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Apple's Craig Federighi Explains Why iOS Auto-Updates Often Arrive Several Weeks Late

sinsin07 said:
Its the beta after the beta.
That why this:

"Hi Mateusz,
We incrementally rollout new iOS updates by first making them available for those that explicitly seek them out in Settings, and then 1-4 weeks later (after we've received feedback on the update) ramp up to rolling out devices with auto-update enabled.
Hope that helps!"
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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.
 
Gazsi said:
the problem is exactly that two level beta test. even small companies shouldn't do that
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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.
 
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Aaargh! said:
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.
Click to expand...

Fun fact: the Secure Enclave appears to run (a variant of) seL4.

 
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adammusic said:
This is absolute nonsense.
Do your testing in house & roll out to everyone at the same time.
This company is insane
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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.
 
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chucker23n1 said:
This isn't very unusual or surprising. In fact, third-party developers can opt in to a similar staggered app release feature.



This way, developers get several days to see the impact of the update (and, if push comes to shove, pull it): do more crash reports come in? Is aggregate CPU or battery use up? Is more bandwidth being used on their servers? Etc.

For Apple's OS releases, it's basically:

  1. have the thousands of engineers at Apple test it internally
  2. roll it out to the ~1M third-party developers as a developer beta
  3. roll it out to AppleSeed (I imagine that's similarly sized)
  4. roll it out to the ~10M public beta testers
  5. roll it out, staggered, to the ~1B people of the general public
At any step of the way, they can pull an update. For example, a lot of developer betas never make it to public beta.



I mean, if you want to look at it like that, yes. Early adopters are more likely to face serious bugs than late adopters. That… really isn't shocking, though. You don't have to be an early adopter if you don't want to.
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Thanks. I had wondered for a long time why auto update for apps wouldn't really work well until I manually did it.
 
Got you all beat, I’ll wait for iOS 16 to be released when I install iOS 15.
Usually the last release is the best and they resolve all the outstanding issues and one final push. 😉
 
That makes perfect sense. The people who really want the update now will look for it. If they don't look for it, then they can't be all that anxious to get it installed.
 
Gazsi said:
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 🙂
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Objective-C is still there for weirdos like you. Swift is there for people who like readable, modern code. 😉
 
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I used to always update on release day. But going by Apple's recent releases, I now hold off for a while......
 
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.
 
chucker23n1 said:
But they're not the first thousand or even the first million. Millions (perhaps tens of millions) are in the public beta these days, and all of those will have been guinea pigs before them.
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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?
 
chucker23n1 said:
He also oversaw some massive engineering feats, like migrating all 1B+ macOS and iOS (and watchOS and tvOS and…) devices to APFS with nary a hitch.
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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.
 
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Luis Ortega said:
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?
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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.
 
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