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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#451

Post by moltopoco »

nicce wrote: post #330
rafaelmn wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except none of Apple stuff is Electron based, and as far as I am aware of Apple salaries are competitive with top companies - so none of your arguments really hold up.

My reply was mostly for the parent comment. Apple software is still top tier when you start comparing to Slack, Teams, and all the non-native friends. Apple Music does not take close to 1GB of RAM. There are very few native applications these days because of the cost. And lower cost availability is based on the web stack and lower entry level of skills. MacOS may have bugs but in general they are well engineered. Sta…

Web-based apps definitely lose when you compare RAM use, and probably also when you look at the average app installation size. Spotify.app filling half a CD is absolutely bonkers. But these are also the easiest two metrics to measure, and that makes it tempting to look at a huge trend in software quality and reduce it to "Chromium eats RAM".

It is much harder to quantify how many bugs or delays one encounters in a single day of macOS/iOS compared to earlier versions, or in native apps vs web apps, and so it never happens.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#452

Post by [deleted] »

progmetaldev wrote: post #245
madeofpalk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.

To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.

[deleted]

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#453

Post by JKCalhoun »

refulgentis wrote: post #412
markus_zhang wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how can I join MSFT or Apple just to fix stuffs? Don't care about salary as long as it's on par with my current one.

I thought this once, it's a disappointing experience. You'll hear all the right things, and 3 years in, realize nothing you do matters to anyone, and that's because all the managers who were so excited about your passion for software quality haven't met with you in a 2 years. And then it clicks, they got promoted by knowing the game: features, resembling the rushed planning deck, delivered yearly. (This is a whole lo…

You know, money fucked up Apple. When I started there (1995) no one came to Apple as a "career move". Everyone there was passionate about the machine, the code, the UI.

Not so after the iPhone.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#454

Post by alanfalcon »

ethbr1 wrote: post #448
_aavaa_ wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. I’m glad I’m not the only one. It’s mind boggling . I’ve had to start putting in my best guess just to have it save…

For exclusively Apple ecosystem users, how do you handle these feature gaps? Just get used to working around them and ignore? I feel like every time I swap to the Mac ecosystem it's a litany of "Hunh, that weird tiny thing doesn't work" issues. PS: USB-C DisplayPort MST (display daisy-chaining) support that's been missing for... a decade and counting?

I don't even understand this bug description. It's an edge case I guess I never ran into, so pretty easy to handle.

That said, it's not like everything is perfect, just 100% better than my drive-by experiences trying to have a gaming PC (dead, again), and an Android phone for testing purposes.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#455

Post by ferguess_k »

bondolo wrote: post #390

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade. But most of all…

Thanks for sharing. Which teams are better and which are worse? I guess all the system software teams are better?

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#456

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

I lean toward "culture" as the problem. Although, allowing for your 100x or 1000x complexity, how much of that complexity is from feature pile-on?

I imagine putting AirPlay in the software stack, just as an example, caused code perturbations all over the place. Sidecar feels like another disruptive feature. Never mind Catalyst, juggling Swift and C binaries, Swift UI....

This stuff Apple brought upon themselves. I'm sure there will be plenty of opinions though as to whether some of these were worth the cost of disruption, on-going maintenance.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#457

Post by cschep »

kyledrake wrote: post #437

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 t…

What distro do you run on the framework? Ubuntu feels bloated and the software is old. The framework laptop is much, much worse than a MacBook Pro. The comparison isn't even remotely apples to apples.

I wish there was a perfect solution, but man. Comparing a framework laptop with ubuntu to an MBP with MacOS is crazy from anything but a cost perspective.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#459

Post by pengaru »

bondolo wrote: post #390

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade. But most of all…

Having joined a large established FAANG, it's become quite apparent that in any large established entity with so much management and meta work, with strong incentives driving more energy towards the meta work than where the rubber meets the road, it's inevitable for product quality to deteriorate.

Internally the prioritized output becomes the meta work, not what reaches customers. What reaches customers is almost some kind of accidental byproduct of what the vast majority of people in the org spend their time on day-to-day.

My past experience is dominated by startups. The fake work I'm incentivized to spend time on would have been fire-able levels of misplaced priorities / waste everywhere else I've worked as an IC developer.

I've never worked for Apple, I'm assuming this pattern plays out everywhere at this scale.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#460

Post by jorvi »

trogdor wrote: post #260
fnordlord wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Feedback Assistant issue you mentioned is probably one of the worst aspects of their software ecosystem. I haven't had a response on a single ticket that I've filed in there. It feels like an abandoned program, which is terrible UX considering its purpose.

A few years ago, I filed a Feedback Assistant bug report regarding an issue I was experiencing in Final Cut. In response, I was contacted by Final Cut developers who worked with me to replicate the issue and then shipped a fix. Just one anecdote, but some reports definitely get looked at.

I had the same happen for a bug that would toggle off "Do not create a new Apple Ad Identifier Code" (or whatever it was called). It meant that even if you explicitly opted out of Apple's Ad tracking, you would get opted back in with almost every iOS update.

I assume this would have landed them in hot waters with EU privacy regulators, so they were very keen to replicate the bug and then have me check if it no longer happened.

On the other hand, the "first screenshot fails to display screenshot preview and doesn't flash the screen" has been in iOS for 3 versions now. I've reported it thrice, and no one has given the tickets a second look, marked it DUPLICATE, or anything. And every time I mention it, at least 3-4 other people comment on also experiencing the bug, so I assume Apple must be pretty aware.

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