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Apple Reportedly Overhauling Its Software Development Process Following Buggy Release of iOS 13
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Though I have not had a blue screen on my Window's 10 install, I certainly had it destroy my Broadcom driver on the last update. Spent a day tracking down the problem and fixing it to get normal internet speeds back by rolling back the driver.
I have not had any serious issues with Mac OS dating back to 2012 and updating with each revision. Except when I got a hardware memory issue that killed the Mojave upgrade last year. A new mainboard fixed that.
In all my years of being a member of these forums, I don't think I've ever agreed with anything so hard. They can still have "surprises" throughout the year. I.e. things that weren't announced in their roadmap but are highly anticipated and/or welcome features and improvements. But they would still have their customers' trust and loyalty by announcing roadmaps where they might say things like "We're aware of such and such issue and a fix is coming soon" or "We've heard from our customers about wanting x feature added and it's coming this year"
Also, I remember years ago (under Scott Forstall's leadership) they would host software roadmap events to do basically everything I just described. Forstall may have had his issues, but that certainly was not one of them.
Again? This stuff has been buggy as heck since the release of iOS 11.x! They need some Q&A fixes in their dev dept.
Disagree. The exit of people such as Ive shows things are and will be different going forward. Usability of products is already improving.
No, what they did was they paused development on new features and focused on stability. But that's not a great plan for the long term—you're always guaranteed a bad year, even if it's followed by a good year.
The releases need to focus on stability first, features second, forever. This sounds like a necessary procedural shakeup.
You would think that Apple would have a robust process improvement program in place that makes this kind of thing unnecessary and redundant. Or is this a symptom of a passionless employee pool where everyone just does as they're told without taking ownership of quality?
Guys, if they move away from a yearly release cycle for iOS, how are they going to sell you a new phone every year if there’s no new software on it!?!?
Obviously being sarcastic here, but I’m sure that has been their reasoning. They can’t extended the development period because they want to include a major release on every new phone, which they want to release every year. I really wish they would just let the development cycle set itself and release features/updates as they are ready, not because they are trying to met some yearly deadline.
You see the same in the video game industry. Companies will release a buggy game to meet a deadline because they will end up fixing it with post release updates.
Makes you almost wish for the good old days when compiling a program would take hours, so developers would take more care and also the lack of the internet. Once it shipped, there was no fixing it. That’s the mentality they should still have. Sure, you can fix it after the fact, but that should not be the default option to ship something broken or incomplete.
Obviously being sarcastic here, but I’m sure that has been their reasoning. They can’t extended the development period because they want to include a major release on every new phone, which they want to release every year. I really wish they would just let the development cycle set itself and release features/updates as they are ready, not because they are trying to met some yearly deadline.
You see the same in the video game industry. Companies will release a buggy game to meet a deadline because they will end up fixing it with post release updates.
Makes you almost wish for the good old days when compiling a program would take hours, so developers would take more care and also the lack of the internet. Once it shipped, there was no fixing it. That’s the mentality they should still have. Sure, you can fix it after the fact, but that should not be the default option to ship something broken or incomplete.
Scott is snickering with jazz hands singing, "There's no business like show business".
I have been saying this for a while.
I have been a very long time Apple Fan and have used their products for over 25 years. One of the best things about my early experience, especially post-Jobs' return to Apple, was how well everything just worked.
On the Mac side, this pretty much continued up until Mavericks (Although, I skipped Lion on all my Macs), and this was the first time I noticed a downgrade in the software quality. Nothing Major, but definitely noticeable.
The decline in SW quality was really apparent with iOS 9 and the horrible launch of tvOS. I think this was the first time I have ever got really frustrated using Apple Products.
I know people will point at Apple's stock price and say that Apple is doing great, and maybe they are financially, but I think they had a much better product when compared to the competition when they hardly had a market share.
Well it cost me a new iPhone, my 8 was going along fine, planning to upgrade next year once the contract was over but while on holiday my iPhone 8 stopped working with 4G and the battery went down hill. Forcing me to break the contract ($400) and sign a new deal to get a new iPhone. The only good thing is now its working again with the latest iOS update but it cost me time and money and a phone company wanting almost $600 to replace it!
They should just go back to whatever process they were using that led to iOS 12 and Mojave being one of the most stable and bug-free releases ever.
That's it.
They were doing it right in the past couple years; just go back to that.
That's it.
They were doing it right in the past couple years; just go back to that.
I acknowledge there very well could be a reason why this makes sense. But the software development labs I worked at, you were supposed to get your code working BEFORE you checked it in. Yeah, it happens that serious bugs that would affect other people would get checked in. But never have I seen a situation so bad we decided to create a system to work around how bad the code was that was checked in. We just went and shouted at the developers who checked in the bad code and made them not do it again.
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But but but.....I was told by several here that there's nothing wrong with iOS 13, and that bugs should be expected 'cause complex software.
The software development labs I’ve worked at, yeah it happens that a developer would check in a bug so bad it would affect other people. But what we would do is just go yell at that developer and make him not do it again.
Apparently at Apple what they do is create additional systems to allow buggy code to get checked in...
I hope at least there’s some disciplinary action integrated into that Flags system. Where if you’re code is so buggy we have to turn it off, it’s going to affect your yearly bonus or stock options grant or whatever...
Apparently at Apple what they do is create additional systems to allow buggy code to get checked in...
I hope at least there’s some disciplinary action integrated into that Flags system. Where if you’re code is so buggy we have to turn it off, it’s going to affect your yearly bonus or stock options grant or whatever...
Good idea. Where is the IPSW for iOS 11 I can install on my iPhone 11?
And a Mojave installer for my 16" MBP.
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I've had Safari refuse to let me scroll, unless I clicked around on page in certain white space areas. Never happened in Mojave. In fact I don't recall that ever happening before, going back to 10.8.
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Where is the Mojave installer for a 16" MBP?
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Some literary symmetry I find interesting is Microsoft became successful with really bad quality software. Then after they became successful, they started making quality software. I think it was Windows XP that was the first Microsoft operating system I considered acceptably reliable.
Apple is doing the exact opposite. They became successful again after the second coming of Steve Jobs with very high quality software. But after they became successful, they started developing bad quality software. Although thankfully, they haven’t sunk to the depths of Windows 3.1, Windows NT, etc. At least not yet...
two things, first of all, WWDC has existed long before yearly updates. It’s a developer conference, the first day keynote is really not that important.
Second of all, I’m not saying get rid of all the updates, I’m just saying don’t try to aim to release it all in September. That’s what they’ve been doing for the last 12 years or so. they’ve put huge updates in beta in June, and if it’s not ready by September, they release it anyway. iOS13.1 was already ready to come out before 13.0 did.