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iOS 9 must be 90% bug fixes and 10% useful new features.
- Thread starter sanke1
- Start date
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That's marketing BS and you've been convinced by software companies that this is the correct focus. WRONG.
The fact is that a working and reliable OS is the most important feature. Get the process for delivering on this expectation correct and then add all the new stuff you want.
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This is just your opinion and completely wrong. A company the size of Apple making the profits that they do can certainly manage its workload properly. If they're not doing so that's more about greed than it is about being "overwhelmed".
There is no excuse for all of the OS issues coming from Apple. NONE. They can easily focus more of the profits on development and software quality control.
9 women can't make a baby in one month.
I am not certain some of the problems plaguing Apple can be readily resolved simply by throwing more money at it. For instance, the problem with iCloud seems more an organizational issue than a resource one. Then there is the phenomenon known as the "bozo explosion". You can hire more people, but if they don't necessarily fit in with the culture or aren't very competent, they may be more trouble than they are worth.
From what I can see, the problem lies primarily with Apple trying to match software updates with hardware releases and so being "forced" to release iOS before it is ready. Sure, you can in theory patch it afterwards, but then you leave a bad impression in your users when features are missing, incomplete, buggy or worse, plain screw up your phone (iOS 8.0.1 anyone?).
Have no idea how can you be that specific!!
And when you say bug fixes, like what for example?
And "useful" btw is subjective. What is useful for you may not be useful for me and vise-versa. For example, I personally don't give a crap about USB storage.
So, in other words, let Android win the race in 2015 ? This isn't a good idea.
Right now, Apple's biggest point of sale is 3rd-party apps, because the dev tools they offer let the developers make apps quicker, faster and of higher quality than anything Android will ever be able to offer in the next 5 years. Other than that, iOS still feels like it hasn't evolved in years. iOS 7 was all about a new interface that is debatable amongst the community, and iOS 8 got them busy mainly under-the-hood with thousands of new APIs, the new Swift language, WatchKit and more. Out of the box, iOS 8 does bring a number of great enhancements, but not something the users will notice right away. Apple will need to do something amazing in iOS 9, on the user side.
What Apple has to do is devote more resources after big releases, to work on serious continuous improvement. It seems like their team is small, because they're too busy with other stuff. Then they could have gotten a great quality record with 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 releases. So far I haven't been impressed with 8.1, and it seems 8.2 only basically brings WatchKit, so I see no point in beta testing it (I'm an iPhone dev, not WatchKit). We know little about 8.3, except that it may bring a lot of late work to Maps, like Transit directions, but don't get your hopes up on this.
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Oh, and they need to dedicate a more serious and permanent team to develop iTunes once and for all. All they did was slap in a new interface every once in a while. It seems like I've been living the same bugs for the last 6 years (syncing and whatnot). Wasn't it supposed to be the "most well programmed" app on Windows? Well, it certainly isn't the most well programmed app on my Mac. How many people did I hear in my life saying "I'm not buying an Apple product, because of iTunes"? They could get so many more sales by making this app the best of the west...
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Regarding Snow Leopard, the context was different back then. The price drop alone was worth installing Snow Leopard and got a bunch of applauses.
You'd have OS X releases every 2-3 years, and Apple knew they were shifting to a yearly basis starting with Snow Leopard, which was much more frequent than Windows on their 3-6 years basis. Apple was in position to waste a release just to bring bug fixes and stability and it wouldn't affect the speed of their release cycle relatively to Microsoft. Plus, OS X wouldn't truly compete with Windows back then, both OSes were so radically different.
The case with the Android war is different. Android is a stolen product. Both iOS and Android look alike and they get major yearly updates with dozens of new features and hundreds or thousands of new APIs. If you don't keep the rhythm, you'll be screwed in the corner. The significant drop in quality in this ferocious competition is the price users will have to continue paying in the next years.
Right now, Apple's biggest point of sale is 3rd-party apps, because the dev tools they offer let the developers make apps quicker, faster and of higher quality than anything Android will ever be able to offer in the next 5 years. Other than that, iOS still feels like it hasn't evolved in years. iOS 7 was all about a new interface that is debatable amongst the community, and iOS 8 got them busy mainly under-the-hood with thousands of new APIs, the new Swift language, WatchKit and more. Out of the box, iOS 8 does bring a number of great enhancements, but not something the users will notice right away. Apple will need to do something amazing in iOS 9, on the user side.
What Apple has to do is devote more resources after big releases, to work on serious continuous improvement. It seems like their team is small, because they're too busy with other stuff. Then they could have gotten a great quality record with 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 releases. So far I haven't been impressed with 8.1, and it seems 8.2 only basically brings WatchKit, so I see no point in beta testing it (I'm an iPhone dev, not WatchKit). We know little about 8.3, except that it may bring a lot of late work to Maps, like Transit directions, but don't get your hopes up on this.
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Oh, and they need to dedicate a more serious and permanent team to develop iTunes once and for all. All they did was slap in a new interface every once in a while. It seems like I've been living the same bugs for the last 6 years (syncing and whatnot). Wasn't it supposed to be the "most well programmed" app on Windows? Well, it certainly isn't the most well programmed app on my Mac. How many people did I hear in my life saying "I'm not buying an Apple product, because of iTunes"? They could get so many more sales by making this app the best of the west...
--
Regarding Snow Leopard, the context was different back then. The price drop alone was worth installing Snow Leopard and got a bunch of applauses.
You'd have OS X releases every 2-3 years, and Apple knew they were shifting to a yearly basis starting with Snow Leopard, which was much more frequent than Windows on their 3-6 years basis. Apple was in position to waste a release just to bring bug fixes and stability and it wouldn't affect the speed of their release cycle relatively to Microsoft. Plus, OS X wouldn't truly compete with Windows back then, both OSes were so radically different.
The case with the Android war is different. Android is a stolen product. Both iOS and Android look alike and they get major yearly updates with dozens of new features and hundreds or thousands of new APIs. If you don't keep the rhythm, you'll be screwed in the corner. The significant drop in quality in this ferocious competition is the price users will have to continue paying in the next years.
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Your example has no relevance. Apple has their agenda on new features with each iOS release. The constraint is the hardware timeline. Having done lots of major software design testing, I look at iOS and this looks like an 18 month project shoehorned into a 12 month hardware cycle. Then they spend the next 6 months fixing major issues (bugs) that are never truly fixed as there is another 12 month hardware release driving another iOS release dumping another batch of major bugs.
Apple really needs to take a release and just get it right.
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Android is going to win this battle based on the current strategy. Android updates are not tied to hardware updates. Apple iOS updates are.
Any software designer / tester can tell you hardware driven software timelines are a setting for failure. You end up with the choice of pushing out the hardware release (OMG!!!!! Can't delay the iPhone launch!!!!) or releasing buggy software.
Unless you plan for intermittent releases that stabilize the OS. This unfortunately is not a current Apple iOS policy.
iOS Mavericks like release
I really want iOS 9 to be like OS X Mavericks. Which fundamentally gave you more performance and had better energy efficiently. Since OS X Mavericks I have never had a memory issues (thanks to compress memory) I heard this feature is on iOS but it's not turn. Also, I would love to see a lot of power optimization so I can get more charge out of my iOS devices. Finally, I wouldn't mind any new features but, these days Apple has started the trend of releasing features that aren't 100% ready for prime time - iOS 8 is great explain of this. I am not saying iOS 8 is bad by any means but it could have been better.
I really want iOS 9 to be like OS X Mavericks. Which fundamentally gave you more performance and had better energy efficiently. Since OS X Mavericks I have never had a memory issues (thanks to compress memory) I heard this feature is on iOS but it's not turn. Also, I would love to see a lot of power optimization so I can get more charge out of my iOS devices. Finally, I wouldn't mind any new features but, these days Apple has started the trend of releasing features that aren't 100% ready for prime time - iOS 8 is great explain of this. I am not saying iOS 8 is bad by any means but it could have been better.
If you look at any "wishlist" for iOS 9 you will notice that users want features that "other" phones have.
This request of "I want the same as the other guy" is what drives a lot of Apple's new features. (Control Center, Quick reply, etc).
Apple has to keep adding new features with every new iOS to stay relevant.
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I agree with you about Apple doing their own thing until they gave in and made a 5.5" iPhone. This isn't the same Apple anymore.
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Everyone here. Wait until the Beta threads show up
That's right. If they want to do this, they'll need to have teams working on it overnight. At this point, it's the only way to release huge versions like these in such little time.
Why are you ok with it? It isn't the only way at all! As for the 'huge version', this release looks identical to iOS7 and it just has a few new features. I really don't see why there are so many bugs and I for one would MUCH rather that iOS 7.1.3 came installed on my 6+. Why couldn't they improve 7.1.2 and hold back on iOS8 until it was actually ready? Who on earth would have only bought an iPhone 6 because it had iOS8 on it??
This is Mobile operating systems we're talking about. Google is releasing a new version of Android every year with new features. Apple can't release a "bug fix" version of iOS and do nothing for another year.
Should have read my comment up there.
iOS 8 is a huge release, for developers. The user side of me hasn't been impressed at all. So many things happened under-the-hood, it's these kind of changes that caused so many bugs. But the average Joe won't understand it, and as a user, doesn't have to understand it, because it's supposed to be bug free once it's released.
As for making iOS 7 compatible with iPhones 6, there's more work to spend than I think both of us can imagine, and it's a loss of efficiency. Also, it makes iPhone releases much bigger by enabling all of the latest features, and you can collect more user-feedback when it's publicly available.
Regarding closed betas, I've submitted a few things to Apple and it's as if their employees weren't reading my stuff. (One example amongst 5-6 : I gave them all the steps to reproduce the problem, they ask me to provide them, I say I don't know what else they want me to add, and they close the ticket) They've been in denial mode for the whole summer, so I simply stopped giving them any more feed-back.
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Prevent a thief from turning your phone off before you can activate Lost Mode or whatnot.
A thief can put your phone into DFU mode and defeat it also. Now, you'd be asking for trouble if passcode is required for DFU mode. Imagine the damage done to people who forget their passcodes.
Easy, if the phone is stolen, most thiefs will turn it off. But if they need the passcode to do so, they won't be able to, giving time to use Find my iPhone.
If Power + Home button soft reset combination is passcode locked too then it could mean trouble if the phone is asking for passcode but on screen touch is not responding due to some software glitch.
Which could mean being without phone while waiting till battery drains out.
Yes, I'm aware of this but one can never be too careful with a little extra security.
iOS 8 is actually quite significant in terms of the new features it brings. Only issue is that many of these new features rely on the app developers to integrate them into their apps, so the benefits are not as immediately obvious as say, Notifications or multitasking. At the moment, not many developers have done so, making it seem like the update hasn't really done much.