When it is determined beyond a reasonable doubt that there are serious flaws in their design languages, modern minimalist apologists have nowhere to turn but to fallaciously appeal to bugs. They claim that the badly designed operating system must have been a big mistake, a bug that can be easily fixed. But that it is you, the user, who must cease with your criticism and do your part.

When Michael Heilemann, the Interface Director of Squarespace, politely pointed out several areas for improvement in iOS 7, his detractors dismissed him and declared the issues he criticized to be mere bugs due to the build being only in Beta 1. Heilemann argued of the beta that yes, "it might change. But how did it make it this far? He continued:

You could chalk it up to experimentation, as some do, but it's like experimenting with triangular tires. We know it doesn't work, there's no need for us to repeat that particular experiment.

Heilemann was not against reporting bugs per se, but rather felt that there were significant changes that went beyond mere bugs that practitioners needed to grapple with. Nevertheless, his detractors felt that instead of it being Apple's responsibility to fix the so-called bugs, it was Heinemann's personal duty to submit bug reports to mend the situation.

Iconfactory developer Craig Hockenberry took this self-professed “duty” to new heights in an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, entitled “Death by a thousand cuts.” He explained how “guilty” he feels when he forgets to submit a bug report, because “Apple may not be aware of the scope of these issues because many of these annoyances go unreported.”

So guilty did Hockenberry feel about this matter that he spent “two days of his productivity,” without pay, filing bug reports. He went so far as to expend energy building custom software to lessen the friction required to file bug reports. In his words, “My obsession knows no bounds” and that “Lately, it feels like I’m making a career out of submitting issues for Radar.” Hockenberry implored his readership to do the same, “I’ll keep harping on my 20K+ Twitter followers to do their duty. These problems won’t fix themselves.” Many have followed in his footsteps.

The situation could not be more appalling. Apple, a company sitting on a $155 billion war chest, has convinced independent developers that it is their own fault that Apple’s operating systems are unstable. Not only that, but indie developers are convinced they should spend their billable hours working unpaid to spot errors that were missed by a QA department at Apple that seems to be on vacation.

Still, Apple’s lack of action should not be surprising. With unpaid laborers like Hockenberry and his cohort at their disposal, Apple has no reason to invest in building better tools—even if they are tools directly tied to improving the performance of Apple’s own software. Why pay for those tools when indies will make them for free?

So bad is the state of affairs that iOS developer Nick Lockwood said that today “3rd party iOS app developers generally have higher standards than Apple when it comes to quality control.” If industry designers, developers and journalists accept this type of negligence on the part of operating system makers, it is no wonder that other companies take them up on the opportunity.

The obscurantism inherent to an appeal to bugs is easily refuted when one looks at the gestalt that makes up an operating system’s design. One error may be a bug. But thousands? That is when you have a flawed software design philosophy. We are at a point beyond which one can say without question that the dominant modern minimalist school of design is fundamentally destructive.

Once one adopts modern minimalist principles, lapses in software quality, specifically in visual design, are virtually guaranteed. This is a necessity, because visual design is no longer a priority. It is predictable that we see more bugs today.

It is today often impossible to distinguish bugs from the myopic design ideology from which they emerged. Some argue that the abundance of bugs in software today cannot be blamed on poor design philosophy. They believe that bugs were the result of developers being rushed, and that this has nothing to do with design. Here is where I disagree. It is true that there are bugs that are the result of incorrect implementation. But that does not preclude there also being bugs that originate in design ideology. What is worrying is that there is an abundance of both types of flawed design in modern operating systems where there weren’t before.

Some are hopeful that these implementation bugs will be squared away. I remain skeptical. It is clear that Apple’s deadlines were driven by a new management regime. Design leaders who were clearly willing to accept a mess of implementation bugs if it meant they would get their modern minimalist stranglehold on operating system design.

Far worse than implementation bugs though are the so-called bugs that are simply bad design choices. Choices implemented perfectly accurately by developers. Designs where flatness is embraced over coherence, stability or legibility. Apple users have nowhere to run from ideologically hampered designs, because the same philosophies have been adopted and implemented at Google and Microsoft too.