Seriously. I refresh my App updates page and always have updates despite auto. I am sure this has to do with how often it "fetches" the data, maybe once a week?
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Apple's Craig Federighi Explains Why iOS Auto-Updates Often Arrive Several Weeks Late
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Seriously. I refresh my App updates page and always have updates despite auto. I am sure this has to do with how often it "fetches" the data, maybe once a week?
That's not a beta. That's an official release that's on time release not to crush to the servers and just in case something problematic crops up. There's no reason to push an immediate update out to everyone unless it's critical.
This is absolute nonsense.
Do your testing in house & roll out to everyone at the same time.
This company is insane
Do your testing in house & roll out to everyone at the same time.
This company is insane
They do it exactly because they are a huge company with billions of users.
There are several beta test rounds. Internal, developers, public beta's. There are literally millions of people testing the iOS betas. They test the **** out of it. However, software like this is incredibly complex; by far one of the most complex things we humans have ever created. Software is literally too complicated for humans to truly understand. I know of only one OS (seL4) that has a formally proven correct kernel. This is a microkernel consisting of 9300 lines of code (8700 lines of C and 600 lines of assembler) and took about 2 years to formally verify. Compare that an OS the size of iOS or macOS.
So you can't prove that software is bug-free, the only thing you can do is test it and test it again. Even a million beta testers, it's unlikely that every code path is tested, every combination of parts that may interact. So some obscure bugs are going to slip through the cracks. However, at the scale that Apple is operating at those very obscure bugs still affect a lot of people. As an early Microsoft engineer put it: "One in a million is next Tuesday". Even a million testers aren't going to find all the bugs that pop up when a billion users test it (the difference between a million a billion is about a billion).
Since it affects so many people, they are extra cautious and do a staggered roll-out. This is perfectly normal and understandable, especially at the scale of Apple.
The outrage over this topic is exhausting. The testing is done in house and via the beta program. The delayed rollout isn't for testing, it's cautionary in case something doesn't work despite the in house testing/beta program OR some change isn't well received by the masses despite working exactly as it's meant to. On top of that, rolling out to everyone at the same time is a strain on server resources. Apple isn't looking to have bad experiences because too many people are downloading updates and authenticating at the same time. Very few of these updates are URGENT!!! INSTALL IMMEDIATELY!!!
On top of all that, this is a common rollout strategy for tech companies. If you want the download immediately, go get it. I'd bet money the general public doesn't care about having an update minute #1 of availability.
Thanks. I had wondered for a long time why auto update for apps wouldn't really work well until I manually did it.
Apple should change the name from "automatic updates" to "1-4 week delayed updates"
Objective-C is still there for weirdos like you. Swift is there for people who like readable, modern code. ?couldn't agree more especially as an iOS developer. I am also sad that Swift didn't [instance function: parameter]but that may have nothing to do with him and is my personal problem
Me too. Whenever I check, there's like 15-20 apps not updated. There should not be that many. What is this?
This makes perfect sense. I'm actually surprised how much attention this has received.
So even Apple is saying that installing any iOS update on day 1 is risky. (Which we all knew anyway)
I enable the auto download but don’t allow the auto install. I‘d rather wait to see if there are any issues with the update before I install it, usually a couple days after…
Camp 3. Always update to the last version of an outgoing OS and ONLY that. It’s the only one you can reasonably expect to have few serious bugs. And if the system works and there are no big security issues, why update at all? The new features in the last 5 years have been window dressing at best and downgrades to existing functionality more than once.
I swear we’ve gone over this already, years ago In fact. With an exception to a few in this thread, it’s common sense. ?
Which begs the question, why is apple’s beta testing program so bad that with all those millions of testers, they still put out buggy software?
As a long time UNIX sysadmin this still blows me away. They converted over a billion devices to a whole new filesystem successfully, and not only that, they did it with a point release, not even a major iOS update.
This gained me a lot of additional respect for the OS team at Apple. They absolutely know their stuff.
I really think that's the wrong way to think about this / frame it. iOS has hundreds of millions of users - say a portion of those can/are running the latest OS. There will be bugs - bugs are a fact in software development - you cannot avoid bugs unless your codebase is small.
With a small fraction testing the betas for free (ie, volunteers), there will always be something they miss - they don't represent every install, every different configuration. I can't recall the last time an iOS release was halted (if ever?) - but I seem to recall point releases happening shortly after a release which effectively "halts" that release.