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Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

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Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#191

Post by jedieaston »

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #67

I did not work for Apple but this article describes exactly what I was thinking. Apple has very waterfall cycle. Everything is planned year after year to be released for the September event. When the deadline approach teams realized that are behind and they need to overwork. And when people get tired and under pressure, they usually introduce even more bugs. The article also nails the solution: a more Agile workflow.…

Microsoft tried doing that with the bi-yearly Windows 10 feature updates, and now they are moving to a yearly release cycle because there were too many bugs getting into releases even with an army of "insiders" (although it should be an army of QA people that are in Redmond). They don't release major updates to system applications between releases either (The rewrite of Edge and WSL2 are planned for release 20H1).

The real problem is that Apple needs to loosen the secrecy between engineering teams, as there's no good way to tell if your new Safari feature breaks something in System Preferences because the System Preferences developers are in another building and aren't under the right NDA to learn about your new Safari feature.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#192

Post by thom »

threeseed wrote: post #19

Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one. And then a few point releases later and it's all forgotten. And then the next .0 release arrives and the blog posts reappear.

This was also my experience. I am always perplexed by these pearl-clutching post-Jobs threads, which also pop up on the hardware side as if no Mac hardware had thermal issues or other hardware faults while Jobs was at the helm.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#193

Post by thrower123 »

jwr wrote: post #186
thrower123 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But we are talking about reading bug reports, not writing software. Also, I would argue that finding and fixing bugs actually does scale, as opposed to designing and writing new systems.

You need the small subset of people who actually understand how the software works to fix the bugs, lest you just end up playing whack-a-mole and introducing new bugs.

Ideally, it wouldn't be like this, but we don't live in an ideal world, and there's always some unintended consquence when you start pulling the string on anything nontrivial. And there's never sufficient automated testing, especially for the things that haven't been a problem yet.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#194

Post by saagarjha »

pmjordan wrote: post #182
arvinsim wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without rewriting for their own platform. Can you expand on this? Are there limitations on MacOS that prevents them from doing so?

The macOS kernel (XNU) does not have any kind of containerisation support. I believe "Docker for Mac" is actually a Linux kernel running inside a hyperkit/xhyve VM, and uses Linux's container support. Apple hasn't put much public effort into making macOS work well inside a virtual machine. Recent versions in particular, where the window compositor uses Metal for drawing, don't run well. Apple hasn't opened the API fo…

> The tightening of code signing requirements [see the 'library-validation' flag] even locked out nvidia from providing their own GPU drivers from macOS 10.14 onwards.

Library validation has nothing to do with drivers.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#195

Post by [deleted] »

breatheoften wrote: post #33
novok wrote: post #27

The way I've heard one company deal with noticing non-crashing bugs is to treat warning logs as 'crashes' with backtrace snapshots and upload them as specially tagged non-fatal crashes. Might help apple see if clients are having specific icloud issues.

This seems like a really good idea to me. Is it possible to do in a way that preserves privacy and doesn’t basically become a hidden “telemetry” system?

[deleted]

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#196

Post by coldcode »

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #98
neya wrote: post #44

I'm still on High Sierra on my 2015 Macbook Pro. I haven't upgraded my OS nor my machine and pretty happy with it (I only accept updates within my OS version itself) . On my home machine, I do use Mojave, which by itself is quite buggy and I'm waiting for some more fixes before I upgrade my Macbook Pro to Mojave as well. I never install Apple's newer OS'es because I have a lot of development related stuff setup on my…

The "Regressions Get Fixed. Old Bugs Get Ignored." thought does not help your strategy. After 6 months into the new version of iOS and MacOS, there is a lot less attention to fix problem in the previous version of the OS. It is even worse when it comes to firmware problems on older hardware. If you have a 2+ year old Apple device you need to hope that all the security bugs on your hardware are also in the latest soft…

Google is just as bad at this and have many of the same issues of too many things being built at the same time. Googlers often lament that fixing bugs is never a priority to new features which is pretty much Apple as well. Perhaps too much complex technology is hard to do.

I work for a non-tech similarly big company that uses a lot of software (that we make ourselves as well as integrating vendors) and our processes and quality are even worse than Apple and Google.

But as an iOS dev I would happy if at least Xcode was built and tested properly...

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#197

Post by checkyoursudo »

jammygit wrote: post #18

My wife’s Iphone lost most of its battery life since the update. Very dramatic difference

Since the iOS 13 update, I'd had this happen almost daily:

The battery level is reported as fine and everything works like normal from 100% to about 35%. At about 35% (could be 36 or 32 or whatever any given time--I can't see that the exact percentage matters), the phone crashes to powered off state. If I try to start it up with the power button, I get the "plug this in" indicator. If I start it using the hard reset method, then it'll power back up normally, and the battery will always report as 10% at this stage. It can stay like this for a few minutes up to a couple of hours, but it'll inevitably crash again if I don't plug it in. After it crashes, I can do a hard reset again and it'll come back up and the battery will often show something percentage in the 20's. Often if I try to use any app in this cycle, that'll cause a crash. If I do plug it in after a second crash, then suddenly the battery is reporting at maybe 23% again. Like, WTF?

It only started happening since iOS 13.

I would be happy if my iphone only lost most of its battery life. :)

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#198

Post by EasyTiger_ »

tobr wrote: post #55

Tangentially related: GitHub has already dropped support for Mojave. The whole site is now broken in Safari 12 because it’s no longer the “current” version of the browser. Well, it is if you run Mojave, as you need to upgrade the entire system to get Safari 13. I can understand not developing new features for Safari 12, but speaking of regressions, why would you go break things that used to work a week ago?

This is complete disinformation yet is one of the top comments?

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#199

Post by chadlavi »

ljsocal wrote: post #119

Apple stores are highly tuned to and responsive to customer experience in-store. The same is true with their AppleCare support online and via phone. The metric they focus on is Net Promoter Score. Maybe this same model could be applied to the OS, Apps and services. Apple user experience would be improved methinks.

Like the guy said in the blog post, though, they don't have company wide hiring standards. Their service design is superb (and we should probably note, the service design is very close to the purchase point), but doesn't translate necessarily to their UX.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#200

Post by p_l »

Mindwipe wrote: post #137
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…

If Apple spent more than $11 dollars on documentation they also might not be in the situation they're currently in. So much of what happened in Catalina is just flat out not written down in the Developer Documentation. Apple's documentation has been waning for a while, but it's fallen off a cliff in the last eighteen months. It's impossible to believe that's not having an impact on external software quality, and it's…

I remember doing my first hackintosh, due to an attempt at a startup where we wanted to have a iOS and OSX client.

The documentation blew me away, nicely packaged with XCode, and made it really look like a platform that would care about developers, especially given how niche it was.

That was 10.6 time.

Currently, I have a Mac forced on me by company. I look at docs... and they are the same docs I remember, with bits missing, a "deprecated banner" from 5 years ago. Deprecation notices give no information what APIs one should use in place, or where new documentation is.

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