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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#881

Post by ustad »

Apple’s software quality has certainly taken a hit in recent updates.

I’ve been experiencing issues like home screen widgets not updating or showing incorrect data (like wrong date/times).

Notifications are another frustration, especially with Signal Messenger, where they just don’t come through reliably.

The camera app also seems to have a bug where the screen goes black, making you think the camera is broken, but force closing and reopening the app fixes it.

Finally, sharing content from Safari to Gmail often causes the entire UI to freeze until I force close Safari.

These are small but annoying issues that seem to be affecting the overall experience, and it’s disappointing for a platform that once prided itself on stability and polish.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#882

Post by andy_ppp »

I think this is everything, for example YouTube has about 20 different bugs, a few off the top of my head. 1) video is often cut off making chess content annoying to watch 2) replying to people sometimes removes their username leaving just an @ symbol 3) you can’t edit comments on web mobile 4) sometimes you’ll try to fast forward and end up selecting content on the screen 5) don’t get me started on Shorts polluting the experience etc. etc.

Smaller teams with fewer managers and clearer direction on what improves user experiences would be a good plan. Sites like this end up with so many features that aren’t needed.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#883

Post by john_alan »

alberth wrote: post #54
john_alan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using macOS since Tiger as daily driven. Never been worse. Needs a “Snow Leopard” year.

> Never been worse. How so? Would you mind giving examples. Note: I'm not disagreeing. Just curious what software quality issues you're having exactly.

hey sure!

Not an exhaustive list but some simple recent examples:

in Messages on macOS across 3 Macs I own, turning on and off the global 'read receipts' setting has no effect, not even from the perspective of iOS. The iOS setting does seem to work though.

Bugs in iOS mail where notifications just freeze the app.

Layout issues in macOS settings.

Memory leaks in WindowServer.

Many iCloud services inconsistent and non-reliable.

Apple Pay not showing correctly in Apple Account settings.

Lots of little hiccups...

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#884

Post by [deleted] »

ramraj07 wrote: post #804
yalok wrote: post #685

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality. Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps. Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they live…

I moved out of iPhone because of one such thing: the call log can only be 100 items long, like what? The most powerful processor ever, hundreds of GB and i can't see who I called last month?? I was done at that moment.

[deleted]

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#885

Post by gvurrdon »

tbeseda wrote: post #27

Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.

iTunes used to be extremely buggy for me, and things got a bit better with the Apple Music app. But, within the last week a bug which messes up all the album artwork on a synced iPhone struck my partner's device - I've not seen that one since iTunes.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#886

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

nwatson wrote: post #865
virtualmic wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis. I face none of the issues on my Samsung S23 phone, which the parent commentator describes - no issues in phones calls (I make 4-5 calls daily, mix of WhatsApp & regular calls), no major issues in Google Keep (which I use 2-3 times daily, specially never o…

I use Apple-Silicon MacBook Pro and Mac Mini for software development. I hardly ever use Apple software for business/personal/productivity. Jetbrains IDE tools, Docker, Homebrew work great. I install Chrome browser and use Google services, AWS and GCP consoles, etc. via the browser. YouTube for video, Google Music app. As for all Apple software, I might use Preview or Numbers (spreadsheets) on occasion, and I'm force…

> Apple "PC" hardware is solid. I use third party apps though, little Apple software,

Same. I have two "deal-brakers" when it comes to notebooks: 1) it's got to sleep consistently and without problems when I close the lid. 2) it should be silent when I'm doing simple things or nothing at all.

I have never seen a Linux or Windows laptop that does these things well. Even Intel MacBooks would spin up the fans seemingly at random. I don't think I've ever heard the fan in my M1 MBP. I'm looking forward to the new M4 MBA to replace an older Windows 10 laptop, which spins up its fans all the time, and sometimes doesn't sleep, sucking the battery dry in the process.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#887

Post by HPsquared »

mherrmann wrote: post #825

> Premium Hardware, Struggling Software This sums it up well. The hardware is great, the software isn't. I recently programmed the same app for iOS and Android. iOS took twice as long, simply because Apple's APIs suck. Case in point: The background task APIs (plural, yes, unfortunately) are so bad that Apple felt compelled to publish a video "Background execution demystified" [1]. If a dev creates an API and then has…

Slightly unrelated, but that reminds me of all the thousands of "Git demystified" videos out there. There's a lot of confusing software out there!

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#888

Post by WithinReason »

meindnoch wrote: post #784
WithinReason wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason why YCbCr should be visually worse than RGB if the conversion is accurate

It depends on the exact meaning of "YCbCr" and the meaning of "RGB". Is it BT.601? BT.709? BT.2020? Adobe RGB? Display P3? Also extra fun is guaranteed if one end of the video cable is encoding with e.g. BT.601 primaries, while the other end is decoding as e.g. BT.709, or vice versa.

RGB to YCbCr conversion and back is well defined, and RGB->YCbCR->RGB should give you back the original RGB values, no matter what the colorspace was.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#889

Post by [deleted] »

henry_viii wrote: post #721
yalok wrote: post #685

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality. Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps. Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they live…

On Notes: 1. If you copy some text 2. Select other text 3. Paste the text you copied to replace the selected text Notes will crash. This has been known for years. Also if you turn off all suggestions in Spotlight on iOS and just use it as an app launcher, it will still take seconds for Spotlight to show you the results. For something that's supposed to be an indexed look up.

[deleted]

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#890

Post by mizzao »

mherrmann wrote: post #825

> Premium Hardware, Struggling Software This sums it up well. The hardware is great, the software isn't. I recently programmed the same app for iOS and Android. iOS took twice as long, simply because Apple's APIs suck. Case in point: The background task APIs (plural, yes, unfortunately) are so bad that Apple felt compelled to publish a video "Background execution demystified" [1]. If a dev creates an API and then has…

It's too bad that Linux doesn't come with Apple Silicon. And while 20s me would have loved configuring things, once I had a family and a lot less time, I just want it to work.
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