Saturday, October 11, 2014 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Russell Ivanovic:

I just wish that Apple would slow down their breakneck pace and spend the time required to build stable software that their hardware so desperately needs. The yearly release cycles of OS X, iOS, iPhone & iPad are resulting in too many things seeing the light of day that aren’t finished yet. Perhaps the world wouldn’t let them, perhaps the expectations are now too high, but I’d kill for Snow iOS 8 and Snow Yosemite next year. I’m fairly confident I’m not alone in that feeling.

John Gruber:

From the outside, it seems like Apple’s software teams can’t keep up with the pace of the hardware teams. Major new versions of iOS aren’t released “when they’re ready”, they’re released when the new iPhone hardware ships. […] Just today: My iPhone 6 rebooted after I changed the home screen wallpaper. Tapped a new image in the wallpaper settings, and poof, it rebooted. Worse, it never stopped rebooting. Endless reboot cycle.

Tim Schmitz:

One thing that’s striking is how many of Apple’s troubles are self-inflicted. Gone are the days when Apple planned product announcements around conferences like Macworld Expo. That the company controls its whole ecosystem, from hardware to software to services, is supposed to be a strength. Controlling everything should mean that you can get all your ducks in a row before pulling back the curtain. The only thing that Apple is truly constrained by are its own self-imposed deadlines. The problem is, Apple keeps shooting itself in the foot. Rather than waiting until a new version of iOS is fully finished, for example, they rush an update out the door to coincide with the release of new iPhones.

Kirk McElhearn:

I recently wrote about Apple’s string of bad luck, with bad press, a bad keynote stream, the U2 album spamming fiasco, and, above all, the iOS 8.0.1 update that bricked a lot of users’ iPhones. If I were to go back in the archives of this website, I’d find other, similar articles about blunders when a new OS was released requiring an update quickly for some embarrassing problems, or when hardware issues that shouldn’t have happened plagued many users. […] I’ve increasingly had the feeling that Apple is finding it difficult to keep up with all these releases, and that quality is slipping.

Matthias Plappert:

Apple: “We cannot keep up with developing stable software for OS X and iOS, so let’s have a new programming language and create a watch OS.”

Caitlin McGarry:

Apple’s having a tough time. Its annual one-two punch of an iPhone launch plus an iOS upgrade—usually a time for celebration—has been followed this year by a compounding series of embarrassments.

Daniel Jalkut:

The biggest/richest company in the world, already staffed with many of the smartest and most creative people, shouldn’t get so many passes.

Tim Burks:

The Swift language project has been a major distraction for the development community and much more importantly for Apple’s internal focus on providing quality developer tools.

Justin Duke:

The review process and walled garden model, which was specifically designed to prevent bad customer experiences like upgrading to an app that breaks immediately, failed to keep out apps that literally cannot make it past the launch screen.

Fraser Speirs:

The iOS 7 and now iOS 8 rollouts have simply not been up to the quality of earlier releases. […] We have seen issues with crashing, devices rebooting, rotation glitches, keyboards playing up, touch screens not responding. Indeed I’m typing this while babysitting the full restore of an iPad that one pupil “broke” - through no fault of their own - while updating to iOS 8.

Gus Mueller:

There’s been a bit more grumbling than usual about the quality of Apple’s software recently. And I can’t help but feel like things have changed for the worse. Random crashes, system instability, background processes crashing and having to reboot to fix things. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but I really think Apple is trying to move too fast.

Mark Crump:

In hindsight, the trouble began in 2012. That’s when Apple moved OS X to the same yearly release cycle as iOS. Since OS X has always been the Peter that Apple robbed to pay Paul (the iOS release cycle), I was concerned Apple would be writing checks it couldn’t cash. […] All of these show systemic failure in Apple’s beta testing. It’s inexcusable for a major new feature like HealthKit to be pulled right after launch due to missed bugs. It’s even worse when an update makes your phone unable to make calls.

Clark Goble:

Apple’s been at a breakneck pace to compete with Google. However the time really has come to slow down a bit. The OS is mature. Yet the apis have been changing so fast it’s hard to keep up with what one is supposed to do.

Brent Simmons:

These days, programmers spend hours and days and weeks working very hard, and usually unsatisfactorily, on getting around bugs in their platform.

Michael Yacavone:

The hard edge of the watch image is an homage to the state of modern software development tools, exemplified by the typical developer experience of everything working fine, and then one day looking up to find a new language, 1,500 new APIs, yet another beta version of the IDE, your old code not working properly in the new SDK, a supposed “GM” release that is more buggy than the last beta, an end-user release recalled in hours, an update for a shell exploit dormant since the ’90s, as well as a wide variety of application interaction WTF, all marching toward a ship schedule so disconnected from quality, stability, and reliability it’s like walking off a cliff.

Kristopher Johnson:

Apple’s operating systems, applications, services, and development tools are all pretty janky. I hope someone at Apple worries about that.

I didn’t think yearly OS releases would be good for quality, and I continue to believe that Apple is trying to move too fast.

Update (2014-10-11): John Gruber and Guy English discuss this issue on The Talk Show.

Update (2014-10-12): Collin Allen:

There are so many bugs in iOS 8. How did this ever get through testing? Frustrating.

Landon Fuller:

For Apple to fix quality, it seems like they’d have to step back from deeply embedded process/cultural changes that arose with iOS’ success.

There are lots of comments on Reddit.

Update (2014-10-14): There are more comments at MacRumors.

Update (2014-10-15): Rob Griffiths writes what he would like Tim Cook to say about all this.

Update (2014-10-16): TUAW (comments):

With engineers at Apple working at full throttle to keep new updates coming down the pipeline, some have started to wonder if Apple’s resources are being stretched too thin. Especially for a company like Apple which tends to have leaner teams, some have voiced the opinion that Apple needs to take its foot off of the gas just a bit to help ensure that future software releases have the level of polish longtime Mac and iOS users are accustomed to.

Update (2014-10-18): Brice Pollack (via Dave Verwer):

Unfortunately, despite the awareness of these daily challenges, it is unclear what is being done to improve upon them. This brings me to my next point. Although Apple has nearly limitless financial resources, I found the company to be incredibly reactive. Eagerly throwing resources into addressing the current biggest user facing issue rather than building the necessary tooling and testing needed to prevent those in the future. […] When project managers start tracking bug numbers upon nearing release dates, tactics or tricks are often used to hide or kill bugs in order to meet milestones. One common tactic was to simply make further investigation so onerous on the person who filed it that they give up and kill the bug, marking it as “not enough information to resolve”.

Update (2014-10-19): Nick Heer:

Apple’s been busy this year. But, as Michael Tsai’s quote roundup reveals, it hasn’t been smooth sailing — the buggy yearly iOS and OS X releases, in particular, have revealed a very rushed schedule. […] That Apple is working on yet another OS — Watch OS — isn’t a free pass for their declining software quality, however. While they were never perfect, the company has long been revered for its consistently-high quality bar. Now? Certainly not as much.

Update (2014-11-22): Peter Cohen:

Yosemite and iOS 8 are fraught with enough difficulties for enough users that I feel like neither of them are fully baked.

Update (2014-12-27): Lloyd Chambers:

Apple Core Rot is accelerating. I deal with it every single day many times over. Stuff that worked for years breaks, while new visual crapware is piled on endlessly. Apple Mail deletes my VIP list every day, file open dialogs are sluggish in most programs, to 4-8 second delays in DreamWeaver and with display glitches. APIs are removed breaking apps some users depend upon. In 10.10.1, Apple broke display scaling APIs in 10.10.1 leading to all sorts of issues with Photoshop and dual and 4K displays, so much so that I cannot use a large 4K display as the main screen and still with problems as a 2nd.

Update (2014-12-29): Marco Arment:

I hope Apple realizes how deeply their reputation has been damaged, in an alarmingly short time, by their rapid decline in software quality.

I’m not excited about the Watch — I’m afraid of the toll it will take on Apple’s greatly strained engineering resources.

Chris Adamson:

What the hell has happened? Remember two years ago when there was such an uproar over Core Data in iCloud not working? It was a hot-button issue, but very limited in scope: Core Data was still a trusted tool when used locally, and even iCloud behaved for most developers using it for documents or simple plists. It was a problem that didn’t involve a lot of collateral damage. By comparison, what we’ve seen in the last six months is pervasive, if not ubiquitous. It’s in the developer tools, it’s in the operating system, it’s in iLife and iWork. It’s like the floor has utterly dropped out from beneath all Apple software, across the board.

Update (2015-01-06): I’ve posted a new series of links at Apple’s Software Quality, Continued.

Update (2016-02-16): I’ve posted a new series of links at Mossberg Discovers the Functional High Ground. See also the Apple Software Quality tag.

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