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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#561

Post by ncr100 »

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…

Agile. Sprints. Firing QA departments.

I see these trends as negatively impacting app quality.

"User pain" as a euphemism for "lowest common denominator" apathetic / fear driven development.

Like, playing the Vulcan game of Kal Toh where you remove rods unintelligentlly and still believe your constructed structure (the app) is fully coherent, and instead it dissolves into uselessness.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#562

Post by nullpoint420 »

kingds wrote: post #540
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.

it's comically bad. the UI is a mess, the search functionality is broken, you can't resize the window horizontally. it's feels like a hello world first project in a new language type of app. also - it's such a bummer that they have decided to shit the bed so hard on software at a moment when their hardware lineup is arguably at its pinnacle. like, the hardware has been firing on all cylinders since M1 but the softwar…

right on the money.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#563

Post by chamomeal »

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 agree. The frameworks and tools we use are so complicated, but we’re also so tied to the complexity that it’s pretty much an anti pattern to go outside the framework/toolkit.

I haven’t fully thought this idea out, but I’ve been feelin it recently.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#564

Post by riversandroads »

I recently switched from an Android to an iphone and the writing experience (keyboard, text selection, scrolling) are so frustrating. I initially thought I must not be used to it but then found so many people had the same problem. I didn't expect this from Apple.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#565

Post by ProllyInfamous »

roody15 wrote: post #268

When you upgrade MacOS 15.3.0 apple automatically enables Apple intelligence and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default. You are not prompted or asked to enable. After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored. This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality.…

This is not a bug, it's a feature.

By "volunteering" your data for third party advertising (...remember, you agreed to Apple's ToS), they get to sell referrals and you get nothing.

Sounds fair?

My main Apple computers predate modern LLMs, and will forever be stuck on Ventura & 10.14. The M4 Mini I just purchased (to replace MacPro5,1) will never go online, and I have physically removed all wireless "features" [why does bluetooth constantly turn itself back on?!] — love the OS (particularly the fluidity of screensavers) but the OS is so enmeshed in wanting to "be helpful" (== I don't want your AI schizo ==) that I won't plan to update any online machines any further than 2023 operating systems (== "pre-AI" ==).

The best news in all this is it may finally push me into running Linux as my main online machine, which I've been putting off for only three decades now (68k->PPC->Intel->Silicone).

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#566

Post by kyralis »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #309
kyralis wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It basically is an Electron app; most of the UI is server-driven. It's just not HTML and js. News, Books, and TV are all similar.

Just curious, why did they decide to use Electron instead of native? After all those are Apple MacOS software.

It's not actually Electron; it's a bit of an unholy mishmash of webkit doing layout of things that are sometimes native views with interaction handling that's also a bit of both. It just has many of the same problems that that Electron apps have, which is also why the interactions are so janky.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#567

Post by lurk2 »

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.

I've had the same experience. MacOS had lots of features intended to make it friendly for casual users, which made it a pain when you wanted to modify it, but if you wanted to modify something, you generally could; it just took some extra steps compared to Windows 7. By contrast, I spent an hour figuring out how to uninstall Edge on Windows 10 this afternoon, and I suspect it's going to reinstall after the next update like all of the other bloatware did.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#568

Post by 1123581321 »

nunez wrote: post #560

Shortcuts. Have you tried using Shortcuts on ANY Apple device? It's a fucking mess. It is impossible to write Shortcuts with code. Consequently, this means that you're stuck with the no-code workflow builder. Unfortunately, the no-code builder is a hog! Moving actions around within the panel will cause Shortcuts to lock up. Sometimes, Shortcuts will just refuse to reorder actions when you move them. Exiting and re-op…

If you want to type your shortcuts, there’s a tool that turns code into plist imports. https://scpl.dev/

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#569

Post by abhaynayar »

Yea, I used to use Apple Notes for everything until their recent big update where it became very jittery. (even on an iPhone). The web-version of Apple Notes always sucked.

I am using Notion now, and even though that is kinda janky on an iPhone, it is still better than Apple's own notes, and of course, their web-version is much much much better than Apple's.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#570

Post by bitwize »

grishka wrote: post #538
cageface wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can really see this when trying to build apps with Swift & SwiftUI. The language and the framework seem to be optimized for nice terse WWDC demos but both fall apart pretty quickly when you start to do any heavy UI lifting with them. And I think that's starting to bleed into their own native UI now too. The lousy macOS settings app is a good example. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any good alternatives to A…

All of these modern "declarative" frameworks seem to be optimized for hello world kinds of apps. Jetpack Compose, too. And SwiftUI is just being too smart sometimes: https://tonsky.me/blog/swiftui/ Not sure about other people, but for me, my UI framework making its own heuristic decisions about how to lay out and style my views is the last thing I want. It robs me of the certainty that my UI will look and work the wa…

Except those technologies are now deprecated and you don't know when they might be removed. Jetpack Compose is now the vendor-favored way to build apps, so best practice is to use that.
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