I can understand bugs with new software features but introducing bugs into old software features that should be polished to perfection is my issue.
Former software Quality Assurance Director here (now CEO of an app company)... what's you're seeing is called a "regression bug" in the software industry. On the surface, one feature in one part of the software may not seem to have anything to do with a new feature, but most stuff inside all of this software is surprisingly very interconnected. A lot of code bases are shared, including network libraries, UI, basic utility functions, etc. Make a change in one place, it breaks it in another.
QA should be doing regression test passes. Usually these are automated and nightly to find changes in behavior from build to build. They can be black box (meaning just testing the UI like a human would) and white box (testing the code functions themselves with unit testing, etc). There are all kinds of more intricate things you can do as well. QA should also have a stack of test cases built up over time that is essentially a dictionary of every possible scenario you can think of where something could go wrong, per feature, and they write that into your automation script. I guarantee you Apple has people who do all of this.
One of the problems though is that when software becomes incredibly complex, like iOS has, you can't hit or even think of EVERY possible scenario in your testing. It would just take too long to test and write scripts, etc. So that's why we have beta testers out in the wild... people who hit these weird edge cases that they missed or can't quite reproduce internally. Maybe some enterprise has some weird networking setup? Maybe some cell network in Vietnam uses a different non-standard signal compared to the rest of the world? Stuff like that.
I do agree with everyone else though; A billion dollar company like Apple shouldn't be missing some of the stuff they are. And who knows, maybe QA reported the bugs long ago, but they were shoved on a priority list and weren't "showstoppers" as we call them (or 0-day security exploits). Apple
needed to get the promised iOS 17 out for the iPhone 15 launch, and maybe pushed these fixes out to a future 0.1 release on purpose. That the entire software team knew, and bugs were filed, but the business side of things pushed ahead anyway. It happens
all the time in what is called a "triage" meeting to set priorities on bugs/features and how they line up with business objectives.
We'll never know what happened behind the scenes for these 0.1 releases though. But as a former QA guy (which is how I got my career started, my first job in QA when I was 21 at Microsoft in Seattle back in 2000), seeing Apple release a bunch of bugs
drives me nuts even though I also understand the business side of why they do it. After all, the point of selling software isn't to make people happy (that's secondary), it's to make the business money. It's a fine balancing act and buggy software is often a result of that.
