
Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy - gdeglin
https://tidbits.com/2019/10/21/six-reasons-why-ios-13-and-catalina-are-so-buggy/
======
fauigerzigerk
That doesn't make sense. None of this has changed from previous updates and
all previous macOS updates were far more stable than this one. This isn't a
particularly feature laden update either.

But now all of a sudden we get catastrophic (deleted emails) and less
catastrophic (missing Music playlists) data loss, crash bugs and generally
weird behaviour of many apps.

I have identified one particular area where bugs are endemic: iCloud and it's
complete failure to deal with multiple OS and client app versions. This is
clearly a design issue as it also manifests itself in many ways that are not
bugs as such.

For instance, Notes has gained the ability to share folders via iCloud. But if
you create a folder and then share it from a device with the latest OS
version, that folder disappears from all devices running older OS versions and
importantly also from the icloud.com website.

Reminders on Catalina warns you of such version incompatibilities and the
wording is telling. It's talking about "converting" something to the latest
version. "Conversion" shouldn't even be a thing that users need to know about
where no user controlled files are involved.

All indications are that there is a fundamental design error at the very core
of iCloud's architecture. It feels like iCloud operates not as a single source
of truth but as yet another device that participates in peer to peer syncing.
This is a very complex architecture and they haven't been able to make it
work.

So my conclusion is that iCloud which has always been exceptionally buggy has
become pervasive within Apple's ecosystem. This is what has changed.

~~~
elicash
> all previous macOS updates

My experience is this is true of recent updates, but I don't think the data
would support such a sweeping statement beyond that. I remember the dustup
around this in 2015/2016 after comments by Marco Arment:

[https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-
grou...](https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground)
[https://marco.org/2015/01/05/popular-for-a-
day](https://marco.org/2015/01/05/popular-for-a-day)

I haven't listened to the interview that Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi did with
Gruber since it aired, but my recollection is that they said that they
actually measure these things and there had been FAR fewer bugs over years
(from that date) and that we've simply come to expect less buggy software as a
result. Or at least that's my years-old recollection, I could be wrong. And so
I think what's likely is that this version is worse than recent versions, but
if you compare to, say, 10 years ago it's less buggy. Kind of like what people
experience when we have increases in the crime rate -- far better than it used
to be, even if people don't recognize it, but (1) still an increase, and (2)
we should _expect_ progress, not things getting worse!

[https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2016/02/12/ep-146](https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2016/02/12/ep-146)
(I could be wrong and maybe it was a different interview)

Anyway, there was a ton of chatter here and everywhere else in the tech
community around that time. Here's a quick example at the time (but I imagine
there are dozens of others, if not hundreds):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071)

~~~
vsl
When people stop filing bugs, because it’s futile and pointless waste of time,
then you get fewer bugs and your metrics go up...

~~~
elicash
My understanding is that they have ways of discovering when something breaks
beyond the user having to file a report. But I agree that Apple is terrible
when it comes to communicating back to people about what they file. It doesn't
happen. (They've also been bad at this for as long as I've been paying
attention to these things. I don't think they're worse than they already were
in the last year.)

------
jwr
I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should
dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from
users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I
speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so
incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch
with automated or in-house testing.

In contrast, big companies like Apple try very hard to avoid and ignore user
bug reports. There is no way to easily E-mail them, "filing a radar" is hard,
and even if you do they do their best to ignore your report.

When I wrote "percentage of revenue", I meant it. In my software business
([https://partsbox.io/](https://partsbox.io/)), I dedicate about 10% of my
time to reading, analyzing, and responding to user bug reports. Carefully
thinking about every report let me catch bugs and problems that I never would
have found. I also learned that every user bug report carries some
information: even if something isn't actually a bug, getting multiple reports
about it might point to a usability or a documentation problem.

If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing
bugs, they would not have a quality problem like they do now.

~~~
mschaef
> If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing
> bugs

Just to be clear, you're suggesting they dedicate $25B/year to bug fixing?
Seems high, given their total R&D budget for 2018 was only ~56% of that.

[https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/05/apple-2018-form-10-k-hi...](https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/05/apple-2018-form-10-k-highlights/)

~~~
Strom
Sure, why not? It's not like they're doing anything else with the money. It
doesn't have to be only software fixes either. There's plenty of hardware
issues like the keyboard.

The spending doesn't have to be instant either. Just start increasing the
spending and measure user satisfaction and bug report counts. Once you've
arrived deep into diminishing returns you can stop increasing the spending.

~~~
mschaef
> Once you've arrived deep into diminishing returns you can stop increasing
> the spending.

How do you know they're not there now? It's hard to believe they're not
thinking very carefully about these sorts of things, given how successful
they've been establishing a place in the market.

~~~
Strom
> _How do you know they 're not there now?_

I don't know for a fact but I have more respect towards Apple than to think
that the current state is the best they could do.

~~~
mschaef
> I have more respect towards Apple than to think that the current state is
> the best they could do.

$265B in Revenue and and $59B in profit seems to indicate they're already
doing pretty well. Maybe your definition of 'best' isn't in perfect alignment
with the rest of the marketplace?

I get that there are things about their products you can point at and wish
were done better, or at least differently. I use Apple products myself, so I
have a list of these things myself. But, the thing is, this isn't unique to
Apple. Have you ever been completely satisfied with a product or service? I
can't really say that I have. About the best that I've ever been able to
achieve is something that's a close enough approximation to my 'requirements'
that I can adapt what I'm doing to make it a solution.

Point is - you're never going to find something perfect. There will always be
a gap and hopefully effort on both sides to close that gap. Those financial
numbers aren't a perfect indication by any means, but they do signal that
Apple's doing a reasonably good job of closing that gap for a reasonably large
number of people willing to part with their earnings to buy Apple's products.

------
elagost
Yesterday a coworker was frustrated with his computers, and said something
insightful: "When software gets past a certain age it just gets bad." He was
referring primarily to Android and Windows (10) but it applies to every piece
of software that suffers from feature creep. If it's a cash cow they have to
keep stuffing new things in and periodically repainting it to make it look new
again.

Around 10.9, MacOS reached a "feature complete" state. Now things are just
being changed for change's sake. Running older Android versions reminds me of
how fast and slick they were, and how many features have since have just added
complexity in meaningless ways (they've changed the "silent" mode roughly 4
times since 2011?) and introduced "features" nobody asked for. Half the
features end up getting removed later.

As an example of good software that doesn't perpetually introduce bugs, take
venerable *nix Desktop Environment XFCE. (Screenshots here
[https://xfce.org/about/screenshots](https://xfce.org/about/screenshots)) It
has a release every few years and doesn't add anything major or change in
breaking ways - it works, and works the same as it always has for decades.

(edit) I had another thought - since Apple the company is now so large and
most of their resources are focused on churning out new products year after
year, it could be that they've stretched themselves too thin and the people
that could uphold the quality standard of the systems either a) aren't as much
of a hardass as Jobs was and don't have as high standards, or b) just don't
use the products on a regular basis. I bet you there's someone working at
Apple right now getting paid >$250k/yr that hasn't touched macOS in over a
year.

~~~
lisper
I'm reading this on a late-2013 MBP retina running 10.9.5 and not only does it
do everything I need it to do, "upgrading" from here would actually cause me
to _lose_ essential functionality (which is why I haven't done it). I have a
stash of replacement MBPs to replace this one with when it finally does die,
but I don't know what I'm going to do when they're all gone because AFAICT
everything Apple is producing nowadays is shit and everything else on the
market is vastly worse. Sometimes contemplating the future (or even the
present) causes me to sink into deep existential despair because I remember
what the world was like when there was a company that made computers that Just
Worked.

~~~
elagost
Although older software usually does what we need it to do, I question the
wisdom of running an Internet-connected machine with software that no longer
receives security fixes. If the various Linuxes might give you what you need,
I encourage you to check them out. Debian with XFCE and Xubuntu's LTS are both
very good options that stay stable and secure.

Out of curiosity, what would you lose functionality-wise by upgrading? What's
your mission-critical workflow?

~~~
lisper
> If the various Linuxes might give you what you need

Oh, how I wish! The problem is it's not just me. I'm the IT department for my
wife as well, and there is no way she's going to switch to Linux. For on
thing, she's a writer, and she uses MS Word. That is not going to change. :-(

Also, what to do for a mobile device? They all suck big fat honking weenies
AFAICT. We both have iPhone SE's which, AFAICT, are the least bad of all the
available options. We both tried Android once and it was a disaster.

~~~
criddell
> she uses MS Word

I've always wondered about people that are able to switch platforms. I've
always thought that you pick the operating system that best runs the software
you want to use. So it makes sense that a Word user wouldn't switch to Linux.

> We both tried Android once and it was a disaster.

Why was it a disaster? Were the apps you needed not there? I use iOS (on an
iPad) and Android (on a Pixel phone) and they both seem good enough.

~~~
lisper
> Why was it a disaster?

It was a long time ago so I don't remember the details, but it was just a
slow, buggy mess. Maybe things have gotten better since then but the
experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that I've not gone back to re-
evaluate the situation. It's an expensive experiment to conduct in terms of
both money and time. Also, the fact that Android is so intimately intertwined
with Google gives me serious pause. At least with Apple there's a chance that
my data is somewhat secure. With Google I know with certainty that it isn't
because their entire business model is to surveil me and sell the data to
third parties.

------
babesh
I have been told by multiple sources that Apple engineering salaries are not
competitive with industry leaders and haven't been for a long time. I wonder
if the dissolution of the Jobs anti compete agreements exacerbated the issue.

However Apple seems to be willing to pay for highly sought after skills.

I have also been told that they don't have company level hiring standards so
you should expect uneven abilities across different teams.

I have also been told that things were being rewritten or rather that Apple
likes to rewrite. Apple doesn't seem to be very good at limiting regressions
caused by these rewrites.

That's why there are so many crashes across the board. The crashes are caused
by bugs or changes in behavior in common frameworks. This seems to jive with
the author saying that Apple doesn't do enough automated testing.

~~~
bluejekyll
I was just speaking with an acquaintance at Apple this weekend that works in a
group in this area at Apple, and they pretty much said exactly what you just
said.

Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general
progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without
rewriting for their own platform.

~~~
arvinsim
> Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general
> progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas
> without rewriting for their own platform.

Can you expand on this? Are there limitations on MacOS that prevents them from
doing so?

~~~
pmjordan
The macOS kernel (XNU) does not have any kind of containerisation support. I
believe "Docker for Mac" is actually a Linux kernel running inside a
hyperkit/xhyve VM, and uses Linux's container support.

Apple hasn't put much public effort into making macOS work well inside a
virtual machine. Recent versions in particular, where the window compositor
uses Metal for drawing, don't run well. Apple hasn't opened the API for
writing GPU drivers, so there are no drivers for the virtualised GPUs provided
by VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox, or Qemu in their VMs. (The tightening of
code signing requirements [see the 'library-validation' flag] even locked out
nvidia from providing their own GPU drivers from macOS 10.14 onwards.) The
only way to have GPU acceleration in macOS guest VM is to pass through a whole
GPU at the PCIe device level. (I don't know if anyone has tried AMD's MXGPU
tech, which allows GPU 'slices' to be passed to VMs, with Macs and macOS VMs;
the GPUs that support it are a little too expensive for a weekend project.)

There are signs that Apple does use virtualisation internally; specifically,
they've started adding drivers for virtio devices and one of Qemu's display
adapters to macOS.

~~~
bloopernova
> "Docker for Mac" is actually a Linux kernel running inside a hyperkit/xhyve
> VM, and uses Linux's container support.

This is indeed correct. Your Docker VM lives at:

    
    
        /Users/$USERNAME/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/vms/0/Docker.raw
    

It would be very nice to be able to use libvirt from my Mac in the same way as
my Linux workstation. Or be able to migrate VMs between the two. They're both
using the same-ish CPUs, after all! (Workstation has a "i7-5820K" vs the
Macbook Pro's "i7-8850H")

~~~
pmjordan
_It would be very nice to be able to use libvirt from my Mac in the same way
as my Linux workstation._

I believe libvirt as such is supposed to work on macOS. Furthermore, recent
versions of Qemu apparently support using macOS's Hypervisor.framework. So it
seems like this should be doable, although I've not had a chance to try it
myself yet.

~~~
bloopernova
Cool, thank you for the info. It's been a while since I tried it.

------
jl6
The only iOS 13 bugs I’ve been bitten by are:

1\. Safari’s back button now seems to lose the position on the previous page -
sometimes.

2\. The share sheet has a row of Messages contacts that I didn’t ask for,
don’t want, and can’t turn off - and it creates the risk of super-
inappropriate sharing, because all my work contacts are eligible for being on
this row, seemingly at random.

~~~
Engineering-MD
I completely agree with point 2, and I have already accidentally shared a
hacker news story to a work colleague without intending to!

I can’t understand why there is no option to remove it.

~~~
DavideNL
> I can’t understand why there is no option to remove it.

You can i think... but not sure;

Settings > Siri & Search > Messages > Learn from this app < uncheck

~~~
pzmarzly
Didn't work for me. I unchecked all boxes for Contacts, Phone and Messages,
rebooted my phone, it's still there.

~~~
DavideNL
Strange. At some point after i changed multiple settings this feature
_stopped_ working for me. Instead of the "suggested contacts" i only saw a
sort of blurred panel without any contacts.

So i started searching and re-enabling things and suddenly the suggested
contacts were back. Not sure what caused it then, might have been a bug...

------
Razengan
I can only surmise (hope) that their resources are diverted towards Something
Big. Could be ARM macOS and/or AR glasses. Not that this excuses the bugginess
of their current core products.

Bringing up comparisons to Steve Jobs must be the tech equivalent of Godwin's
Law, but if there was one thing about him, it's that he actually was a _user_
of his own products, like us.

It feels like there's no one at Apple (or other companies) like that anymore.
They can only try to guess at what it must be like to be a user, so they can't
nitpick all the little things that annoy us.

~~~
manojlds
With their culture, something big will be worked on by a relatively small team
in total secrecy. The team, in name of secrecy, will repeat the same mistakes
that some other teams are fixing elsewhere.

~~~
ChrisCinelli
Secrecy inside a company may help a team to focus on only one thing but it
also prevents people from understanding the "big picture" and unless there is
a special process for "sharing lessons learned", people repeats the same
mistakes over and over. It is a little sad.

------
mlang23
As a VoiceOver user, I can provide a lesser known perspective. I've gotten
used to waiting several months until I actually install a new major release.
With the exception of iOS 12, basically all releases since iOS 5 were quite
buggy when it comes to apples screen reader VoiceOver. Luckily, applevis.com
these days publishes a list of known problems with accessibility on iOS a few
days before every major release. So those of us that depend on lesser
mainstream features feel the bad release quality already since quite a long
time. Still, with all the hickups that Apple has during new releases, their
accessibility stack is still lightyears before Android.

~~~
Razengan
> _their accessibility stack is still lightyears before Android._

Don't you mean "ahead of"?

~~~
chrismorgan
That’s what that means, “before” being the opposite of “behind”. It’s just not
as common a construction in most English locales as it used to be. It does
still get more restricted usage in this sense: when considering the future,
“this is what lies before us” wouldn’t sound out of place.

~~~
curryst
Out of this context, I would assume that "before" is being used as a location
instead of a temporal reference. I.e. "this" referring to some kind of object;
"the food was laid before us".

As a temporal reference, it's definitely valid, but it bears a somewhat
highfalutin connotation. It sounds like someone who is trying to wax poetic.

Not that I would fault a non-native speaker for using it; it's a very nuanced
and probably subjective interpretation.

------
dplgk
After doing some iOS/Mac development, I'd say some bugginiess is caused by
changing APIs and behaviors inflicted by Apple, expected to be absorbed/dealt
with by developers. They mercilessly do this with every release and no doubt
that affects their internal projects. Also, xcode has gone the way of iTunes
and ObjC was always a huge pain. It's a really hostile environment to develop
in, where you're having to play catch up all the time.

~~~
Svoka
Wow. My experience is opposite. Been in iOS development for over 10 years
already, little less for Android. App made for iOS still works with very minor
adjustments, while on Android it’s a mess. We was forced to change build
system several times, breaking changes and just silly API renames, service
depreciations, generations of push services, forcing firebase and AndroidX,
change of permission model, of concurrency model.

Honestly, I can’t even name single such change for iOS. At worse it is adding
interface implementation.

About objective c and Xcode. Just lol. I love being able to debug by pressing
single button and putting breakpoint. Android studio, being abominably ugly
and slow, and killing battery like in 1 hour, still struggles to do that for
native code.

Also, what is wrong with Objective C?

~~~
fingerlocks
> I can’t even name single such change for iOS.

I can give you one. A few years back an important interface was arbitrarily
renamed in the CoreBluetooth stack. I would look it up, but I’m on mobile and
laying in bed. Ask tomorrow and I’ll find it.

anyway, I was overseeing a half-dozen BT apps for a hardware company at the
time. Was a real pain to go through all those projects and #ifdef the
interface name for the iOS version. Very odd change since I’ve never seen
Apple do anything like that before either.

~~~
mistahenry
Lol this one was painful. And they also moved where the peripheral identifier
is located in the object hierarchy to a superclass CBPeer which was wrapped in
available MacOS 13+. So all my existing code that referenced the identifier on
the CBPeripheral where it was prior to MacOS 13 needed warning suppression
since identifier has been available through the object hierarchy on peripheral
since forever

------
song
Macos used to not have a yearly schedule. New versions took the time they
needed. I think it's actually a better model, it allows engineers the time to
test and make sure things work. Having arbitrary deadlines just increases the
amount of crunch time which usually increases the amount of bugs.

Other than that, I wish that Apple did another Snow Leopard and focused for
one year purely on fixing bugs in macos x instead of introducing new features.

~~~
Razengan
Although I like looking forward to the next macOS name unveiling and seeing
new themed wallpapers, I think operating systems should get a regular stream
of small updates for individual features and builtin apps, instead of
monolithic yearly releases branded as distinct products.

As for API sets, SDKs and third-party app compatibility, they could still be
tied to yearly milestones, e.g. "macOS 2020 January", so there would be no
breaking changes for apps which advertise compatibility with that, at least
until 2021.

Isn't that kinda what Windows 10 does now?

~~~
1_player
Rolling updates is the reason I loved using Arch Linux instead of the more
common Ubuntu.

Though if quality control is bad, rolling updates means many broken updates
spread over the year instead of an optional huge broken update every October.
Right now I'm on Mojave, works well enough, and I can wait until next summer
to update to Catalina, when hopefully the major bugs have been ironed out.

------
riffraff
This article explains why something is buggy. Maybe why Apple's software is
buggy.

It does not explain why the latest stuff is so buggy.

Is Catalina that much more complex than, say, Mavericks? Are managers playing
deadline chicken more?

I don't see evidence for this.

~~~
yashap
The author used to work at Apple, but no longer does, so they probably can’t
comment accurately on anything super recent. I agree with you, it doesn’t
really deliver on the title, but I still found it an interesting read. But
yeah, a more accurate title would be something like “common causes of quality
issues in Apple software.”

------
threeseed
Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one.

And then a few point releases later and it's all forgotten. And then the next
.0 release arrives and the blog posts reappear.

~~~
alwillis
_Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one._

I've run and tested every release going back to 2001 and it's been a while
since a macOS release has been _this_ buggy and caused serious data loss in
some cases.

So even for .0 release, this has been pretty bad.

~~~
dickeytk
May I be Goldilocks? I’ve used basically every iOS beta. Beta 1 is always
AWFUL. Then it gets better and better. iOS 13 is probably the worst, but only
incrementally so. It’s hardly worth having a fuss.

~~~
bauerd
It's not a beta, it's what they encourage their users to upgrade to

~~~
dickeytk
I know. I’m talking about iOS 13 beta 1.

If you think this is what a bad OS looks like, you should try that.

~~~
saagarjha
iOS 12 beta 1 was a lot better, FWIW.

------
tobr
Tangentially related: GitHub has already dropped support for Mojave. The whole
site is now broken in Safari 12 because it’s no longer the “current” version
of the browser. Well, it is if you run Mojave, as you need to upgrade the
entire system to get Safari 13.

I can understand not developing new features for Safari 12, but speaking of
regressions, why would you go break things that used to work a week ago?

~~~
NobodyNada
Safari 13 is supported on Mojave. You can install it in System
Preferences->Software Updates (there's a link that says "more updates" or
"other updates" or something along those lines).

~~~
tobr
Thanks you, I did not know this. I looked into it a few days ago and Apple’s
support page[1] seemed to tell me pretty clearly that I had to upgrade. I know
see the small print that says:

> For some earlier versions of macOS, Safari might also be available
> separately from the Updates tab of the App Store.

1: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204416](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT204416)

~~~
tobr
I suppose no-one is reading this thread anymore, but for the record I was now
able to check, and I do _not_ have an option to download Safari, neither in
the App Store nor after clicking the secret link in System Preferences.

------
ChrisCinelli
I did not work for Apple but this article describes exactly what I was
thinking.

Apple has very waterfall cycle. Everything is planned year after year to be
released for the September event. When the deadline approach teams realized
that are behind and they need to overwork. And when people get tired and under
pressure, they usually introduce even more bugs.

The article also nails the solution: a more Agile workflow. But it ain't gonna
happen: "Apple could address this scheduling problem by not packing so many
features into each release, but that’s just not the company culture."

~~~
steve19
They could simply decouple the apps from the OS, like Android. Safari and
Mail.app do not need to be tied to OS releases.

Android OS releases do not get nearly as much fanfare because a lot of core
functionality is decoupled from the OS: app store(s), mail clients, browsers,
todo lists, even the text messaging apps and some security frameworks.

Which of course is exactly why Apple keeps everything in one big release. They
want lots of press talking about the brand new features.

~~~
mason55
I wonder if there's some anti-trust consideration to it. If Apple were able to
update all their apps separately from the OS that would mean they had
accessible APIs to do it. People would complain a lot more loudly about Apple
blocking replacement functionality and Apple wouldn't want to allow a
replacement for, eg, the messages app.

If you integrate the apps directly into the OS then you can just say that no
APIs exist, those are just features of the operating system itself.

------
neya
I'm still on High Sierra on my 2015 Macbook Pro. I haven't upgraded my OS nor
my machine and pretty happy with it (I only accept updates within my OS
version itself) . On my home machine, I do use Mojave, which by itself is
quite buggy and I'm waiting for some more fixes before I upgrade my Macbook
Pro to Mojave as well.

I never install Apple's newer OS'es because I have a lot of development
related stuff setup on my machines and wouldn't want them to break post an
update. But so far, this lag in my update schedule has served me really well
for years now and looks like this won't be changing anytime soon for me,
either.

~~~
ChrisCinelli
The "Regressions Get Fixed. Old Bugs Get Ignored." thought does not help your
strategy.

After 6 months into the new version of iOS and MacOS, there is a lot less
attention to fix problem in the previous version of the OS. It is even worse
when it comes to firmware problems on older hardware.

If you have a 2+ year old Apple device you need to hope that all the security
bugs on your hardware are also in the latest software or hardware, otherwise
it may just never be fixed.

~~~
coldcode
Google is just as bad at this and have many of the same issues of too many
things being built at the same time. Googlers often lament that fixing bugs is
never a priority to new features which is pretty much Apple as well. Perhaps
too much complex technology is hard to do.

I work for a non-tech similarly big company that uses a lot of software (that
we make ourselves as well as integrating vendors) and our processes and
quality are even worse than Apple and Google.

But as an iOS dev I would happy if at least Xcode was built and tested
properly...

------
temporallobe
My wife updated her macbook to Catalina the other day and suddenly has low
disk space errors popping up all the time. She stores no big files and does
nothing on the laptop but school work. Turns out it created a new encrypted
disk partition containing all of her personal data, and somehow it kept adding
disk snapshots multiple times per day. After some research, it seems that this
is a known problem! I had to disable Time Machine and do some kind of tmutil
command, then delete the recent snapshots. All that and she still has very
little disk space. These are the kind of shenanigans I’d expect from
Microsoft, not Apple, where everything is supposed to “just work”. I’m
disappointed that Apple has released such a buggy OS update. Not even the
Linux distros I use have been this buggy.

~~~
FireBeyond
I had that too, and 'disk write' errors (which definitely are not). Ended up
repartitioning and reformatting, and they went away (though the install and
upgrade process even beyond all that still seemed hugely buggy - at one time
the fresh install said install couldn't complete. And then it did. With no
intervention).

------
aloknnikhil
I am also finding text selection in iOS 13 hit/miss. I either cannot activate
the text selection or I cannot select without the cursor jumping all over the
place. Also, I miss the magnifying glass for text selection. Did Apple remove
that?

~~~
justinv
Hold down the space key as if you would be force touching it. It will make
your finger become the "cursor". Slide it around as you see fit.

~~~
aloknnikhil
I was referring to text that's not editable. I can no longer select text on
the screen without peeking under my finger to see if I selected everything

~~~
slowmotiony
Yup, the magnifyig glass is gone. A horrible design choice to get rid of it
IMO

------
novok
The way I've heard one company deal with noticing non-crashing bugs is to
treat warning logs as 'crashes' with backtrace snapshots and upload them as
specially tagged non-fatal crashes. Might help apple see if clients are having
specific icloud issues.

~~~
breatheoften
This seems like a really good idea to me. Is it possible to do in a way that
preserves privacy and doesn’t basically become a hidden “telemetry” system?

~~~
saagarjha
Make it opt-in and require a privacy review every time something like this
goes in?

~~~
ChrisCinelli
If you make it opt-in, the company will not get a lot of reports. If you want
to get enough data, they should be opt-out as the others.

~~~
saagarjha
Opt-in analytics fail to account for people who turn them off because they
don't like opt-in analytics. So you might be getting more data, but it might
not necessarily be any more representative.

------
sinuhe69
All the points are sensible. But hardly any of them is new so it doesn't help
explain why iOS 13 is so buggy.

------
ksec
I could understand iOS 13 being buggy as they are trying cramp more features
in every year. But the thing is, there is nothing on Catalina that felt new,
unless you take removal of iTunes and new PodCast / Apple Music App as _new_.

99% of the macOS remain the same. The removal of 32bit Apps are long time
coming. I just dont understand why it had so many problems.

------
themagician
Ya'll just have hindsight issues.

Every MacOS upgrade has been a problem for a non-trivial number of users. It's
much more likely that YOU didn't have a problem because you were new the
platform and didn't have much stuff to migrate. If you just got a Mac in 2018
moving to Catalina is no problem at all. It will probably go flawlessly and
the only issue you might is with Adobe software… but if you use Adobe software
on any platform that's nothing new either.

Moving from PowerPC to X86 had a bunch of problems. Remember when they dropped
Rosetta completely? Or when they dropped support for the first Intel Macs
because they were 32-bit only that was a problem. Remember when they changed
QuickTime? Or dropped AFP? How about dropping Firewire? Or how about the
changes to Filevualt? Or when they integrated your Apple ID into the user
login and then removed it? Or how about all those times you upgraded and
iTunes stopped working and you had to reinstall it manually. Oh man, how about
that total abandonment of OS X Server.

Apple has NEVER been good about upgrades. Ever. You buy an Apple device and
it's good for that point in time. In 2-3 years when the warranty is up and the
platform evolves it's anyone's guess as to what will happen.

------
mikestew
_But if you file a bug report, and the QA engineer determines that bug also
exists in previous releases of the software, it’s marked “not a regression.”_

In case you were wondering why 13.1 got rolled out so fast. Snark aside, this
annoys me because the message is, "haha, didn't find it fast enough, and now
we don't have to fix it." And you jackasses think this clown shoes attitude
should be enshrined on a t-shirt?

------
steipete
I still remember at WWDC a few years back, I went with some older radars to
the labs, only to get turned down with a „You already have a workaround - why
do you care?“

...that made me mostly stop filing radars for older issues.

------
envolt
> apart from a few specific areas, Apple doesn’t do a lot of automated
> testing. Apple is highly reliant on manual testing, probably too much so.

That's the last thing I expected to know about such a big company.

~~~
ChrisCinelli
They should have more automated tests. But considering this article does not
surprise me at all. That also mean probably almost no exploration/fuzzy tests.
The kernel may be one of the few exceptions.

Considering the secrecy infra-team I would expect almost no integration tests.

That also means that Apple products are pretty bad when it come to security
contrary to what Apple's marketing wants you to believe.

~~~
saagarjha
Considering that they own the entire stack, I honestly think that one of the
unofficial integration tests for lower-level components is when the apps
sitting on fail to work.

------
huffmsa
Sounds like the past couple years of hardware "whoopsies" have come to the
software side.

Over-optimization of existing processes, what Mr Cook made his name doing,
seem to have gone a bridge too far.

Time to go back to making cool new products and not squeezing every last ounce
of blood out of existing ones. And no, starting a TV production division
doesn't count.

------
campfireveteran
I refuse to install iOS 13.0 because it's so buggy, and refuse to install
Catalina because all it does is take away features rather than adding value.
They can't seem to stop to fix what's already broken, so they add a few
things, break a few more and remove some I use and say "the emperor's new
clothes are awesome."

~~~
selectodude
13.1 is out now, and it's pretty slick.

------
jsperson
My number one iOS bug right now: "Hey Siri call Scott's conference line" That
exact text shows up on the screen...and Siri says "Calling Don's conference
line". Both are in my contacts list. I have not had this problem prior to this
week so it's probably a backend issue.

------
jmull
This narrative repeats with every release.

But is each release actually worse than the last?

My guess is, not really, though the perception persists for a couple main
reasons:

(1) For a certain subset of people, the last release really was worse than
ever before. New releases have new bugs, and those bugs will affect a certain
subset of people that isn't necessarily the same as the bug from the last
release. Those people complain (justifiably, I think) though of course people
don't create a lot of posts to describe the problems they aren't having.

(2) We all naturally forget about the annoyances of years past while focusing
on the current annoyances. (Generally, that is.)

------
pknerd
I made a mistake of installing Catalina. Since the day the system is acting up
weird. Apart from rejecting 32-bits apps, Catalina is also having memory kind
of issues. After working for a few hours things start getting weird, chrome's
extensions start crashing, if I try to open a new tab it does not let me load
the page. I also start getting messages "X Application can not be opened"
where X is ANY application I wish to open. The issue got a bit better after a
recent 1 GB update but the main problem persists. I am seriously considering
to downgrade to Mojave.

------
pcr910303
I've having a feeling that iOS 13 & Catalina is felt buggy b.c. it's not the
operating system itself that's buggy but that the updater is buggy. Many
things have changed in this release, and the installer/updater had to handle
too many different scenarios.

For example, when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, an 'Moved Files'
directory appeared that contained some files (that was once) in /usr/local/. I
don't remember such directory appearing after an macOS update, and I've had
many friends (that aren't really technical) appear that to them. There were
lots of new applications (like Music.app and Podcasts.app), and data migration
between internal databases weren't perfect.

I've installed Catalina two times, first by upgrading from Mojave and second a
clean re-install. When I upgraded Mojave, I found too many bugs that I was
worrying about data-loss, which lead to a full backup (I do backups regularly)
and a clean re-install. (Admittedly, this was my first clean reinstall for a
major macOS update) I clean-installed Catalina and manually restored all of my
files from the backup, and except for some minor bugs I'm good.

It's a pity that updates aren't seamless, but if there's anyone having trouble
with various Catalina bugs, (while Apple updates it's imperfect macOS updater)
I would recommend a full clean re-install for macOS Catalina.

~~~
jldugger
> For example, when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, an 'Moved Files'
> directory appeared that contained some files (that was once) in /usr/local/

This is a consequence of the read-only root filesystem in Catalina:
[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT210650)

Even with SIP disabled you can't do shit to that volume until you remount rw
(at least, this was reported to work in betas, haven't seen anyone test the
shipped OS).

~~~
pram
This isn't true, /usr/local is one of the writable firmlinked directories. How
else would homebrew work?

~~~
jldugger
Huh, I definitely have some moved files, and they're definitely from homebrew.
But you're right, they're not from /usr/local. Perhaps the OP made the same
mistaken assumptions of origin as I did?

------
oflannabhra
My personal feelings are that #2 (crash reporting) and #6 (complexity) are the
biggest issues facing Apple software quality. Apple is a metrics-driven
company, and when managers see bad metrics going down (like crashes), they
think they are doing a great job.

But, just like with police crime reporting, there can be an effect where
metrics are massaged or are reported differently. With Apple, I think the
issue is that crashes are avoided by design or by nature of growing
complexity, which means that metrics will continually be going down, even if
user-facing issues go up. An example being that a failed sync does not crash.

Apple has attempted to get ahead of this, recently, with the new Feedback
Assistant allowing beta users to grab and report sysdiagnoses, but there's
still a lot of work to do. I really appreciate the point the article makes:

> Besides the fact that bugs are expensive, both in support costs and engineer
> time, they’re starting to become a public relations concern.

Apple would be wise to heed this, instead of continuing to blindly trust
metrics.

------
ljsocal
Apple stores are highly tuned to and responsive to customer experience in-
store. The same is true with their AppleCare support online and via phone. The
metric they focus on is Net Promoter Score. Maybe this same model could be
applied to the OS, Apps and services. Apple user experience would be improved
methinks.

~~~
p_l
As someone described, Jobs focused heavily on the sale experience - anything
after that, unless someone (or his own experience with his product) convinced
him, was irrelevant.

The moment your money parted with you, your importance ended. This was
visible, among other things, in gutting departments that kept Apple alive when
literally everyone else had better hw & sw - people who did long-term accounts
with for example government customers, specific market areas, etc.

------
taylodl
_" No need to go into the details here, except to say that, apart from a few
specific areas, Apple doesn’t do a lot of automated testing. Apple is highly
reliant on manual testing, probably too much so."_

This tells you everything you need to know about the poor state of Apple's
software. A large, untested code base that's been in development for years and
years is going to reach a maximum point of complexity where the cost of adding
new features exceeds the business value. The ROI turns upside down. That's
when your technical debt turns into a bankruptcy and your software is kaput.
It's quite conceivable that Mac OS, which is built on top of NeXTStep OS which
dates back to the mid-80's, is reaching this state.

------
whywhywhywhy
So a few days ago we had an article on the front page claiming Windows 10 was
buggy because of automated testing, now we have an article claiming iOS is
buggy because they don't use enough automated testing...

------
chubs
I have a theory that this year tons of stuff was rewritten in Swift, because
with the lockdown of the ABI it's now possible to write libraries in Swift.
This might be why this year is a bumper crop of bugs.

~~~
saagarjha
Very little has been rewritten in Swift.

~~~
chubs
Really? I read otherwise: [https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-
ios13/](https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/)

It'd be hard to know unless you worked there. It's just a wild theory, I might
be wrong :)

~~~
dep_b
It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff
that just works in Swift especially when it has a lot of low-level code. What
they do sometimes is adding a Swift-friendly API layer around the
Objective-C(++) code. Newer libraries that are not too low-level oriented
might get written in Swift nowadays.

~~~
Someone
_”It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite
stuff”_

I don’t think _”for a resource constrained company”_ makes a difference there.

That’s good, because I have a hard time thinking of Apple as resource
constrained.

~~~
saagarjha
Apple doesn't actually have a lot of engineers on most projects.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The resources are there to hire engineers. If they're not being used to hire
engineers that's a management choice, not a resource constraint.

~~~
greggman2
I wonder if that is true in reality. I know at one company I interviewed maybe
80 people. Of those I think 3 or 4 were hired. The point being it was hard to
find qualified people. You could argue they should offer more money and they'd
get more applicants. Say they offered 4x what they are offering now. They'd
likely just end up with a bidding war with the other rich tech companies and
so in the end nothing would happen (if all the companies raise their salaries
then it seems arguable that there'd be little affect on applicants). Other
solutions might be longer term like investing in education or hiring less
experienced people and training. Others might be opening more remote offices
hoping to find more talent in other locations.

All I'm really saying is as rich as Apple is I don't think hiring more
engineers is as easy as just deciding to hire more.

------
geuis
I’ve been super annoyed at some bugs in iOS Safari. In particular, double tap
to zoom on web pages is completely broken. It’s a really old feature that just
suddenly stopped working in the new iOS release.

~~~
bori5
Yep just noticed this today. Why remove this feature ? Did people complain
about this during beta and Apple ignore it. Although zooming in by pinching
and then double tapping reverts to original size which is nowhere near as
useful. Fingers crossed for a point release that brings this back.

~~~
superdisk
It's actually still around, however on some pages Safari will go into some
sort of weird state where scrolling is slightly broken (you can't overscroll
and have the page bounce back is the indicator that you're in the broken
state). When you're in that state, double tapping to zoom doesn't work either.
I find that I mostly encounter this bug on Reddit.

------
ChrisCinelli
I expect the number of the new security vulnerabilities to be a lot more than
the bugs visible to the users. Considering the MacOS track of record in the
last year ( [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT201222](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222) ), I am pretty worried.

When I see a weird behavior I always wonder if it is a Apple's bug or a bug
introduced by something trying to exploit a vulnerability.

------
paulcarroty
It's popular tendencies today: release aplha/beta stage product and get free
QA from users. Apple isn't an icon of hardware/software quality anymore.

------
alwillis
The Apple USB keyboard on my old Mojave iMac works fine but doesn't work when
I plug it into the iMac running Catalina.

I submitted the bug yesterday.

~~~
alwillis
The latest Catalina beta released today (build 19B86a) fixed this bug—the
keyboard now works.

------
bitwize
One of the things that I heard about Windows 10 was that Microsoft switched
from testing on real hardware to virtualized testing and relying on end-user
crash reports. If Apple did something similar, that would explain why more
nonfatal bugs make it through to final release.

------
nextstep
Are they that buggy? They seem very stable to me and I’ve been running them
since the betas.

~~~
Razengan
I'm on the second-latest MacBook Pro. I completely erased my disk and
installed a fresh copy of Catalina when it was released. It's been patched
with the post-release update.

Almost all settings are at their recommended defaults, there is no third-party
stuff that modifies system behavior, and I mostly only use Apple's own apps
and services for stuff like music, books, cloud, mail etc.

And boy yes there are bugs. Not outright crashing/rebooting, but bugs there
are.

I've been using macOS since Lion and I can't recall such a dismal release as
Catalina's.

~~~
odkamkfn
So... what are the bugs?

~~~
Razengan
My earlier comment about files disappearing from Music.app: [0]

Just now, I had taken some screenshots in a game. One of the screenshots
insisted on sitting outside the Screenshots stack for some reason (Stacks
automatically collapse similar items on the desktop.)

When you open a book in Books.app, then view a different Desktop Space, the
Books window automatically jumps to that space, even without the "Show on All
Desktops" option.

Activity Monitor column widths randomly grow towards infinity.

Display Accessibility options randomly stop taking effect until relogging.

Widgets randomly rearrange themselves in the Notification Center.

Music/TV/Podcasts/App Store sometimes show no content, just blank views.

On the developer side, many bugs and missing documentation for SwiftUI.

I don't have the energy to type them all out here again after writing their
bug reports.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21318159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21318159)

~~~
Razengan
Some of these bugs like the Books issue have been there for _years_ , on
multiple machines/macOS versions.

If that doesn't happen to anyone else, I wonder if it's my iCloud-stored
settings for Books.app

------
whalesalad
This is a pretty subjective take.

~~~
kelnos
Nothing in that article seemed surprising or especially odd. Most software
development shops operate that way, especially the bits about management and
feature culling before deadlines.

From talking to a few friends who work at Apple, I believe the article when it
says they're not too big on automated testing, which is a shame.

At any rate, nothing in there seems new, as in, that it would explain why
_this year 's_ releases are particularly more buggy than in any previous year.
Assuming that is actually the case; I imagine every year's releases are pretty
buggy, but after the .1 release comes out, everyone forgets until the next
year.

------
temac
Why do any SW/QA engineer _routinely_ accept to work night and WE? Of course
this is gonna be non productive and produce only buggy crap. I expect any
reasonable person to understand that, and only very naive and/or junior people
to not.

So just don't. What is your employer going to do? Fire you? Good, you don't
want to work there anyway. And especially if you work at Apple, it is going to
be easy to find a new job.

Refuse to ship crap. Refuse to work in insane conditions. If you don't it is
not your employer's fault. It is yours. (I'm saying that in the context of
highly qualified jobs, like engineering -- it does not apply to other
situations where the employer has all the power and people are easily
replaceable and sometimes have a hard time to find a job.)

------
wrs
None of this is unique to Apple — this is all standard practice for giant
mass-market software projects. The “closed, not a regression” thing used to
drive me crazy at Microsoft. It makes no sense whatsoever!

------
greggman2
tvOS 13 seems to also be buggy. After the update I can no longer wake it via
HDMI/CEC. Once I wake it some other (inconvenient) way then HDMI/CEC control
works. Wake up was working on tvOS 12

~~~
mrweasel
I had to disable HDMI/CEC a while back because the AppleTV kept switch the TV
back to it's own HDMI, stealing "focus" from the PlayStation.

~~~
greggman2
strange, I haven't had that issue. I have 4 devices connected to the TV; A Mac
Mini (running Ubuntu), An Apple TV, a PS4, and a Switch. If I turn any one
device on it will wake up the TV if off and eventually switch to that device's
input. But I haven't had any device switch the input to the TV out of order
that I remember. I wonder what the issue is. My Apple TV is only used for 2
things, Kodi and Amazon Prime. I wonder if it's a particular app? I'm using
the Apple TV 4k (not sure if that's the newest model or if there is another
since)

Frustrating that this stuff is so finicky. It seems as simple as a USB
keyboard which seem to generally work everywhere so why is it so hard to make
work and keep it working.

------
mensetmanusman
Has anyone done back of the envelope calculations into how much it costs Apple
in bandwidth to push an update?

I wonder if that is a reason there isn’t a stream of x.1 updates every few
weeks as things are fixed?

~~~
xckfs
this already happens, but x.1 updates are beta tested. If you’re running the
beta channel, you’ll get x.1 updates shortly after launch.

These beta updates can go through a couple iterations before being released to
the public, which is why it seems like there’s a long delay.

------
m0llusk
Is there evidence that crash reports are being systematically analyzed? It
seems more likely those are collected and reviewed as convenient for the
highest priority fix investigations.

------
ganzolo
Operating system should stop trying to do everything and just focus on giving
basic functionalities in almost perfect way.

Let third party developer use those building blocks and add this magic!

~~~
lioeters
I think this is where Apple's walled-garden approach is actively harming the
growth and resilience of their operating system.

Unlike GNU/Linux, only Apple's in-company devs get to work on the proprietary
code base, to build features based on a small number of decision-makers, and
test them before release. Questionable decisions in the core don't get
questioned by a wider community of devs before they get released to the
public.

In Jobs' days, this approach might have worked better due to (maybe smaller
code base and) higher quality and dedication of their internal dev teams.

Open-sourcing macOS maybe wishful thinking, but it's not an unreasonable idea,
considering it's not their main money-maker (anymore?). In my opinion, this
would vastly improve its future development, active participation by motivated
community, and quality control.

------
KoftaBob
It's going to take a long time before I can ever trust iCloud with my files
again. Such an absolutely trash experience compared to Dropbox, Google Drive,
and OneDrive.

------
Simon_says
It’s simpler than all that. They’re buggy because Apple inexplicably decided
they need to ship a new OS every year rather than when the features are ready.
Reap what you sow.

------
m3kw9
The bugs shows very increased complexity in the system, which causes so many
exceptional scenarios that it is hard for QA to catch them all. This is the
reason

~~~
m3kw9
They need one year of tech debt payback to get things back on track like what
happened to one of their prev releases.

------
crimsonalucard
>practically impossible to create a comprehensive test suite.

Maybe it’s time for the community to look deeper into formal methods.

------
mikl
Interesting insights. It’s like a laundry list of software engineering
management failures.

------
jammygit
My wife’s Iphone lost most of its battery life since the update. Very dramatic
difference

~~~
checkyoursudo
Since the iOS 13 update, I'd had this happen almost daily:

The battery level is reported as fine and everything works like normal from
100% to about 35%. At about 35% (could be 36 or 32 or whatever any given time
--I can't see that the exact percentage matters), the phone crashes to powered
off state. If I try to start it up with the power button, I get the "plug this
in" indicator. If I start it using the hard reset method, then it'll power
back up normally, and the battery will _always_ report as 10% at this stage.
It can stay like this for a few minutes up to a couple of hours, but it'll
inevitably crash again if I don't plug it in. After it crashes, I can do a
hard reset again and it'll come back up and the battery will often show
something percentage in the 20's. Often if I try to use _any_ app in this
cycle, that'll cause a crash. If I do plug it in after a second crash, then
suddenly the battery is reporting at maybe 23% again. Like, WTF?

It only started happening since iOS 13.

I would be happy if my iphone only lost most of its battery life. :)

------
dep_b
iOS 13 was pretty buggy but the amount of improvements all across the system
has been significant. I can live with it. But installing Catalina on my daily
driver: no thanks. Xcode will force me to upgrade eventually I guess.

------
tiffanyh
A bit ironic the author use to be on the Radar development team at Apple.

------
pitterpatter
Sounds a lot like Windows development haha

------
rnantes
iOS 13 has been pretty much flawless for me. However, I am waiting to update
to Catalina until 2020 because support for 32 bit apps and OpenGL has been
pulled.

~~~
comex
Catalina does not drop support for OpenGL.

------
_Codemonkeyism
And it can't play TF2.

------
ronanyeah
TLDR, technical debt.

