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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#801

Post by cmiles74 »

whstl wrote: post #728
latexr wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

While I agree that it's Tim Cook's responsibility to set the course and influence the culture, I doubt a new CEO will be able to so. I'm not saying nobody can be like Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs was an anomaly when it comes to C-Levels, and even when it comes to management in general, at least from reading things like www.folkore.org and interviews with people who worked with him. And I'm not even talking about talent…

Back in the 90s, Apple seemed to have a lot of these same problems. Software quality was declining and they had real trouble executing on anything strategic. They aren't there yet, but they certainly seem to be headed down a similar path.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#802

Post by janfoeh »

joshuaturner wrote: post #602
amluto wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The upload-and-stream-your-own-music feature, as handled by the Mac desktop Apple Music app, seems to be 90% bug and 10% working. I can’t imagine a rewrite being worse than the status quo.

Funnily enough that's the one feature that works pretty well for me and is keeping me on Apple Music as opposed to Spotify. Considering the state of every recently made/"remade" first party Apple app I cannot imagine how horrible the Music app would be after they got done with it.

That feature is the single worst thing Apple has done I have ever encountered: it stole my music library.

At some point when migrating from one Mac to another, it "forgot" which songs were actually mine. It's all Apple Music now. I have songs that the application _knows_ were added to my library in 2003, but for which it steadfastly maintains they're Apple Music downloads. Worse: some songs have been replaced with other recordings. Other are "unavailable" for unexplained reasons.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#803

Post by ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 »

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…

The article makes some great points about how iOS software is regressing, but it still feels so much better than almost any other software I use on a daily basis.

I’ve only ever noticed maybe like a few actually bothersome bugs in the however many years I’ve been using iPhones which is pretty impressive.

Anyway, hope they get it together. Performance and optimization are a very difficult and very thankless job that might not get you promoted the same way cool sexy feature work does. Such is corporate life I guess.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#804

Post by ramraj07 »

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…

I moved out of iPhone because of one such thing: the call log can only be 100 items long, like what? The most powerful processor ever, hundreds of GB and i can't see who I called last month?? I was done at that moment.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#805

Post by [deleted] »

ramraj07 wrote: post #804
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…

I moved out of iPhone because of one such thing: the call log can only be 100 items long, like what? The most powerful processor ever, hundreds of GB and i can't see who I called last month?? I was done at that moment.

[deleted]

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#806

Post by jamil7 »

shantara wrote: post #732
jamil7 wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah it's in a really bad spot on macOS still, iOS performance is a lot better. I'm sure all of this can be overcome but I'm not certain it's a priority for them.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#807

Post by growt »

Yes, my wife recently lost a bunch of files on her iPad. The files just dissapeared and are nowhere to be found. Of course I thought that it must have been a "user error", but some research showed that this a bug that affects a bunch of people [1][2] (might only affect files that you've written into with an apple pencil).

If apple can't even guarantee the users documents, I wonder what else might be wrong.

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255156283?sortBy=rank

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/19evmb8/files_disappe...

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#808

Post by thedanbob »

ljm wrote: post #790
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the auto complete on proper nouns. I'm typing someone's name and it'll often get corrected and will take more than one attempt for what you actually intended to stick. No, Ellie isn't a typo and I didn't actually mean Emma.

Not just proper nouns. Often it tries to autocorrect a real but less-commonly-used word to a more common but completely different word.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#809

Post by ChildOfChaos »

i've got some issues with my older iMac from 2015 after my internal SSD failed and i'm booting from an external that all appear to be software related with little I can do about it as my Mac is out of support, even though these issues must have existed previously, it's so frustrating.

-- On Monterey no disk images will mount and no external drives or SD card. Everything is fine on older versions of OS, some forum posts suggest others with the same issue, but without any resolution. The only way to get DMG images to mount is to use a third party mounter like FastDMG, upgrading to Ventura fixes the issue with Disk images and my SD card, however this is not an officially supported OS for my model, so I have to use OpenCore Legacy patcher to achieve this. External drives still do not mount, the OS just doesn't see them at all, even in the recovery mode for these OS versions However running another MacOS inside Parallels I can access them, so they must be accessible somehow.

-- This is all perhaps caused by my firmware being out of date, i'm running 173.0.0.0 and it should be something like 530.0.0.0, this is updated with the operating system, however it has been found that on custom order macs with SDD's rather than the standard fusion drive, such as mine, the firmware update fails due to it incorrectly looking for a drive via the sata port. Apparently this is fixed on 195.x but you have to open up the iMac and plug in a drive into the Sata port just to get it to do this.

Extremely frustrating considering I paid a lot extra to spec this model up but due to Apple's mistake with the firmware updates (Or other unknown issue) I'm left with these problems. Since the machine is no longer in support, Apple aren't interested in helping.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#810

Post by typewithrhythm »

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…

The reason everything is built on millions of layers is not because it is actually required, but because we have invested a whole lot of time in building frameworks so that mediocre programmers can get fast results.

I would call it a culture issue, where we are not able to seperate out places where this is fine, new interesting apps are great, I want as many as possible.

From places where it's destructive, I would be happy if none of the ways I interact with an os had changed since windows 7, but it had gotten faster, more secure, and resilient.

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