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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#431

Post by zer0x4d »

Techrot is real and it's there in almost every major big tech product. Google does definitely take the gold medal in this category though as I have never seen so many bugs in production software by a trillion dollar company as I have seen in Google's.

1. Maps crashes almost every ride on Car Play (this used to happen a lot back in 2023 and was fixed for majority of 2024. Seems like it regressed again)

2. Trying to expand reviews on Google Maps expands the wrong review (100% reproducible, not an edge case)

3. Firebase Auth has terrible reliability when it comes to SMS delivery and fail rate of like 5-10%.

4. Gmail keeps opening links with the wrong account (Click on Google meet link from an email in account number 2, as in .../u/2/... . Link opens with account 0 and now you gotta switch accounts again).

5. Gemini is famously unreliable and produces wrong results for seemingly simple queries.

And many more I can't recall on top of my head but surely exist.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#432

Post by bee_rider »

webdever wrote: post #338
pico303 wrote: post #331

As someone forced to use a Windows laptop for work with the new job, I've stopped complaining about my Mac. It's so much worse on the other side of the fence... Working on Windows makes me appreciate the Mac ecosystem so, so, so very much.

As someone who works on both I don't notice a difference. Mac sucks just as much as Windows (or visa versa). There's things each does better and things each does worse.

They are totally different.

Macs come working. When something breaks, it is impossible to fix, because they didn’t include a button to fix it. But it comes working!

Windows PCs come broken out of the box, but the user adapts and eventually gains a pile of workarounds, which is sort of like the windows equivalent of a UX.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#433

Post by SeriousStorm »

karmakaze wrote: post #208
flohofwoe wrote: post #68

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens - click on 'Custom Color' - now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues…

My indicator for if Apple is for the customer vs for Apple is how macOS 'negotiates' YPbPr instead of RGB for non-Apple branded monitors (some LG monitors also get a pass) which results in worse color quality. I believe this to be carefully engineered to be a plausible bug rather than a real one. BTW I have found a workaround using BetterDisplay and an EDID override (to more closely match what the monitor is actually…

I ran into this issue with the Sonoma update. My display (4k LG) was negotiating RGB just fine before, but not anymore. The BetterDisplay workaround hasn't worked for me. The poor colors and fuzzy edges around all the text is causing eye strain too. I'm beyond furious.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#434

Post by AyyEye »

crazygringo wrote: post #366
swat535 wrote: post #212

It's not just Apple guys, it's everywhere. Software quality has seriously declined across the board, from Spotify to Slack to core operating systems like Windows and macOS. I think a major factor is corporate culture, which largely ignores software quality. Another issue is that many engineers lack a solid understanding of CS fundamentals like performance, security, and reliability (perhaps this is why many are not a…

Honestly, I don't think it's a culture thing or a CS fundamentals thing. I think it's the fact that software is 100x, or maybe even 1,000x, more complex that it was just 25 years ago. Apps are built on so many libraries and frameworks and packages that an average application will have 100x the amount of code. And they're all necessary . A typical phone app is 200 MB, when Word 4.0 was less than 1 MB. But it's not jus…

> And they're all necessary

No. No they aren't.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#436

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #328
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #251

Using the backend services (iTunes Connect, etc.) is painful . Also, don't get me started on the current state of "documentation." At one time, Apple had a huge team of ridiculously overqualified documentation people. They often had better chops than the engineers.

This reminds me of the recent reading of "Inside Macintosh" on archive.org. I really hope they produce similar paper documentations nowadays. I'd love to hold a dictionary of obscure Mac internal knowledge.

We had the whole set.

It was amazing, and spoiled me. There was a similar set of books about BSD UNIX, as well. Don't remember the exact title, but it was pretty awesome.

Right now, it looks like they are relying completely on, on headerdoc comments.

It can work, but someone needs to spend a lot of time on these comments, and they need to do so, at a “holistic” level, coordinating all the various systems.

They have done a fairly good job, so far, but it’s really starting to fray; especially in the newer systems.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#437

Post by kyledrake »

I tried a Macbook again when the M1 chips came out, and wasn't impressed with the performance. Despite incredible benchmarks, the interface just felt bloated and sluggish.

The biggest issue for me though was Darwin's weird psuedo-complete unix environment. All of my production servers are Linux, and it's a real pain to have to torture software that works great on Linux over to Apple's OS. Homebrew is nice, but even that would fail sometimes, and if the software wasn't available I would have to wait for someone smarter than me to port it. Also, it's weird that the community has to maintain this despite Apple having a gajillion dollars because they simply do not care about OSS.

More of a personal ancedote, but in the end all I'm really using a computer for is a web browser, code editing, and running linux production software locally. Just made more sense to stay on Linux, which I run on an excellent Framework laptop. It feels nice to be out of the software bloat treadmill.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#438

Post by sbuk »

treve wrote: post #211
sbuk wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rubbish. You Linux-only guys post this nonsense on any thread criticising competing OSs thinking the rest of us have no experience using them. I daily-drive older hardware (Xeon E5 with 16GB RAM and GTX 1080 ti), which is essentially all midtier is, and GNOME is a stuttery mess. It struggles to drive 4K. It's slow to load software, and what is available is often a UX mess (what have they got against menus?!). Discove…

I use Linux, Apple OS and Windows.

Apple OS. Indeed.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#439

Post by JKCalhoun »

flohofwoe wrote: post #68

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens - click on 'Custom Color' - now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues…

> A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app.

Yes, but code reviewers signed off on it, our unit tests have 100% code coverage and they all passed. It must be okay.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#440

Post by JKCalhoun »

visviva wrote: post #416
K7PJP wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't repro this on macOS 15.3.1 with an Apple Studio Display. What display are you using? It's likely something related to color space translation. Edit: Repro-ed using the additional steps you mentioned below. As someone who handles external bug reports and writes them, it's so often the case that there are additional steps or a specific start state required, which both prevents reproducing the bug and narrows th…

[flagged]

repro'd works for me.
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