Welcome to Mossberg , a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Re/code by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Re/code.

In response to my inquiries about this, Apple said: "We have dedicated software teams across multiple platforms. The effort is as strong there as it has ever been." The company explains that these teams work on every major core app each year, but, as with its hardware, some years see more major revamps of some apps than others.

Apple's own apps often fail to meet its self-imposed standards

Apple has, of course, had a few famous software misfires, like the MobileMe and iTunes Ping cloud services, and the first iterations of Apple Maps (which has gotten vastly better). And, so far, Apple News is nothing to write home about, in my view.

But I’m talking about more familiar mainstays, like Mail and Photos, iTunes, and iCloud. In ways big and sometimes just small and nagging, I think they too often fail to meet Apple’s self-imposed standards. Sometimes this is on iOS, sometimes on OS X, sometimes on both.

Here are a few examples.

iTunes for the desktop

Apple’s iTunes program was once the envy of the world. A combined digital music store and player, it could also sync your iPod. And it worked on both Mac and Windows. It was reasonably fast and very sure-footed.

Now, I dread opening the thing.

Despite a big overhaul in 2012 that made it better for a while, iTunes is once again bloated, complex, and sluggish. That has gotten even worse since the recent integration of the new Apple Music streaming service. Just the other day, I tried to sync two iPads to it (a rare event) and it took forever for the program to recognize them. On my three Macs, which were built from 2013–2015, iTunes is just too slow at almost every task.

I dread opening iTunes

It’s time to disassemble the thing, the way Apple has done on iOS, where iTunes is just a store and each content type, such as music, videos, and podcasts, has its own playback app.

The company concedes that it has debated this question, but, so far, has come down on the side of keeping the huge program in one piece and working to make it faster and wring out any bugs that occur.

Mail

Apple’s desktop and mobile mail apps were once superb, but, despite some nice feature additions, I find they’ve become slow and unreliable. This is especially true if you use Gmail, as a billion people now do. In my experience, on both platforms, Mail is slow at both receiving and sending Gmail messages, whether they are from personal or business accounts. Some messages don’t show up. Search misses things.

The problem goes beyond Gmail

Like many others I know who rely on Gmail, I’ve been forced to switch to, or at least add, Google’s Gmail app or website. Apple claims this is an issue beyond its control, or the control of any other email app vendor, because Gmail uses nonstandard technology that gives a speed advantage to the search giant’s own apps and sites. (Google has told me otherwise in the past.)

But the problem goes beyond Gmail. You can find lots of other iOS and some new OS X email apps that try and help you do quick message triage, intelligently auto-sort various types of email, and more. Apple hasn’t ventured into that territory, beyond enabling swiping actions for dealing with messages. Even its junk mail filters, once far superior to competitors’, are failing on me regularly these days.

And the mobile version of Mail still can’t send mail to the contact groups you can make in Apple’s own contacts app. (The company says this is deliberate, that groups on the iPhone weren’t meant for use with Mail.)