Apple's Software Quality Crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#111

Post by Workaccount2 » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #69

deegles wrote: post #46

I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.

Yep. A lot of software companies are suffering from this short-term-ism that results in incentive structures that value things that move the stock price rather than make for a strong long term company. It may eventually blow up in faces, but a lot of the people making money on it today won't be around to see it.

I don't even know if it's stock price or just human hubris. "I joined the team, implemented "amazing" feature, got promoted/got hired at x".

Google is by far the worst of this. It seems 75% of their products are pet-projects turned abandonware.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#112

Post by mrweasel » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

FredPret wrote: post #7

I 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.

iOS doesn't even need more features, it needs way less. Sadly that isn't how the world work.

For my one use case I noticed that the newest iOS release doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3. The "Press home to unlock" and "X new notification" texts are now laid on top of each other on the lock screen. You're looking right at it when picking up your phone, so you can't miss it, yet Apple QA did.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#113

Post by varenc » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #4

I 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…

What Linux CarPlay alternative do you use?

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#114

Post by ohgr » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #89

ohgr wrote: post #31

I would disagree with the conclusion. It sounds like a faulty line of hardware on the M2 Air then. My partner is the IT manager at a school where they have over 1000 iPads (10th gen) deployed with iOS 18 and there are no reported issues like this. We ourselves have iPad Pro M2's without these issues which we both use all day every day. Our kids have 3x 10th gen iPads too. No issues. YMMV but they just work for us and…

iPad 10th Gen doesn't even support the Apple Pencil Pro. Are they using any Apple Pencils at all?

Correct. Which is the point. The user complains that the problem is a software crisis when the software is fine on completely different hardware. That would suggest by elimination it's not a software problem, or is a software problem tied to particular hardware.

(incidentally they mostly use USB-C apple pencils and some clone ones when they lose them and the parents don't want to buy a genuine replacement one)

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#115

Post by zimpenfish » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #67

JoshTko wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

podcast app is the worst, I can never find what I'm looking for

> I can never find what I'm looking for Overcast might be the app for you. No affiliation, I just like it.

Overcast is definitely the least worst of the iOS podcast apps but it does have its own set of UI/UX annoyances.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#116

Post by Y-bar » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

formerly_proven wrote: post #18

Mail on iOS doesn’t even have push any more, the new Photos app is garbage, Music randomly spews “content not available” errors and works remarkably poorly with mobile data for a mobile app, watchOS is so chock-full of bugs and glitches that just go unfixed major version after major version etc. It’s pretty bad. Somehow most other software is even worse. Genuinely impressive at this point.

I would trade push in iOS Mail for the standard rules (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mail/mlhlp1017/mac) available in the desktop client since the past 20 years. Can't believe it is still not implemented.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#117

Post by garyrob » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

In the current MacOS release, if I type Time Machine in the System Settings search box, it shows what I was looking for: "Show Time Machine status in the menu bar".

But if I click that, it shows the switch for the Keyboard Brightness menu bar control, and doesn't show anything about the Time Machine menu bar item!

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#118

Post by dkarl » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

I have an issue with Messenger notifications on one device, a laptop. The messages get delivered just as quickly on this laptop as on other devices, but the notifications can take minutes to come up. Also, the number of unread messages sometimes gets stuck out of sync, for example showing 1 when I have no unread messages. I've tried rebooting, and I've tried disabling and re-enabling notifications.

I'm still on Sonoma, so the next thing I could try is updating to Sequoia, but that feels foolish. Only one thing is wrong. It could be worse. How often does updating software actually make it better? Apple should feel like the exception to that cynicism, but it doesn't, which is bad news for them, since their entire business is predicated on being the exception.

A premium product that's worth the money. That's such an easy thing for people to stop believing in if the reality doesn't live up to it.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#119

Post by freedomben » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #69

deegles wrote: post #46

I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.

Yep. A lot of software companies are suffering from this short-term-ism that results in incentive structures that value things that move the stock price rather than make for a strong long term company. It may eventually blow up in faces, but a lot of the people making money on it today won't be around to see it.

Indeed. It's a Tragedy of the Commons type of issue with the way most corps are run nowadays. When you're just starting out it's understandable to be very short-term focused as next year doesn't really matter much if you go belly up next week. But once companies have some establishment, it's insane to me how little thought goes into long-term planning. That is, until you realize the incentive structure they've built essentially penalizes executives/management for sacrificing short-term opps for long-term health. For example, but slicing R&D to the bare minimum (and often below that level) and driving revenue high up and to the right by pumping up sales/marketing efforts, you can look like a business genius, and just as it starts to really hurt the company you're moving on to the next gig, and often with an exit bonus of some kind.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#120

Post by kjkjadksj » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

I was just thinking the other day how there is a ton of friction now after they moved on from skewmorphic. Say what you will but I always knew exactly where my specific home directory folders were because they looked so distinct in the finder sidebar. Now I have to actually read the damn folder names because everything looks the same.