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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#821

Post by alt227 »

latexr wrote: post #789
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want any goddamn reports!

Which is a valid but entirely different complaint from claiming those reports are being sent every 15 minutes. What sense would that even make? They could just log your data anyway without you knowing or providing a setting for it. Why would they make it a toggle for something you need to provide authentication to access?

Are those reports backed up in the automated backup tool which posts an encrypted backup to your icloud which only Apple can decrypt and view?

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#822

Post by jrcplus »

Idea: everyone, anytime you hit a bug or error, post a screenshot to the social media of your choice and tag it say #applesoftware. Over time this might start attracting PR attention, which seems to be most effective at getting Apple to do anything.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#823

Post by markus_zhang »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #738
henry_viii wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never used an iPhone, but TBF these functionalities are equally hard on Android phones I used (but I never used any "higher end" phones such as Pixel). I came to the conclusion that human fingers are not exactly the best tools for them.

Not sure about iOS, but Android has sort of magnifier when users start to select so they can clearly see what characters they are selecting. It definitely helps. However, what I should want is some sort of arrow keys that I can press to select characters instead of relying on my fingers.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#824

Post by michelb »

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.…

Apple intelligence cannot be enabled in my country, yet sometimes when I do an action in Mail (desktop), I get a popup with a summary of my email asking me something about it.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#825

Post by mherrmann »

> Premium Hardware, Struggling Software

This sums it up well. The hardware is great, the software isn't.

I recently programmed the same app for iOS and Android. iOS took twice as long, simply because Apple's APIs suck. Case in point: The background task APIs (plural, yes, unfortunately) are so bad that Apple felt compelled to publish a video "Background execution demystified" [1]. If a dev creates an API and then has to publish docs "[my API] demystified", then the API sucks. Period.

I value stability and the freedom to configure the OS to my liking. macOS is stable but forces countless things on me that I do not want. Windows offers freedom but comes with many glitches. Linux is extremely stable and puts me first by letting me configure it. I love it.

[1]: https://wwdcnotes.com/documentation/wwdcnotes/wwdc20-10063-b...

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#826

Post by simoncion »

hanikesn wrote: post #167
packetlost wrote: post #12

I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who…

Linux seems like the opposite to me a slow marathon to achieve perfection. With pipewire, systemd and wayland there's less cruft than ever and you get the best out-of-the-box experience since it's inception.

Did pipewire actually build in their pulseaudio and JACK emulation, or is it still acting as a shim between already-running pulseaudio and JACK daemons?

Also, (FWIW) I've a fine time with JACK2, openrc, and xorg. I had to do some manual work to tell JACK which sound card to use and to set up the pulseaudio backfill for software that doesn't know how to speak to JACK, [0] but everything else just works.

[0] The "tricky" part was disabling all pulseaudio backend modules but the JACK backend. This was -of course- not tricky at all.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#827

Post by alt227 »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #753
robinsonrc wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current plan is to basically never move on from macOS 14 and perhaps move away from macOS entirely when the time arrives that I’d be forced to upgrade (new hardware needed, etc)

For reasons I am not sure about, When a new major version of macOS is released macOS developers seem obsessed with quickly releasing a new version of their apps that will only run on the newest operating system. From then on any updates and bug fixes are only available on the latest macOS If you don't upgrade to the latest and greatest macOS you are out of luck. I fear the day when all new apps must target the M* chi…

> When a new major version of macOS is released macOS developers seem obsessed with quickly releasing a new version of their apps that will only run on the newest operating system.

This is encouraged by Apple to help with their planned obsolescence of old OS versions. With new macOS versions there is often a requirement to rebuild your apps with the latest version of Xcode which ships alongside it. This is because Apple changes lots of its internal APIs etc between OS versions, and only the latest version of Xcode supports those changes.

Also the App stores only allow new and update submissions for apps built with the latest SDK, which in turn must be coded on the latest version of Xcode, which itself cannot be run on older versions of macOS.

Is this all a conspiracy to keep people buying new computers and phones? I cannot say, but if I wanted to keep people bying more of my product this is how I would do it.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#828

Post by metaltyphoon »

layer8 wrote: post #304
progmetaldev wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't qualify it as fair, both are pretty horrible.

At least the window settings app can be resized like normal apps

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#829

Post by possibleworlds »

pndy wrote: post #799
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.…

> After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled Lemme list some of my recent nitpicks: I never used Bluetooth that much because I had no devices either for the phone or tablet, so I kept it disabled. But every major or minor iOS update was turning it on - I ofc understand that some devices may want to reconnect after update. But that doesn't explain why si…

I'll just hop on this chain since you commented recently.

I recently updated a very carefully managed (over many years) local Apple Music library to sync with cloud Apple Music. One funny (captive laughter) side effect was performance issues I had long since learned to live with just disappeared. For some insane reason running a completely local library is much, much laggier than one that is constantly syncing with the cloud.

The real fun, however, was when I recently created a smart playlist and noticed it was missing tracks that obviously should have been matched. I luckily found an older smart playlist with the same rule and lo and behold this one contained the tracks that were missing. So two smart playlists, exact same single rule (equating to "not Favourited"), with > 1000 difference in total tracks.

This is stressing me out. How can I trust any of my smart playlists anymore? Is my library corrupt, or is it just a bug? Who knows, and who knows when or if it will ever be fixed. I can list numerous other bugs with playlists in the macOS Apple Music app that have existed across 2 or more previous major releases.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#830

Post by virtualmic »

ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote: post #803
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 m…

> 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 face none of the issues on my Samsung S23 phone, which the parent commentator describes - no issues in phones calls (I make 4-5 calls daily, mix of WhatsApp & regular calls), no major issues in Google Keep (which I use 2-3 times daily, specially never of a note becoming "blank"), and again no major issues in the Google App Store or updates (which I use on an average once a week).

So maybe, the software quality varies by user experience rather than one platform being universally better.

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