
Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut - tosh
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios-14-features-changes-testing-after-ios-13-bugs
======
hylaride
There have been glaring bugs/issues lasting ages in both MacOS and iOS.

For years apple mail on iOS would always show 1 unread message in "all mail"
for gmail.

On my iPhone 11 pro (and the 6S i had before it) the camera app will sometimes
only show a black screen and a freaking _reboot_ is needed to get it working
again. I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that.

Multi-monitor support was _so good_ on MacOS up until maybe 5 years ago. You
could easily PIN apps to certain monitors and virtual desktops on specific
monitors. If you started an app on a laptop and then connected to external
monitors apps would automagically go where they were supposed to. Now it's a
complete mess.

MacOS's UI seems more jerky in the last two major releases.

Time machine's performance has slowly gotten worse and worse, leaving me
having to cancel backups just so I can go home.

I could go on. The worst part? These have all been ignored open issues that
other people have submitted and for _years_ they just sit there...open.

~~~
TheRealWatson
> I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that

You just missed taking pictures. You were still there to live them :)

~~~
pushpop
So true. My parents didn’t miss out not having a camera phone and neither did
my grandparents. It’s amazing how dependant we’ve become on capturing moments.
Sometimes even to the detriment of actually experiencing them.

~~~
Razengan
Might be related to the "Terror Management" theory. :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298470)

We probably feel the need to preserve/hoard everything in a subconscious
desire for immortality.

~~~
xchaotic
It’s interesting that individuals have this desire- the goal should be
survival of the species not of an individual

~~~
Razengan
Like insects? No, thanks.

------
Razengan
I'm one of the most staunch Apple supporters but even I must admit that since
WWDC 2019, I have spent more time fighting Apple's bugs than actually using
any of the new features...or the old features that _used to_ work flawlessly
(like iTunes/Music.)

Not just on the user side, but the developer end as well.

Perfectly valid code which used to work up till Xcode 11.1 throws errors
inside the Swift runtime or toolchain on Xcode 11.2 (and 11.2.1). Even the
Swift engineers on the official forums don't seem to know what you can or
can't do with the new language features.

And after seeing bugs I reported eons ago still not fixed, it feels futile to
even bother reporting them anymore.

It's _still_ not quite bad enough to make me want to flee back to Windows or
switch to Android, but it does make me depressed, like there's nothing left in
the world that "just works", except maybe my Nintendo Switch.

~~~
kenshi
Why be a "staunch <Company X> supporter" at all?

It's one thing to admire the work/output of a company, but once you identify
as a "Company X" supporter you are just closing yourself off to being critical
of "Company X".

I cringe at every WWDC session when people applaud for minor features (new
themes in Xcode!) and long overdue bug fixes.

I am embarrassed whenever someone online talks about a problem they have with
Apple hardware or software, and they are met with passive-aggressive replies
along the lines of "I've never seen that problem, what are you doing wrong..."

I develop for and use Apple platforms. I really like some things they have
done, but I'd never consider myself an "Apple supporter".

I'm the customer, they are the vendor. They are here to support me.

If they don't do a good job at that, I'll try to find another company to take
their place.

Also companies change, as do their priorities. There was once a period in when
MS were making the best internet browser (really)...

~~~
Razengan
> _Why be a "staunch <Company X> supporter" at all?_

Because they consistently make what I want to see. For example SwiftUI, which
I had been waiting for my entire life.

Call it the lesser evil, compared to my experience with other companies, if
that's more acceptable for you.

Here's a funny observation: I have 20+ upvotes on my previous comment
criticizing Apple, but a negative score for the supportive statements on this
one.

So you see, some people will staunchly attempt to bury anything remotely
positive about something they begrudge, so others feel they have to balance
that out. :)

~~~
kbenson
Likely because you can like a company, or _portions of their output_ , without
being a "staunch supporter", depending on your interpretation of what that
even means. I think most people are interpreting being a staunch supporter
with ignoring their shortcomings. You may not mean it that way, and may
correctly criticize them for their missteps (it sounds like you do, since you
reference criticism), but if people interpret this comment as defense of
defending Apple in all circumstances, then they're likely to down vote.

I think this is less a case of people being too for or against a company, and
more people interpreting the same statement differently depending on their own
context.

~~~
Razengan
> _a "staunch supporter", depending on your interpretation of what that even
> means._

I just figured it was a nicer word to use than fanboy/fangirl.

~~~
kbenson
Yeah, I think it mostly is, but by the same token it might bring some of the
baggage of those terms with it, such as support consideration of the facts, or
refusal to accept any negative assertion, which is also sometimes associated
with fanboy/fangirl. It's more to do with whether you use the term in a
positive or negative context, as that will likely control what attributes it
brings to mind. If you aren't careful to define that context, you're allowing
others to define it themselves (even if it makes little sense in most cases
for people to be using it in a way most would consider negative but applied to
themselves. Exceptions do exist though...).

------
CoolGuySteve
The same thing happened when we were working on Leopard under Bertrand.
Because the developer toolchain switched to Objective C 2.0 with garbage
collection enabled, the OS was unusable for development for months at a time.

Development took twice as long as planned, the release was fairly bloated, and
required 2 or 3 updates in the first month or two.

When Craig took over he introduced a sprint model so that there were periodic
relatively stable releases. If something wasn't ready and there were still
sprints left, you could push it back.

But it sounds like there has been milestone creep causing those sprints to
either become more heavy or less missable. And I'm guessing the consequences
for missing a sprint are more career limiting than they were when the
methodology was still new.

It's like Rich Hickey said, we're smarter than runners, we just fire a new
starting pistol every 100 yards and call it a new sprint:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPT-
DuG0UjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPT-DuG0UjU)

~~~
LgWoodenBadger
I hate that Rich Hickey quote.

Sprints are just the classic computer science "divide and conquer" strategy
applied to development.

~~~
AgloeDreams
The problem with divide and conquer is that the finished product has to be
back in one piece that makes sense. Often times the act of `divide` also
reduces context for what conquer actually is.

Plus `divide and conquer` is used like a task you need to do with the goal of
finishing, but Sprints never quite get to the end of the conquer phase,
generally it's divide, and conquer...some tasks, and then divide in some
more... and more... and more. You end up losing all sight of what you are
actually trying to do or make.

The only way to fix sprints in a small to medium size company that exists and
is shipping products is to realize that they should be tied to a set series of
tasks and that every now and then you really need a stop point where you can
take a week or two, define what your goals, needs, and issues are for the next
6 weeks or so, and then start anew with a clean backlog and roadmap with full
buy in from the developers of what they are making. Otherwise you just turn
developers into ticket pushers for tickets that they themselves do not
understand, or have any context to understand why they are doing them. It's
depressing and causes burnout and bad products. It's a symptom of the hustle
culture bleeding into development and a lack of understanding that having long
term end goals and sustainable pace is healthy to good products rather than
`move fast and break things`.

------
chmaynard
When I first worked at Apple 30 years ago it was widely acknowledged that R&D
had a two-tier system for software development. The rockstar engineers got to
work on new stuff and the less productive/creative engineers cleaned up their
mess. Bringing new features to maturity was a low-prestige activity and was
not rewarded as well. The top engineers joined the hot new projects, shipped
the first version, and then moved on to the next big thing. That pattern
changed somewhat after Steve Jobs returned, but it still seems to be the case
that testing and maintenance are not a very high priority.

~~~
sixstringtheory
Sounds like just about every software job I’ve had over the last 7 years. It
sounds like a mgmt problem to me. Either they can’t tamp down the devs who
move too fast and break things, or they are driving the devs to do so.

~~~
dhagz
It's a lot harder to demonstrate how the value added by improving stability.
Like, what's the difference between 99.93% availability and 99.95%
availability? How do you show that increasing test coverage by 5% helps users
and brings value to the company?

"Hey, so you know how our application is pretty much always working, but will
error out once every other blue moon? It does that less now," doesn't sound as
flashy as "Look at this thing our app does that it didn't do before!"

~~~
dmitrygr
> what's the difference between 99.93% availability and 99.95% availability?

Quite literally a 40% reduction in crashes

~~~
CamperBob2
As so many people have pointed out in this thread, though, crashes are far
from the only thing that can keep a user from being able to take advantage of
a given feature.

------
gok
It's interesting to me how widely followed the "Snow Leopard" myth is. It was
a total disaster of a release. There were egregious issues in libdispatch
which led to the entire API being re-written at least once. There were also
random hangs due to major kernel scheduler changes for the first several point
releases. Snow Leopard also introduced OpenCL, which has basically never
worked. The Finder re-write added no features but made it slower. The 64-bit
kernel couldn't be turned on by default for years. Many of the perf gains came
from dropping PowerPC support by default with only a couple years of warning,
which I'm sure today would cause an uproar.

It got marketed as a "no features" release and that's how it seems to be
remembered. But in fact it probably was probably the highest-risk Mac OS
release ever. It rewrote a huge amount of code for almost no direct user
benefit, at time when testing was quite limited.

~~~
snowwrestler
Snow Leopard was marketed as a stability release, but what they didn't tell us
was that the stability would come at the end of the dev cycle, not at launch.
:-)

In the end, Snow Leopard did end up very stable. I'm stilling running it today
on an old Mac Mini hooked up to some old peripherals I want to keep around.
But it definitely did not start that way.

------
tolmasky
In iOS 13, there is an absolutely bizarre bug when typing your passcode into
the lock-screen: it will randomly delete one of the characters! You can
actually watch it happen, you for example type 4 characters, and then on
typing the 5th, it drops down to 3. It's absolutely infuriating, especially if
you have failed-unlocking behaviors turned on where you then locked out of
your phone after a minute if you fail X times.

The worst part is with all these bugs, you kind of feel that Apple will
probably never get to them, given there are just so many (and on top of that
Apple may just not care about non Face-ID modes of entry anymore, probably how
this bug appeared in the first place). It is especially maddening since it
feels like a cruel joke to have both the physical keyboard on the laptop mess
up entry AND the virtual one on the phone.

~~~
apaprocki
You should feel lucky you can even type to have it delete one of your
characters. On both (different) models of iPads I tried, the digit entry for
screen time password was stretched out upon wake up so that there was no
physical way to hit the “0” digit. You have to change the orientation for it
to get back into a good state so you can press “0”. This one has survived all
the updates so far! Pretty wild...

------
bluedino
13 was the worst iOS release I can remember. Photos would crash from scrolling
too fast. Mail wouldn't check for new messages for a whole day. Safari blank
screens. Replying to messages in Mail was a 50/50 proposition. The phone would
freeze for 5-10 seconds more than it ever did before. All kinds of visual
artifacts like text appearing where it shouldn't, UI elements getting orphaned
and just floating around, effects that didn't finish all the way...

~~~
faitswulff
I'm still holding off on updating my iPad, even though I really want to use
sidecar. Has iOS 13 stabilized now?

~~~
sambe
I'm on 13.2.3 and a lot of the worst things seem to be fixed. That said, I
still find some of the design changes odd and unintuitive (e.g. new editing
gestures, new Music/Mail layouts). Mail is still infuriatingly slow at almost
everything. I think you could probably call it stable (for my usage).

Note that there were also some... "interesting" iCloud sync design choices.
You need to upgrade all devices (including macOS) to be sure of proper syncing
in some cases, with odd behaviour ensuing if you don't.

------
saagarjha
> The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test
> versions, known as “daily builds,” of future software updates disable
> unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option
> to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and
> settings menu dubbed Flags, allowing them to isolate the impact of each
> individual addition on the system.

Uh, I'm not very confident on this helping; wouldn't this mean fewer people
will be using and evaluating beta components?

> Apple privately considered iOS 13.1 the “actual public release” with a
> quality level matching iOS 12.

It certainly didn't reach that quality level…

~~~
stestagg
> Uh, I'm not very confident on this helping; wouldn't this mean fewer people
> will be using and evaluating beta components?

Probably. But the benefit gained by doing this is that every issue discovered
should be directly attributable.

If everything is broken, it’s very easy to normalise broken behaviours, or to
deflect responsibility.

------
louwrentius
Maybe it's easy to say but it feels more like a cultural problem than a
technical/procedural one.

Why the fuck did they let this happen in the first place?

Where is this mentality that even the backside of a cabinet should be build
well?

~~~
kaolti
Because it's inevitable at a certain scale.

The brand has a momentum, even if things start getting worse for customers
there isn't an immediate response on a large scale.

A certain quality is important for the "true" advocates, but we're a small
minority. Growth is driven by at scale customers who don't notice these issues
because they're buying the products for different reasons.

In this context, improving quality to keep the hardcore fans happy costs
money, but doesn't impact the bottom line significantly in the short term.

Growth is the only goal at this scale and that's driven by other strategies
and not hardcore fans.

I guess long story short is corporations are cash machines and product quality
does not play an important part at this scale.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
That's not how it works.

How it works is that your brand suffers, and sales drift downwards.

When you attempt new projects outside of your skill envelope - a Maps
application, a self-driving car, VR/AR hardware, a move to ARM - you either
don't finish on schedule, don't finish at all and are forced to cancel, or you
unleash a shit storm of bugs and negativity that costs far more than any
nominal savings you might persuade yourself you've made by not doing QA
properly.

It's a cultural problem. Not only is skimping on QA and customer support
cheap, it _looks and feels_ cheap. And that's not a good look when you're
trying to sell yourself as a premium brand.

To be fair, customer abuse is not unusual among premium brands. Prestige cars
are notoriously crap for reliability and build quality.

But Apple is a prestige _consumer_ brand, and the brand experience is the most
important asset.

If customers stop believing in the brand, all Apple has left is Dell or HP but
with nicer packaging.

------
jamroom
Apple needs another "Snow Leopard" release - spend an entire year not adding
anything - just focus on making everything work better, fix bugs, etc.

~~~
saagarjha
They just did that with iOS 12/macOS Mojave. I guess they need another one?

~~~
criddell
iOS 12 and Mojave are fine. Just stay there, fix bugs, and add support for new
hardware.

~~~
wlesieutre
iOS 12 is fine for phones maybe, but iOS 13 (or iPadOS if you prefer) is a
pretty big change for iPads in terms of power-user features.

USB storage support, network drive support, multiple instances of apps,
multiple apps switchable in slide-over, major improvements to Safari.

I've run into some bugs, but I wouldn't switch back to 12.

EDIT - Forgot to mention the contextual menus, which are new to iPads this
year as well. I think iPhones with 3D touch hardware had similar actions
available in some places, but it's a big addition for iPads and the fact that
it's supported across all devices now means that 3rd party devs will bother to
implement it.

~~~
criddell
Storage support is a sensible addition to the OS for sure. It should also be
in iOS.

I think the multiple app stuff was a mistake on Apples part. It complicates
the OS significantly and starts to make it feel like a computer operating
system.

Improvements to Safari make sense, but then I'd consider that an application
and not part of the operating system.

~~~
wlesieutre
Multiple windows is easy to ignore if you don't want it, but especially with
the side-by-side multitasking view it's very nice to be able to group app
instances together as they relate to things you're working on, and not
sweating the fact that there can only be one web browser window.

For instance, if I'm doing research on something, I might have Notes or
MindNode running with a copy of Safari paired alongside it. Those research
related tabs are kept in their own world, not mixed with my main Safari
instance and it's accumulated tabs.

And then let's say I'm writing an email about my travel plans and want to pull
up the airline's website to look at my reservation. I can do that in a
separate Safari instance instead of taking away the research sidebar from next
to my MindNode document.

And the new Mail message can be its own window while I write it. If I need to
refer to another message in my inbox, I don't have to close the draft I'm
writing to get back to my inbox, and then go fetch it out of the drafts folder
when I want to get back to it. Just swipe over to the main Mail window and
swipe back when I'm done.

Or take an app like GoodNotes, where I have several notebooks on different
subjects. I can open two of them at once instead of having to close notebook
A, open notebook B, make a note, close notebook B, reopen notebook A every
time I want to jot a quick note down in a different topic.

There's an adjustment period if you want to get in the habit of thinking about
the iPad this way. But being able to operate it in terms of different tasks
and projects, leaving their workspaces intact and unpolluted to come back to
later, is a much more productive setup than having to play "How can I best
allocate my single instance of the text editor?"

~~~
criddell
It's hard to ignore it when the introduction of the features destabilizes the
rest of the operating system.

I get how multiple windows is great for productivity, but I'd rather seem
Apple push macOS for those use cases and keep the iPad as simple as possible.

~~~
wlesieutre
I've not seen any OS stability issues, my main issue has been the Mail rewrite
not listing messages reliably. Pretty frequently messages show up as a blank
white box. But it hasn't been crashing.

13.2 had an issue with apps terminating and having to be relaunched every time
you backgrounded them, but that hit the iPhone too so it wasn't an iPad multi-
window problem. Speculation I saw was blaming iPhone 11 camera RAM
requirements for more aggressive memory management, but who knows.

------
strictnein
A long time bug that drives me insane: the dock forgets how to hide itself on
full screen apps. Here's someone talking about it in March of 2012:
[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3797657](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3797657)

Same exact issue exists today.

~~~
mh-
this one drives me nuts. it's frequent enough that I have a shortcut to
trigger `killall Dock`

------
nayuki
It's almost like Apple iOS/macOS and Microsoft Windows 10 are competing with
each other, to see how fast they can push out buggy software upgrades and
skimp on quality assurance. The grass is greener on neither side.

~~~
saagarjha
How about other pastures, like Android or Linux?

~~~
swiley
Android is crap but if you stay away from “desktop environments” and a lot of
the GUI software Linux OSes aren’t bad.

------
travisgriggs
Does anyone have more detailed information as to _why_ the degradation?

Has the balance of push push push for features just passed a tipping point of
what developers could mostly keep up with?

Is it a process thing (eg the review process changed or testing practices
changed)?

Or a developer skill level thing? Are seasoned coders being replaced by less
seasoned ones?

Or is there a finger to be pointed at some piece of technology (for example,
I've been pretty pro on swift for the last couple years, but recently have
become aware of what a nightmare the marriage of closures and ARC are and how
easy it is to make mistakes around them)?

~~~
saagarjha
This year's releases had a lot of new things in it, and a number of projects
saw significant rewrites. Presumably engineers had a hard time keeping up with
bugs?

------
wruza
Idk what other errors are, for me it’s the input system that degraded with
years of ios releases down to what it is now. For one, this hn comment entry
field is now a minefield that jumps around if you’re not careful enough to
drag the cursor beyond the input borders. Moving cursor and selecting text
(both in input and in div) became so much difficult. Sometimes I also cannot
get rid of selection in url bar to be able to scroll it right to see what
/path is. While writing this message I missed spacebar around 10 times. My
first iphone was 4 (ios 5). Idk how they did it, but I barely missed a single
letter. On ios 7 keyboards changed and typing errors became a thing. I
remember every single release that broke some of my basic functions: 7, 9, 10,
12, now 13.

I’m not talking about “complex” things here, it is what worked and then
someone broke it step by step. Whoever is responsible for that, please get an
early retirement. You did enough to me.

------
dep_b
I'm a bit worried about macOS releases since it's never something that really
excites me anymore, apart from the new file system. I just need a robust
system to work with.

iOS 13 was jam packed with new features, but released too early because of
hardware release schedule. I waited it out until 13.2. Still some weird bugs
here and there like adding a phone number as a name from new contacts from
incoming calls.

------
gurumeditations
Safari, at least on the iPad, is so incredibly buggy in iOS 13 that it’s
practically unusable. Not to mention the ridiculous system where it opens new
Safari windows, not tabs, and then doesn’t give me any option to close them.
And when Safari bugs out, and I have to force close it, it loses every single
one of the tabs I have open, and it didn’t do any of this garbage before iOS
13.

~~~
jrgaston
Arghh, those floating Safari windows. How do you get rid of them?

~~~
technosmurf
When you already have Safari running (or any other app), pull up the dock from
the bottom edge of the screen.

Then press the Safari icon (or alternatively, press and hold on the Safari
icon and choose "Show All Windows").

Now, all of those floating Safari windows are shown, and you can "toss them
away" and close them.

Yes, it's not a very intuitive discovery process :(

~~~
redwall_hp
I definitely appreciate the need to have multiple windows of the same app on
an iPad, but the way Apple went about it is...bizarre, clunky and not exactly
intuitive.

Considering Exposé and its default gestures exist on MacOS, you'd think maybe
they'd take cues from that?

------
crazygringo
I'm genuinely curious, does anyone here know if there's an underlying
framework issue behind so many iOS bugs?

Because in my experience _so many_ bugs seem to have something to do with some
kind of underlying data or sync model (not even remote sync, just on the
device itself).

E.g. half the time I delete a voice memo, it re-appears 10 seconds later. Or
maybe a quarter of the time I send an e-mail from the "Share" button in an
app, it shows up as an unsent draft when I switch to my Mail app (despite the
fact the e-mail was actually sent). Or sidebar shortcuts to folders I create
in the Files app gradually and randomly disappear over the course of
days/weeks.

It's like there's some funky async stuff going on behind the scenes, where
either a common library has flaws or race conditions that seem to pop up
everywhere, or it's so hard to use the library correctly that even the
internal teams which program the apps are making mistakes with it.

~~~
eddieh
I can't speak to the specifics, but after working on a significant third-party
SDK for iOS I can say that libdispatch isn't hard to use correctly, but it is
easy to use incorrectly. Worse still, once you get yourself into a libdispatch
mess it is hard to escape without a total rewrite.

------
sleepinseattle
Feature flags are not a panacea for software quality. They actually make your
test matrix much larger, as on any given system a different set of flags might
be enabled.

------
jackall
My iPhone's battery has been discharging like crazy after I updated to iOS
13.2.2. Without any active usage of the phone the entire battery discharges in
about 4 - 5 hours, due to apps' background activity. I'm having to charge the
phone 2 - 3 times a day.

According to [https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/11/19/apple-
io...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/11/19/apple-
ios-1323-ios13-release-should-you-upgrade-iphone-update/), the battery
discharge issue has apparently not been fixed, so I'm not planning to update
my phone yet. Hopefully it gets fixed in the next iOS release.

------
gonational
Dear Apple,

1\. Return text selection back to 12.x functionality - it is now _literally_
impossible to e.g., select a single word from a link’s anchor text without
first selecting some random portion of text (half the page at times), and then
walking back the blue knobs for 45 minutes. The ideal UX is to offer to select
a word if I click next to it, and if I press down and hold, give me a movable
cursor every single time, and never automatically start selecting whole chunks
of text just because I hold my finger down. The current iteration of this
functionality randomly switches between both of those modes.

2\. allow me to use dictation in offline-only mode so that it actually works
AND so that I don’t get 400 words into a message and then watch my phone
magically backspace the entire thing and then type it out again, incorrectly,
in slow-motion

3\. Stop putting my cursor in capitalization mode every time I backspace a
word when I’m typing

4\. After I dictate a block of text, please do not make it look like you have
highlighted the entire block of text for me, when in actuality it’s not
highlighted at all, and if I tried to do some kind of operation with the
assumption that it’s highlighted (like delete), I will be disappointed by
instead performing an accidental operation

5\. If I start typing a URL into Safari, let me backspace the characters at
the same rate that I have typed them (currently, if I open Safari and click
into the URL bar and start typing “new” like I’m going to go to
“news.ycombinator.com”, but then decide I first want to go to “google.com”, I
have typed 3 chars (“new”) so I should be able to hit backspace 3 times and
then start typing “google”. Instead, I must first hit backspace one time to
get rid of the auto suggestion because hacker news is in my favorites list.
Then I can hit backspace three more times, then start typing “google“. This is
an idiotic bug.

6\. If I am using dictation and then I click somewhere in the text to prepare
to fix the inevitable incorrect word that dictation will put in my text, but I
click there before I end dictation, and then I end dictation, please do not
insert everything that I said twice, once originally where the cursor was, and
then a second time where I clicked to make that correction. I don’t think
there is much value in having two copies of the same paragraph, one inserted
into the middle of the other...

7\. If I try to share a photo while in the Camera app by selecting Share >
Messages, and then I turn my phone vertical while I’m typing the message (to
make typing easier), please don’t make it so that I can no longer see the
keyboard, the text input field, or the photo that I’m sending, and I have no
way of getting out of the situation besides losing the message, by closing the
app and starting over

8\. If I click in the Camera app to start recording a video, start recording
immediately instead of waiting a variable amount of time between half of one
second and two whole seconds, causing me to A) miss whatever I was trying to
record or B) click a second time, resulting in me stopping recording... and
missing whatever I was trying to record

9\. If I open the Camera app, I am, at that moment, more interested in seeing
the Camera app open then I am seeing a black screen with no functionality. Can
we make the default such that the Camera app is what I see instead of a black
screen that doesn’t go away until I restart my phone? I like that camera
feature better than the black screen.

... please add to this list in replies

~~~
corobo
Anyone else have it where the keyboard animates up in super slowmo?

I occasionally have it happen when pulling down to do a search and aside from
it bring completely uncanny valley creepy it never quite finishes it’s
animation so I can’t use the keyboard to type anything

Unfortunately I’ve not found any rhyme or reason to it to report the bug aside
from what I’ve typed above “sometimes iOS is weird” would probably not get a
response

------
MiguelBranco
It's not so much how you screw up - the sheer complexity of all this makes
errors practically inevitable -, it's how you live up to it and act the day
after. So let's see; these are good indications, but let's see how they
deliver next.

------
hellomyguys
The most infuriating bug for me is on OS X where I'm randomly asked to enter
my iCloud password continuously. This bug has existed for years. Absolutely
bewildering when it happens and there's nothing you can do to suppress the
system pop-up.

------
tracer4201
My biggest gripe with Apple is they keep pushing out “features“ that I don’t
want, and I end up with a net negative because of all the new bugs.

I never had crashes on my iPhone, ever, period, until the recent iOS 13
update. Photos crashes on me. The text messaging app crashes on me. Safari
crashes just about every other day. Apple Maps, which had gotten so much
better over the years, is now crashing too. Screw the new iPhones. Apple, you
crapped on my relationship with you by screwing up what I’ve already paid you
for. How do you expect me to trust you and give you even more of my money?

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/eZ2He](http://archive.is/eZ2He)

[https://outline.com/xFAH3J](https://outline.com/xFAH3J)

------
ksec
I am wondering it this is because of Swift.

And after 5 years I am also wondering if Swift was the wrong bet.

Especially on the Mac, no one buy a new machine every year, and hence the Mac
as a platform are more for new comers and replacement cycle. So as long as the
hardware were kept up to date, they will come. Why not just stop making new
features on macOS and start fixing bugs and paying down those technical debt,
all the way down from the Kernel to application layers.

I cant even name 5 features that were must have in the last few macOS release.

~~~
saagarjha
> I am wondering it this is because of Swift.

It is not.

------
classified
I'm just glad my phone is still on iOS 12. I'll hope for the best and wait for
iOS 14 to ship. And not updating at all is still an option.

It has been this way with macOS for several years now, and iOS has gotten just
as bad: You cannot, under any circumstances, update a device that you depend
upon to the newest OS version available. It will take at least 6 months to
iron out the worst bugs, and sometimes you need to skip the whole release and
hope that the next one will be bearable.

------
swiley
I really like the “we finally fixed text editing” thing.

Try editing something in a text area with more text than fits in it without
scrolling to see how “fixed” it is.

------
mberning
It is unfathomable to me how the iOS ecosystem has so many features that don't
work well eve after years of being in the wild and being available on millions
of devices. Things like handoff, continuity, personal hotspot, etc. still do
not "just work". I honestly wish they would remove the features if they have
no intention or ability to make it work 100% of the time.

~~~
heisenbit
I believe it is a rumor that there are many new features. Just check the the
documentation - not much moved 8-/

------
makecheck
Feature flags can’t work for everything; a more complete testing methodology
is required, and I hope there is more planned than we see here.

One issue with feature flags is identifying what a “feature” even _is_. A
single flag is insufficient to enable target features in systems of
interconnected frameworks. There will be an entire _graph_ of dependencies!
Testers will need to understand the _series_ of flags that need to be enabled
for a target feature to work.

And of course, there is a risk that this will make disabled features seem like
bugs themselves! I am imagining Apple colleagues having to waste time
reminding their testers _how_ to enable a feature, after receiving a “bug”
report about something not working.

------
acoye
I wonder if some day they will come up with another Snow Leopard. Or if the
size of teams and the complexity of the product line is an inescapable doom
pit.

------
georgespencer
Apple parrots their OS update metrics as a leading indicator of customer
engagement / satisfaction with the platform & how sympathetic they are to the
difficulty for developers of putting out software for new hardware every year.
I'm interested to know the rationale for them putting out weekly releases vs.
fortnightly or monthly. It seems like they could burn a lot of goodwill with
casual users.

~~~
saagarjha
> I'm interested to know the rationale for them putting out weekly releases
> vs. fortnightly or monthly.

Apple doesn't push out weekly releases to the public. Are you suggesting that
they should?

~~~
georgespencer
In the last 11 days we have had two public releases of iOS.

That’s MORE than one per week.

~~~
pertymcpert
That's due to necessity, not due to choice.

~~~
georgespencer
My entire point is: what determines that it's necessity?

None of the updates included fixes to critical bugs or security flaws AFAIK;
they were incremental improvements in stability.

Who is determining that patch 1 needs to go out rather than being rolled into
patch 2? On what basis?

~~~
pertymcpert
I think they were critical fixes.

------
pier25
I don't use iOS much as I only have it on an iPad Pro, but Safari has this
annoying thing where you tap a button or a link and nothing happens. The CSS
changes so you know the tap event has occurred, but nothing happens. You have
to tap again to navigate or submit a form.

Of course this happens on all iOS browsers since all are running on Safari web
views.

~~~
saagarjha
> Safari has this annoying thing where you tap a button or a link and nothing
> happens

This might be the new heuristics to make desktop-class browsing work.

~~~
andrekandre
it’s most likely ‘onHover’ behavior since ipad now identifies as a mac, so
probably most css/js is assuming you have a mouse most likely...

it was like this in the early ios days before css media queries

------
tosh
> The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test
> versions, known as “daily builds,” of future software updates disable
> unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option
> to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and
> settings menu dubbed Flags

~~~
jtbayly
That’s nice and all, but I don’t really understand how that helps.

Ah, from the article:

> some “testers would go days without a livable build, so they wouldn’t really
> have a handle on what’s working and not working,” the person said. This
> defeated the main goal of the testing process as Apple engineers struggled
> to check how the operating system was reacting to many of the new features,
> leading to some of iOS 13’s problems.

~~~
saagarjha
So one of the issues is that Apple lives on their own tools, so when critical
system components are broken nobody can get work done. But ideally they'd
actually fix the bugs and try to keep the daily builds livable rather than
trying to sweep the issues under the rug…

~~~
oefrha
The problem seems to be there are so many bugs it becomes impossible to tell
what caused what. Also, mixing unfinished features with known bugs in there
might be a waste of time.

~~~
zentiggr
This reads like "our entire development process is borked. We should just hire
1000 cats because we can't control ourselves any better."

------
mitchitized
I remember the GOOD OLD DAYS(TM) where I had to pay to upgrade Mac OSX, iOS,
and paid monthly for MobileMe. You know what? That ____just worked.

Now it is all free and 99% Jankytown. Apple, take my damned money and give me
my productivity and happiness back!

------
mensetmanusman
The rollout of iOS 12 was amazing, it made my iPads faster... do that again,
every time! :)

------
asc123
Can they do this with Catalina. I get a kernel panic twice a day and forced to
reboot.

------
why_only_15
I was at the all-hands I think this is referring to, and I'm not familiar with
the flags. There are profiles, but most new features we're creating are going
in the build.

------
pizzaknife
im sorry but its hilarious to me that feature flagging is "new" to their
development process

------
dionian
Been using iOS 13 since early betas. Working great for me

