iOS 18 Updates Continue to Cause Delays in Apple's iOS 19 Plans

[bluespark]

Software used to be Apple's core strength. Now it's its achilles heel.

People don't trust updates not only because of bad design choices, but new added bugs that weren't there with previous versions and deal breaking levels of battery drain on their year old or even shiny brand new device.


Frogs who have been boiling in the pot just realized where they are and it aint a jacuzzi.

Has Craig Federighi gone rogue, have their standards lowered to the point of non existent - do they have any internal awareness of any of this?

AI is a nothing burger of a value prop for the average consumer. If anything, sketchy and a bit of a negative that has been forced upon us (yes, you can opt out, but I'm talking about branding wise - their big push)

How I would love to better understand what's really going on at Cupertino these days, if only I had the ability to.

There's a lot of truth to this. Among other things, the Apple Intelligence rollout has been terrible. Many people bought phones based on an advertised feature that simply didn't exist at the time, or for months afterwards. Apart from the timing issues mentioned here, the most obvious feature by which most people will measure their Apple's "intelligence" is Siri, which is dumb as a post, and lags horribly behind its competitors. It should be a five-alarm fire at Apple that the Siri of today remains dumber than the Alexa of five years ago. Meanwhile, I'm wondering if my investment in HomePods will amount to nothing, as any meaningful Siri improvements seem to be in the distant future and likely won't run on existing hardware.

Same thing with the Mac. Despite the Mac's excellent hardware, the new OS still lacks features present for a while in iOS, as well as some of the marquee new features like e-mail sorting.

Want to combine two Apple IDs? Still not possible, after years of requests from users who require a technical solution to various Apple-created account problems.

What is Apple doing?

 

[Mr_Ed]

People on MacRumors are funny. They complain when Apple doesn't release every single software feature at once, but then they complain when Apple takes the time to roll out software features gradually, waiting until the features are actually ready.

I suspect the circles for those types of commenters on a Venn diagram are not nearly as concentric as you think they are 😁

 

[Kylo83]

iOS is going to be minor now, no re design. Just Siri and ai updates, it’s sad because I wanted more

 

[WarmWinterHat]

Almost all businesses do this and Apple is one the few that gives new features to older hardware.

Yea... I don't think that is the case.

Thinking back to the phone commercials I've recently seen. Samsung shows people folding their phones, or using a pen, or watching a movie in a cab. Pixel has been showing off their AI stuff, and taking photos, and general closeups of the phone itself. Apple has been showing AI, people using their phone in the rain, when working out, making Genmoji closeups with TITANIUM. I see nothing referencing what OS version any of them are running, in any capacity.

Google (Pixel) has been giving new features to older hardware for a while now. Apple isn't unique in that sense.

 

[NT1440]

…Didn’t Apple recently (in the last year) state that they’re moving primarily to .X feature rollouts?

They’ve already been doing this for years, when was the last time all new iOS features were released in the .0 release?

Gurman is very bad at basic pattern recognition, and understanding anything about the technology itself he’s supposed to be covering.

 

[Rafagon]

I'm still waiting for my new Safari backgrounds. I'm only seeing the old ones, despite updating to the public release of iOS 18.2 and having an iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Apparently this is also a staggered rollout. Anyone know when Miami, Florida is going to get them?

 

[nt5672]

Well... This is not bad news. If they polish iOS 18 then that is perfect news for us. No need for a yearly release.

Adding features is not polishing.

 

[nt5672]

apple forever feeling like a small company that can't keep up while everyone else jumps ahead

Yep, that strategy is call "whack-a-mole" and that describes Cook to the core.

 

[TwoBytes]

as long as they copy and paste the photos app code from ios 17 to ios 19 then happy customers, job done for a year.

 

[nt5672]

This is happening because Apple failed to capitalize on the rapid advancements in AI, missing a crucial opportunity to lead the charge in this transformative technology. They were too focused on self-congratulation, unable to see the bigger picture unfolding around them.

Just Apple repeating the mistakes of Nokia. Nothing to see here, folks.

 

[TEG]

Apple already said they were moving away from the yearly releases. So I suspect that we won't see iOS 19 until 2026.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Great opportunity to switch to naming instead of numbering and get off the forced annual release cycle that causes as many issues as it ever solves each year

 

[roncron]

Honest marketing campaign for the iPhone 17 series:

Upgrade now for brilliant new features in 2026!

--

Genmoji and image playground are fun, at first. But the novelty wears off quickly, and it's not clear I need them or will use them very much.

If a large number of you will find valuable, ongoing use-cases for these features, then maybe it's worthwhile that iOS developers have devoted so much time to them, such that iOS 19 features will be delayed.

 

[Akicks]

Truthfully I think the added pictures, smaller blue dot for unread mail and categories a total waste of screen space and very unproductive for businesses. I have turned them off.

 

[Oestreich Dieter]

Well maybe their UI and artistic designers have more time to spend re-evaluating their choices since they moved away from the initial Skeuomorphism.
Maybe they come up with something new, fresh and less Pokemon style.

The image playground app icon is atrocious.

 

[yeah]

iOS 12 had minimal new features but focused on stability because of bugs in iOS 11

iOS 19 seems to be following the footsteps of iOS 12 since the major feature of iOS 18 [Apple intelligence] is still not fully released until sometime before WWDC 2025

I recall iOS 12 beta 1 was more stable than the final release of iOS 11, truly great software at the time!

 

[CarAnalogy]

Maybe we should move to a 2-yr release schedule? Have a “snow leopard” release every tick-tock year?

Or just do point releases as features are done like normal software??

It is a strange combination of mature and not mature as the same bugs somehow manage to crop up over and over again. It is like they don’t have test cases.

They followed the industry trend of firing all the professional testers and instead using automated testing and making us all beta testers.

They would never do this, but I'll say it anyway: keep iOS 18 around another year. Take the development energy that would've been put into iOS 19 and use it to continue adding the Apple Intelligence features they love so dearly through 18.X upgrades and focus on removing bugs and cleaning up the OS. Win-win.

I don’t understand it but modern big software companies just seem incapable of this. It’s probably Wall Street demanding something to see every single quarter.

Something has infested the development philosophy and it is hurting everyone. And the executives seem removed from the situation. They only see their targets and metrics and don’t understand how it’s being perceived on the ground.

 

[iBreatheApple]

Then have an off year. Be transparent about it and don’t rush things for the sake of saying you put something out.

 

[SKeijmel]

they making everything more and more buggy and less efficient........ just use a whole year to make it stable and polished again..... instead of pushing the devs and making them rush and make tons of mistakes.

 

[dominiongamma]

Apple already said they were moving away from the yearly releases. So I suspect that we won't see iOS 19 until 2026.

Did they ? I’m curious if you have a source, I must have missed it

 

[sunapple]

Rest of Apple hardware isn’t released on the same schedule as the software and it’s fine. iPhone however needs a brand new OS on launch day. iPhone hardware can’t stand on its own apparently and needs to be released every September for profit. It’s an unsustainable cycle that in the end isn’t the greatest thing for consumers.

 

[Shirasaki]

Every single year, the same story. In fact, “Hello Apple Intelligence” is just a joke! Some countries received it yesterday (after announcing it 6 months ago), and in Europe, it’s still a pipe dream.

Apple is lucky it doesn’t have a competing ecosystem; otherwise, it would be struggling to survive.

They probably knew this all along thus tried furiously to defend their closed ecosystem and become a monopoly of said ecosystem. Either way, we have long past the time when keynotes have groundbreaking stuff.

 

[DesertNomad]

They used to release new OS versions when they were ready, and the system seemed to work much better. I miss the Apple of the 80s and 90s.

 

[flybass]

A number of people here are claiming the current iOS releases are such gigantic updates that the dev team can’t reasonably maintain quality standards. I frankly don’t believe that. We’ve had Apple advertising wallpapers as new features in os releases. How do you create bugs while shipping wallpapers? I think it is more a decline in standards at Apple.

 

[ignatius345]

I'm not loving the fact that .1 and even .2 versions are introducing tons of new features instead of just being primarily for bug fixes and general polishing. Have a feeling it's going to get worse, not better, as they heap on more complex features and don't seem to be getting around to tuning things up.