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Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

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Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#11

Post by benologist »

saagarjha wrote: post #7
jamroom wrote: post #5

Apple needs another "Snow Leopard" release - spend an entire year not adding anything - just focus on making everything work better, fix bugs, etc.

They just did that with iOS 12/macOS Mojave. I guess they need another one?

I think they need to do it to hardware too, they will be selling shitty butterfly keyboards for 1 - 2 more years while they stutter out upgrades. The 13" MBP upgrade is expected to be another 6 - 7 months away which is just incoherent, Minis and the iMacs are all over a year old again albeit they at least don't have the butterfly keyboards.

Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#12

Post by saagarjha »

jtbayly wrote: post #3
tosh wrote: post #2

> The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test versions, known as “daily builds,” of future software updates disable unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and settings menu dubbed Flags

That’s nice and all, but I don’t really understand how that helps. Ah, from the article: > some “testers would go days without a livable build, so they wouldn’t really have a handle on what’s working and not working,” the person said. This defeated the main goal of the testing process as Apple engineers struggled to check how the operating system was reacting to many of the new features, leading to some of iOS 13’s p…

So one of the issues is that Apple lives on their own tools, so when critical system components are broken nobody can get work done. But ideally they'd actually fix the bugs and try to keep the daily builds livable rather than trying to sweep the issues under the rug…

Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#13

Post by tosh »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #6

The same thing happened when we were working on Leopard under Bertrand. Because the developer toolchain switched to Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection enabled, the OS was unusable for development for months at a time. Development took twice as long as planned, the release was fairly bloated, and required 2 or 3 updates in the first month or two. When Craig took over he introduced a sprint model so that there wer…

Snow Leopard was one of the best releases I remember. I'm hoping for a Snow Leopard-ish update for iOS 13 so it has a fair shot at getting the attention and praise it deserves.

Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#14

Post by mberning »

It is unfathomable to me how the iOS ecosystem has so many features that don't work well eve after years of being in the wild and being available on millions of devices. Things like handoff, continuity, personal hotspot, etc. still do not "just work". I honestly wish they would remove the features if they have no intention or ability to make it work 100% of the time.

Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#15

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #6

The same thing happened when we were working on Leopard under Bertrand. Because the developer toolchain switched to Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection enabled, the OS was unusable for development for months at a time. Development took twice as long as planned, the release was fairly bloated, and required 2 or 3 updates in the first month or two. When Craig took over he introduced a sprint model so that there wer…

I hate that Rich Hickey quote.

Sprints are just the classic computer science "divide and conquer" strategy applied to development.

Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#16

Post by Xixi »

jamroom wrote: post #5

Apple needs another "Snow Leopard" release - spend an entire year not adding anything - just focus on making everything work better, fix bugs, etc.

People remember fondly of Snow Leopard 10.6.8, but the introduction of Snow Leopard 10.6.0 was very rough, certainly not bug free. Snow Leopard did change a lot of things under the hood (64-bit mostly, maybe Grand Central Dispatch).

At the time I was depending on macports to install a lot of dev dependencies: mono was broken, and a bunch of other libraries were also not compiling anymore. It is to this day the only macOS (then Mac OS X) release that I had to downgrade from. But I'm more cautious now... still running Mojave.

That said on principle I agree: I want an OS that works better and faster, not more features.

Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#17

Post by hylaride »

There have been glaring bugs/issues lasting ages in both MacOS and iOS.

For years apple mail on iOS would always show 1 unread message in "all mail" for gmail.

On my iPhone 11 pro (and the 6S i had before it) the camera app will sometimes only show a black screen and a freaking reboot is needed to get it working again. I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that.

Multi-monitor support was so good on MacOS up until maybe 5 years ago. You could easily PIN apps to certain monitors and virtual desktops on specific monitors. If you started an app on a laptop and then connected to external monitors apps would automagically go where they were supposed to. Now it's a complete mess.

MacOS's UI seems more jerky in the last two major releases.

Time machine's performance has slowly gotten worse and worse, leaving me having to cancel backups just so I can go home.

I could go on. The worst part? These have all been ignored open issues that other people have submitted and for years they just sit there...open.

Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#18

Post by GuiA »

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #15
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #6

The same thing happened when we were working on Leopard under Bertrand. Because the developer toolchain switched to Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection enabled, the OS was unusable for development for months at a time. Development took twice as long as planned, the release was fairly bloated, and required 2 or 3 updates in the first month or two. When Craig took over he introduced a sprint model so that there wer…

I hate that Rich Hickey quote. Sprints are just the classic computer science "divide and conquer" strategy applied to development.

That’s quite the leaky metaphor. If you split a list in half to sort it, the computer doesn’t inherit the backlog of punted features/bugs/stress/frustration/etc from the previous half.

Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#19

Post by georgespencer »

Apple parrots their OS update metrics as a leading indicator of customer engagement / satisfaction with the platform & how sympathetic they are to the difficulty for developers of putting out software for new hardware every year. I'm interested to know the rationale for them putting out weekly releases vs. fortnightly or monthly. It seems like they could burn a lot of goodwill with casual users.

Re: Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut

#20

Post by [deleted] »

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #15
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #6

The same thing happened when we were working on Leopard under Bertrand. Because the developer toolchain switched to Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection enabled, the OS was unusable for development for months at a time. Development took twice as long as planned, the release was fairly bloated, and required 2 or 3 updates in the first month or two. When Craig took over he introduced a sprint model so that there wer…

I hate that Rich Hickey quote. Sprints are just the classic computer science "divide and conquer" strategy applied to development.

[deleted]
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