Apple's Software Quality Crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#731

Post by geden » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:40 AM UTC

henry_viii wrote: post #721

yalok wrote: post #685

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality. Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps. Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they live…

On Notes: 1. If you copy some text 2. Select other text 3. Paste the text you copied to replace the selected text Notes will crash. This has been known for years. Also if you turn off all suggestions in Spotlight on iOS and just use it as an app launcher, it will still take seconds for Spotlight to show you the results. For something that's supposed to be an indexed look up.

I cannot reproduce that Notes crash.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#732

Post by shantara » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:40 AM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #641

epaga wrote: post #635

Here's what I find most puzzling about these things: Apple does amazingly helpful WWDC sessions on how to profile and improve your code, how to prioritize performance...but when it comes to their own apps, it's like they forget everything they know? Messages on Mac is one of my biggest annoyances. How do you make one of the most used messaging tools and have the keyboard lag so badly while typing - sometimes even ski…

There's always been a lot of room for them to optimise performance on macOS to a level that they do iOS, but modern Apple basically wants macOS to go away and sees it as more of an annoyance, so they don't spend any time tuning it. Then the elephant in the room is SwiftUI itself, there's a performance cliff there, wherein if you've optimised everything else, you might just hit the brick wall that's the layout engine…

A modestly sized list of WiFi networks (30-40 items) slows down and stutters while scrolling on a M4 MBP. SwiftUI is a performance disaster, and I refuse to use it outside of toy single screen projects

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#733

Post by friendzis » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:41 AM UTC

latexr wrote: post #700

yalok wrote: post #685

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality. Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps. Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they live…

> Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… Those aren’t options, they’re fantasies. Like dreaming of suing out of existence a company that wronged you, or fixing the world by ruling it, or winning the lottery without playing. Android isn’t perfect either, it’s a different set of frustrations. And why…

I have been saying this for years: consistent deterioration of ACs/DoDs. There is no limit to scrum and especially the constant refinement to ACs/DoDs.

Yes, you may implement a solution more efficiently by not overengineering it. But at some point constant seek to reduce "complexity" so that more features fit into sprint (funny how story point measure complexity, not time, but sprint is sized in both time and SP capacity) is bound to hit feature completeness. Once you cross over that metaphorical Rubicon it's game over - quality starts to slowly go downhill.

You will not notice it immediately. That edge case that was ignored may not surface for months or years. It may take several idiosyncrasies to line up for a feature to be declared FUBAR. At some point that technical debt does bite you back, but at that point the process (tm) has already optimized away most if not all opportunities for deep refactorings fixing previous rushes to deliver.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#734

Post by lynx97 » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:42 AM UTC

VoiceOver user here. I experience a ton of small to medium issues since my first OS upgrade. In my book iOS 5 was the last relatively bugfree version I used.

* Around iOS 8, the back button in Safari would crash voiceover. Bug was fixed with next OS update, so I had to deal with it for at least 8 months. * Since roughly iOS 11, VoiceOver cursor will randmly jump away from the currently selected item. So you actually never know what you will invoke when double-tapping. * My Apple Watch requires a different way of tapping for the first time I enter my passcode after battery was empty. This bug persists even after completely unpairing and re-setting up. * With previous Watch OS, I accidentally tried to download the premium voice from within the Apple Watch App. Apparently, thats not how this is supposed to be done. However, the single attempt to use the watch app to do this, I coulld never successfully download the premium voice from the watch directly again. Something whent stuck, and the menu item doesn't even appear on the watch.

And these are just a small selection of things I could explain in a single paragraph. I could actually write a book about small to medium bugs I experienced with Apple Software in the last 12 years. For instance, sometimes you need to tap a boolean setting three times for it to toggle. If you have an eye for bugs, you see one per day on Apple devices...

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#735

Post by whywhywhywhy » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:43 AM UTC

Apple Music sends ads to my Lock Screen, every time I search it’s automatically set to “Apple music” despite being turned off and no subscription so gives me no results, I have to change the option every time, every few months I get an ad I have to dismiss opening my music collection. The listening queue doesn’t seem to work anymore I can’t add things to it and repeat no longer works in a sane way.

I feel this would be unthinkable in the time before Tim Cook’s Apple.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#736

Post by jeffhuys » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:44 AM UTC

henry_viii wrote: post #721

yalok wrote: post #685

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality. Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps. Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they live…

On Notes: 1. If you copy some text 2. Select other text 3. Paste the text you copied to replace the selected text Notes will crash. This has been known for years. Also if you turn off all suggestions in Spotlight on iOS and just use it as an app launcher, it will still take seconds for Spotlight to show you the results. For something that's supposed to be an indexed look up.

I can't reproduce the crash. Does it happen every time for you or only after a few times?

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#737

Post by ThePowerOfFuet » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

anacrolix wrote: post #620

I reported a bug in their mmap syscall on Apple Silicon. You can hard freeze the computer in about 4 syscalls (basically system C functions). It's still there and they won't fix it, or acknowledge that it's a vulnerability. The frustrating thing is it locks the IO system, but the kernel thinks everything is fine. One by one each thread that does IO never returns. So you frantically click around wondering why your com…

Publish it. Let it get abused. Eventually they might fix it.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#738

Post by whywhywhywhy » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

henry_viii wrote: post #721

yalok wrote: post #685

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality. Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps. Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they live…

On Notes: 1. If you copy some text 2. Select other text 3. Paste the text you copied to replace the selected text Notes will crash. This has been known for years. Also if you turn off all suggestions in Spotlight on iOS and just use it as an app launcher, it will still take seconds for Spotlight to show you the results. For something that's supposed to be an indexed look up.

Select/Copy/Paste has been bad from the start on iOS, another I can’t get over is how the backspace behavior has the absolute worst timings for jumping to words and paragraphs.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#739

Post by mrweasel » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:47 AM UTC

henry_viii wrote: post #721

yalok wrote: post #685

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality. Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps. Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they live…

On Notes: 1. If you copy some text 2. Select other text 3. Paste the text you copied to replace the selected text Notes will crash. This has been known for years. Also if you turn off all suggestions in Spotlight on iOS and just use it as an app launcher, it will still take seconds for Spotlight to show you the results. For something that's supposed to be an indexed look up.

Notes on my laptop would take minutes to load, it was only fixed in the latest macOS release, after more than a year.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#740

Post by jonathantf2 » Tue, Mar 04, 2025, 9:48 AM UTC

retrac98 wrote: post #595

Nevermark wrote: post #587

I got Homepods for all my rooms. Woops. The unpredictable bad behavior is maddening. All intermittent but frequent problems: • I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room. • I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a…

This is disappointing to hear. I was thinking of getting some HomePods to replace my Sonos system which has got progressively less reliable over the years to the point of being virtually useless now. Are there any modern home audio setups that connect to streaming services and actually work reliably? At this point I’m thinking of just going back to an iPod and dock like it’s 2006.

If your Sonos speakers are old enough, take a day out and downgrade them all to S1. Just like magic it will all start working like it did the day you got it.