Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy • Hacker News Board

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#171

Post by dimitar » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 10:42 AM UTC

jwr wrote: post #104

I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch with automated or in-house testing. In contra…

Definitely put a number on it! And track how close you actually are. I think 10% of revenue will be deemed too much for most organizations.

Usually Support is seen as a distraction to new product development or whatever the strategy is, but often I see management overestimate how much time and money is spent on it. So, just tracking that cost/time will likely increase it and improve customer satisfaction.

Unfortunately, improving Customer Support is not rewarded in organizations as much as cutting costs, creating new products or expanding revenue, so you'll probably need the CEO to care a lot about it to improve matters. And CEOs can't really put a number on improving customer support, so it is optimized to cost less over the near term, not deliver a better service.

I also see the worrying tendency to keep only Customer Service or equivalent responsible, as if they can fix the bugs and improve the design.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#172

Post by ChrisRR » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 10:45 AM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #152

That doesn't make sense. None of this has changed from previous updates and all previous macOS updates were far more stable than this one. This isn't a particularly feature laden update either. But now all of a sudden we get catastrophic (deleted emails) and less catastrophic (missing Music playlists) data loss, crash bugs and generally weird behaviour of many apps. I have identified one particular area where bugs ar…

I agree. I looked through that list and there's nothing in the list that doesn't apply to previous releases

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#173

Post by jwr » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 10:45 AM UTC

2rsf wrote: post #162

jwr wrote: post #104

I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch with automated or in-house testing. In contra…

You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable. I used to work on a product at a big company, we took users input very seriously, not only from bug reports but also by analyzing telemetrics data and simple users "star" feedback. At the end of the day it's simply impossible to both fix everything and still go forward when the product is big and complex…

> You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable.

I often hear this repeated, and I keep wondering: why? Why is it not scalable?

Apple had 265 billion dollars of revenue in 2018. I'm spending 10% of my budget on QA. So, in the case of Apple, if you had a 26 billion dollar budget (give or take a few billion) for your QA department, why couldn't you go over every bug report?

It's definitely possible, it's just that companies are making a different tradeoff, assuming that bugs will not influence buying decisions that much. And to a certain extent they are right.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#174

Post by pfortuny » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 10:50 AM UTC

2rsf wrote: post #162

jwr wrote: post #104

I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch with automated or in-house testing. In contra…

You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable. I used to work on a product at a big company, we took users input very seriously, not only from bug reports but also by analyzing telemetrics data and simple users "star" feedback. At the end of the day it's simply impossible to both fix everything and still go forward when the product is big and complex…

Automotive companies do, though.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#175

Post by 2rsf » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 10:58 AM UTC

pfortuny wrote: post #174

2rsf wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable. I used to work on a product at a big company, we took users input very seriously, not only from bug reports but also by analyzing telemetrics data and simple users "star" feedback. At the end of the day it's simply impossible to both fix everything and still go forward when the product is big and complex…

Automotive companies do, though.

maybe in the safety critical parts, but do they fix entertainment system bugs ?

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#176

Post by 00deadbeef » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:03 AM UTC

jwr wrote: post #104

I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch with automated or in-house testing. In contra…

Yeah I have a bug where the disk storage calculations show Messages as using a negative amount of disk space. Nothing I could have done as a user could have caused that, but they've ingored the bug report I sent.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#177

Post by thrower123 » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:11 AM UTC

jwr wrote: post #173

2rsf wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable. I used to work on a product at a big company, we took users input very seriously, not only from bug reports but also by analyzing telemetrics data and simple users "star" feedback. At the end of the day it's simply impossible to both fix everything and still go forward when the product is big and complex…

> You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable. I often hear this repeated, and I keep wondering: why? Why is it not scalable? Apple had 265 billion dollars of revenue in 2018. I'm spending 10% of my budget on QA. So, in the case of Apple, if you had a 26 billion dollar budget (give or take a few billion) for your QA department, why couldn't you go…

Because software is just not something you can just throw more money and people at and expect it to get better. In fact, that is the surest way to make a piece of software worse.

Software, despite all the attempts to come up with ways to commoditize its production, does not scale.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#178

Post by huffmsa » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:12 AM UTC

Sounds like the past couple years of hardware "whoopsies" have come to the software side.

Over-optimization of existing processes, what Mr Cook made his name doing, seem to have gone a bridge too far.

Time to go back to making cool new products and not squeezing every last ounce of blood out of existing ones. And no, starting a TV production division doesn't count.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#179

Post by acollins1331 » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:12 AM UTC

SCdF wrote: post #161

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they not use 2000? Or XP? Or even 7 for that matter?

I've used Windows on and off since 3.11, and have used 98, xp, 7 and 10 a lot. As much fun as it is to hate on Windows, if I'm honest with myself 10 has been the most stable experience I've had with Windows, with the possible exception of 3.11 (though that was a long time ago).

This seems pretty far removed from most other people's experiences.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#180

Post by huffmsa » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:14 AM UTC

2rsf wrote: post #175

pfortuny wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automotive companies do, though.

maybe in the safety critical parts, but do they fix entertainment system bugs ?

That's quickly becoming the main point of differentiation in most reviews since cars in a certain class have become more or less the same performance wise.

Speaking from the perspective of just wrapping up the car buying process. All of the reviews had just as many, if not more words devoted to the infotainment experience as to the driving experience.

Here I am thinking Bluetooth is peak feature so I can play my music while carving canyons and reviewers are taking off points because the touch screen isn't colorful enough or something.