Apple software for business/personal/productivity. Jetbrains IDE tools, Docker, Homebrew work great. I install Chrome browser and use Google services, AWS and GCP consoles, etc. via the browser. YouTube for video, Google Music app. As for all Apple software, I might use Preview or Numbers (spreadsheets) on occasion, and I'm forced to use Finder, which I hate. And Terminal works well. I avoid Safari. Apple "PC" hardware is solid. I use third party apps though, little Apple software, there are better alternatives. I've used Android since the HTC Dream (I think it was the first Android phone in the USA) and have stuck with Android since, with few problems. Edit: I thought the Apple Vision Pro would be interesting (I couldn't justify the expense) but I saw the value supposedly would be greatest for those fully bought into the integrated Apple app ecosystem and iCloud. I'm not the target user.

ramraj07 2y ago

I moved out of iPhone because of one such thing: the call log can only be 100 items long, like what? The most powerful processor ever, hundreds of GB and i can't see who I called last month?? I was done at that moment.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Angostura 2y ago
That doesn’t seem to be correct (any more?) I just spent a while scrolling back through the call log. It goes back to 2019 - certainly more than 100 calls
- giantscastle 2y ago
  Indeed, this restriction was eased in a recent iOS version. Prior to this update, it was true that only the most recent 100 records could be displayed. Moreover, it is amusing to note that after deleting the first most recent record, one can still view the 100th record. This effectively displays 101 records. It is perplexing why this decision was made, as it deliberately limits the user interface to display only 100 records.
- ramraj07 2y ago
  God damn lol. I'm interestingly not regretting the shift though. It truly is useful more often than I thought to request desktop sites and actually see desktop sites, or open two apps side by side.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

dumbfounder 2y ago

The notes bug drives me nuts when I am working on a longer document.

hbosch 2y ago

>phone app I'm triggered. How many times have you reached for the 'end call' button, but the other person ended the call a moment earlier than you, and as you press down the screen immediately flips to your "recent calls" screen and you call a random person straight away? This is such a common and terrifying experience for me, and yet it's been the default UX on the Phone app since probably day 1.

kobalsky 2y ago
the ipad skype apps puts the call button where the hangup button is, so if someone hangs up right when you are going to click it, you call them again. and this is such an easy fix, just don't make components touchable for X milliseconds after they are visible, some value below average human reaction time. this could of course get in the way of people quickly navigating via muscle memory, but there's a probably a threshold where it can prevent one without affecting the other.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  I literally posted about this issue with pretty much the exact same proposed solution in 2017 https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5 https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5
kruuuder 2y ago
This happened so often for me. But lo and behold, they fixed it. I recently installed iOS 18, and the phone app now prevents accidental touch input after the other person has ended the call. This took almost 18 years!
pmarreck 2y ago
This is a symptom of a more general problem that I named (clumsily... "Rerender/Reflow/Repopulation Delayed Interaction Timeout Missing") in a 2017 blog post! https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5 https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5 I consider it by far the most annoying bug in touch UI's today. Solution: There must be a small interaction-ignoring delay instituted when any control has just moved to its final rendered location.

xmddmx 2y ago

Here's my favorite UI/UX bug which has been there for years: In Calendar (macOS) create a new event. In the start or end time, type in the Minutes field, but type slowly. For example, type "2" pause a bit, then type "1" If there's more than ~300msec pause between the two keypresses, the 2 changes into "02" and then the 1 overrides it, so you end up with "01" instead of 21. Works with any two kepresses. Same problem in the date fields. Completely wrong, and super bad for accessibility.

BeFlatXIII 2y ago

Same feeling about Mac OS. What am I going to do? Move to Windows? I suppose I could install Gentoo or read the entire Arch wiki. However, I am no longer an unemployed 23-year-old. Don't have the time or care to bother with recreational sysadminning.