Apple's Software Quality Crisis
eliseomartelli.it
Apple's Software Quality Crisis
1–10 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis
#2[deleted]
Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis
#3Software problems like we are seeing are not something that happen over night. They slowly appear until you can’t see them. It takes years of bad design and decisions to get what we have.
I see this throughout the industry and can’t help conclude the problem started about 5 years ago, and we thus we are now seeing the results of Covid and possibly WFO.
Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis
#4I drank the "creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists" kool-aid back in ~2013 sometime, and got myself a first Macbook when I worked at a software startup the first time. While it certainly gave a more "premium" impression in terms of hardware/UI/UX for the first few years, around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.
Even basic UX like "Can still see navigation map on CarPlay when someone calls you" seems to be just not thought of at all, or not being able to move the cursor left/right because the current iPhone keyboard mode only allows number. There are a thousands of these tiny cuts that just makes it such a pain to use daily.
Which is a darn shame, because the hardware is truly amazing, from everything from the displays, to keyboard and trackpads, to the general feeling and the CPU. But the software experience been so shit for the last decade that it's hard to justify going back.
Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis
#5Agreed; Apple's software quality is rapidly approaching unacceptability.
I'm in a regular video call friend group, every day we call and chat for a bit. A few days ago we "officially" decided to just call in Discord instead of Facetime. Discord's mobile app has its own set of issues, for sure, but we would regularly hit an issue with Facetime where especially as people join and leave the call, other peoples' microphones would become shadow muted; it would look like its sending audio from their end, but no one else could hear them. For non-video participants, this could mean minutes of not being heard before realizing the issue, leaving the call, and re-joining, which fixes things.
Also Facetime related: If you use your iPhone as a continuity camera for your Mac, if you get a Facetime call while your iPhone and Mac are close to each other, you cannot answer the call on your iPhone. If you think about the implications of that, it sounds crazy; like "there's no way that got through testing", but its true. Your iPhone displays an ungrokable error message that took me, a tech guy, several Googles to understand what was going on. The only option in this error message is "Disconnect". You click that, and you're taken back to the home screen. If the other person has not disconnected from the Facetime call, you can manually launch the Facetime app and join the call from there. But if they've left it, you just missed the call, and it does this Every Single Time. I had to turn off Continuity Camera. Its crazy!
That's just the latest ones; the list of issues is really quite endless, and it only gets longer the more of Apple's services you decide to inflict upon yourself.
Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis
#6When software is so bad that tactics “just throw more hardware inside” stops working.
Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis
#7I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches.
In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it.
Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.
Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis
#8Software problems like we are seeing are not something that happen over night. They slowly appear until you can’t see them. It takes years of bad design and decisions to get what we have. I see this throughout the industry and can’t help conclude the problem started about 5 years ago, and we thus we are now seeing the results of Covid and possibly WFO.
[deleted]
Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis
#9It seems to me like the iPad in particular has the worst software quality. Not that iOS on the iPhone is perfect, but it really seems like their workflow is to build for the phone first, then hammer it in place to work on the iPad as an afterthought.
There's so much basic stuff that doesn't work, like if you pull out the keyboard into its split mode, it constantly covers the text input that you're typing in - even in Apple's own apps. The split keyboard may as well not exist for how impossible it is to use.
But there's also just been a lot of usability issues seeping into iOS over time in general. Like those text effects they added in the latest iOS update that constantly force their way onto my messages when I don't want them. And more recently, the "recent emojis" tab doesn't update to my recently used emojis. I think it's been stuck on whatever were my recent emojis were when I did the last iOS update.
Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis
#10Apple had to switch CPU architectures and build their just to make their OS feel as snappy as KDE and Gnome does on mid-tier hardware. I wonder how long it will take until enough technical debt accumulates to a point where Mac OS feels like it drags again.
The absolute worst was the transition to SSDs if you were stuck on a hard to upgrade HDD-based Mac. It became super clear that Apple devs stopped caring in the span of a year.