What is going on with Apple's software engineering?

[theSeb]

I try to keep an open mind and to remain rational about issues I see in software. I've worked in the industry for 20 years now. Some of it as a developer and some it in the dreaded management and consulting layer, so I appreciate how hard it is to make shoes, instead of just complaining about the quality of the shoes. I normally scoff at the posts complaining how things were better and things are getting worse. I write those off as nostalgia coloured glasses. Honestly though, I do think the quality of Apple's efforts is just going down the pan lately.

A few simple examples that have really irritated me. Three years ago I gave up on being a luddite and buying actual CD's and then keeping my own digital collection and subscribed to Apple Music. I have just used it via my iPhone without too many complaints until now. Yesterday I decided to download all my favourite songs to my Mac so that I am not constantly streaming them.

Yesterday I downloaded some albums and Music was already using 4 GBs of memory. Today I downloaded some more and Music is now using 8 GBs. Clearly there is a memory leak here since this application has no reason to use so much.

Closing and restarting brings it back to 120 MB.


Then there is the lack of attention to detail. I have no idea what they are doing, but I was getting constant errors about duplicates and failed downloads. That seemed strange, so I took a look at the albums on Apple Music. This happens for many albums and artists.

How can this happen? Also, if you are going to show an error message, then make it useful. Just a generic blah blah blah about song couldn't be downloaded is not helpful when I am currently downloading 400 songs at a time. Tell me the artist and the song, so that I can take a look.



As I was browsing and trying to figure out the duplicate error, I noticed that when you click on See All albums the artist’s name does not appear. It just says “Placeholder-artist”. This does not only happen for “relative newcomers and unknown artists”, like Johnny Cash. It happens for every artist on Mac Music. It does not happen on the iOS version of Music.

On the subject of Apple Music, maybe it's me and I am using it wrong, but I see no obvious ways to add all albums from a particular artist. I see a download artist option, but I want to just add all of their albums to me collection, but not necessarily download everything. Instead I have to click on all albums, then go into each album and click Add. This is painful when some of the artists I enjoy have > 10 albums.


I used to keep my podcasts and iTunes U videos within my iTunes library, which is stored on an external drive. That way I can easily take my entire iTunes library with me when I used to travel for work. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that all podcasts will now be in their own app. Ok, fine. But they have also decided that you cannot choose where they get downloaded to. Instead they go into a special folder on your start up disk in the Library. Really? This is ok for iDevices, but I don’t expect this on the Mac.

Ejecting a drive is still just as broken as ever and even maybe more so. TM backup has finished ages ago, yet I still cannot eject the TM drive. Apparently Finder is still using it. What are you doing with it? It can’t still be indexing since I left the drive connected overnight.

On the iPhone side things are about the same. Admittedly I haven’t updated to 14.1 yet (busy doing it right now) but version 14 decided that Inbox and Back should be in the same spot. Edit and Down arrow have fallen in love and merged into one entity.

Edit: this issue is indeed fixed in 14.1


I often take screenshots of stuff on the iPad Pro and then share them to a channel in Slack. There is a noticeable delay when you do this. It’s actually faster if you just go into Slack and add the screenshot directly, but hey, less clicking convenience, I guess. However, if you edit the screenshot, like cropping it, or drawing some handy arrows etc and then try to share to Slack the whole screen just freezes and you never get the notification that the file was shared to slack. The editing overlay becomes unresponsive. You can close it though by touching at the bottom and the edited screenshot was indeed shared in slack anyway. Hey, I guess no point in complaining if it works, right?


Is anybody checking this stuff? Or have the code bases become so complicated and convoluted that it’s now impossible to check and regression testing is simply too hard?

 

[MacUser2525]

snip...


Is anybody checking this stuff? Or have the code bases become so complicated and convoluted that it’s now impossible to check and regression testing is simply too hard?

Too much of a rush to get it out the door and getting on to the next planned obsoleting of the products. There is no profit in people keeping their old products around. Same as I have noticed with the security updates for past OSs with the final updates of them they are seemingly to mess up the machines forcing an upgrade to the new OS to use it again.

 

[theSeb]

Too much of a rush to get it out the door and getting on to the next planned obsoleting of the products. There is no profit in people keeping their old products around. Same as I have noticed with the security updates for past OSs with the final updates of them they are seemingly to mess up the machines forcing an upgrade to the new OS to use it again.

I hear you, but these problems are on the latest versions of the software and impact all Mac hardware.

 

[MacUser2525]

I hear you, but these problems are on the latest versions of the software and impact all Mac hardware.

Oh yes it has gone downhill for some time now on the part of them doing a good job. Use to be a time when an update of the software was a good thing, that ship has long since sailed off into the sunset.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Over the past few years I've found myself delaying operating system upgrades on my iDevices as well as my Macs. Five years ago, I had no hesitation upgrading on release day.

I ran iOS 12.x for nine months after iOS 13 was released before I finally upgraded to the latter. I installed iOS 14 on my eligible iDevices a week after it was released.

I am still running Mojave on my Mac mini 2018. I have periodically tried Catalina on an expendable external boot disk but each time, I abandoned it within an hour. There is zero chance I will ever run Catalina as my primary operating system.

I will eventually install Big Sur but it's looking likely that it won't be until some time in Q1 2021.

Apple's software QA has definitely been slipping. Look at the Mojave Security Update 2020-005/Safari 14 debacle.

 

[brianmowrey]

Then there is the lack of attention to detail. I have no idea what they are doing, but I was getting constant errors about duplicates and failed downloads. That seemed strange, so I took a look at the albums on Apple Music. This happens for many albums and artists.

This would not reflect Apple "slipping." Library management and bulk downloading with Apple Music (as well as iTunes in the Cloud) have never not been buggy. iTunes App has always been more likely to leap out of your screen and transform into a mystical princess sent from the moon than display a helpful error message.

YMMV but I don't consider Apple Music a surrogate for having your own portable music collection. I keep a small rotation of albums in my library for playing in the car, the rest of the 5000 albums I might ever want to play I leave for search/streaming. It's a bit Marie Kondo but that suits me fine.

As for all the other stuff, I really don't know if I can grant your point. I mean, did you ever use MobileMe? Did you ever have a family member mistakenly think they could put more than six projects in iMovie without the whole library failing and destroying all their work? Things are bad but they've been worse.

 

[nickdalzell1]

About all I use Apple Music for is for the playlists. Chill Mix, 80s Radio, 70s Radio, etc. It does it far better than the convoluted mess YouTube Music is.

All the rest of my music are MP3s I've had for over two-decades, back when p2p and Napster were a big thing. They're all backed up either to SD cards, synced to my iTunes library, or backed up to multiple NASs.

Where I go, where I work, the trips I take, it's never possible to have a reliable 4G LTE connection or signal in 85% where I am. So it's nice to not have to worry about buffering, ads, or bad quality rips. All my music, media, books, movies are on-device always. I scoff at those poor saps listening to Pandora and having five ads for one or two songs. About as useful as poor AM radio reception.

 

[theSeb]

I have downloaded all of my favourite artists to my iPhone when I started using Apple Music. This way I always have the music available without a network connection. My core library is only 30 GBs so it's not a problem to keep it on the phone.

This would not reflect Apple "slipping." Library management and bulk downloading with Apple Music (as well as iTunes in the Cloud) have never not been buggy. iTunes App has always been more likely to leap out of your screen and transform into a mystical princess sent from the moon than display a helpful error message.

YMMV but I don't consider Apple Music a surrogate for having your own portable music collection. I keep a small rotation of albums in my library for playing in the car, the rest of the 5000 albums I might ever want to play I leave for search/streaming. It's a bit Marie Kondo but that suits me fine.

As for all the other stuff, I really don't know if I can grant your point. I mean, did you ever use MobileMe? Did you ever have a family member mistakenly think they could put more than six projects in iMovie without the whole library failing and destroying all their work? Things are bad but they've been worse.

I know it's always been a thing to "hate" on iTunes, but I never really had much of a problem with it when I was creating my own Apple Lossless versions of my CD library. I also didn't have any issues with it when I became obsessed with digitizing all of my BRs and DVDs. The first time I recall having problems was with iTunes Match. It seemed like it would solve several issues for me and simplify things, but it was painful and had a mind of its own.

I think that I logged into MobileMe once to see what it was. I didn't see any point in it, so never did anything with it.

Over the past few years I've found myself delaying operating system upgrades on my iDevices as well as my Macs. Five years ago, I had no hesitation upgrading on release day.

I ran iOS 12.x for nine months after iOS 13 was released before I finally upgraded to the latter. I installed iOS 14 on my eligible iDevices a week after it was released.

I am still running Mojave on my Mac mini 2018. I have periodically tried Catalina on an expendable external boot disk but each time, I abandoned it within an hour. There is zero chance I will ever run Catalina as my primary operating system.

I will eventually install Big Sur but it's looking likely that it won't be until some time in Q1 2021.

Apple's software QA has definitely been slipping. Look at the Mojave Security Update 2020-005/Safari 14 debacle.

I've been doing the same, usually waiting till .2 version of anything till upgrading. I am not sure why I broke that rule with ios 14. I am lucky that I kept some old Macs, so after waiting for a bit I upgrade on one of those and try it that way.

 

[nickdalzell1]

My Apple ID was created just as they were deprecating MobileMe, so it still has the @me.com domain. That's about all I remember from it.

 

[3460169]

Considering Apple's financial resources and wealth overall it's surprising how sloppy their modern software can be.

I find the music app on Catalina to be far glitchier than any prior experience I've had with iTunes and that's going back nearly to iTune's inception lol. At least for managing libraries this Music app seems wonky.

@OP I wanted to comment on that placeholder-artist thing.

I have a fairly ancient Music library with a a mish-mash of stuff from Apple Music and iTunes Match. I went on a quest to bring some order to chaos that is my library and noticed that it depends on how you get to the albums listing as to whether it shows placeholder or not. If you search for the artist in Apple Music, click the artist and then "See All" in their albums sections you'll see the artist name.

If you right-click the artist name in your Artists list in your library and choose "Show in Apple Music" and then navigate to all albums from there, you get the placeholder name.


I ran into some other annoyances. I have albums that have tracks from different sources, e.g. some are from Apple Music, some are Matched some are Uploaded, which apparently slightly confuses the Music app in CarPlay in ways I won't get into. So I figured I'd removed the album from the library and re-add it entirely from Apple Music. Deleting it was fine and I can confirm it gone in the album list, but when trying to re-add it by right-clicking on the album in Apple Music it would think it was still in my library and wouldn't give an option to add it to library. I would have to click the album in Apple Music and click the "+" sign there to add it back to the library.



And for the guy saying he was avoiding Catalina like the plague: I was in that same boat and had every intention of skipping it entirely. I was on Mojave and then security update 2020-005 came about and wreaked some kind of havoc on my 2019 MBP. The machine performed like a total slug compared even to my ancient 2012 MBA. I bit the proverbial bullet and clean-installed Catalina on the MBP and it's been reasonably sane, I guess, other than two entirely random kernel panics in the first couple of days of usage. ¯\(ツ)/¯

 

[sinbad21]

A friend of mines loves Apple system but hates definitely Apple softwares. He boycotts iTunes, Mail, Safari, everything from Apple, using alternative softwares. I find personally that iTunes is an absolute horror.

Also, I think there is a problem with iCloud. There are thousands of [conlicted] files in my user Library. I have even written a script to list them, and another to delete them periodically.

If you use iCloud, try this command in Terminal and look at the conflicted.txt file on the Desktop when the command is finished :

find ~/Library/ -name *\\[conflicted* -exec echo {} > ~/Desktop/conflicted.txt \;

 

[brianmowrey]

Also, I think there is a problem with iCloud. There are thousands of [conlicted] files in my user Library. I have even written a script to list them, and another to delete them periodically.

If you use iCloud, try this command in Terminal and look at the conflicted.txt file on the Desktop when the command is finished :

find ~/Library/ -name *\\[conflicted* -exec echo {} > ~/Desktop/conflicted.txt \;

There's lots of problems with iCloud. Like how downloading Notes turns new iPhone Pros into pocket toasters for the first two days, which is a huge UX first impression oversight.

I get "zsh: bad pattern: *\[conflicted*" from that prompt. But I have iCloud off on my Mac, because Security Update 005 broke it. Where are the files? e.g. just in Calendars, or all over the place? Seems like you could drill down to one data set and either rebuild your data in iCloud or migrate it to Google Exch.

 

[R3k]

Downloading / syncing for iTunes / Music has been inconsistently messed up for years now. Personally I have heaps of trouble with stalled downloads and purchases not appearing right after purchase. Backend issues?

 

[sinbad21]

I get "zsh: bad pattern: *\[conflicted*" from that prompt.

Because your shell is zsh, my command is for bash. Try this (same command with pattern between double quotes) :

find ~/Library/ -name "*\\[conflicted*" -exec echo {} > ~/Desktop/conflicted.txt \;