That doesn't make sense. None of this has changed from previous updates and all previous macOS updates were far more stable than this one. This isn't a particularly feature laden update either.<p>But now all of a sudden we get catastrophic (deleted emails) and less catastrophic (missing Music playlists) data loss, crash bugs and generally weird behaviour of many apps.<p>I have identified one particular area where bugs are endemic: iCloud and it's complete failure to deal with multiple OS and client app versions. This is clearly a design issue as it also manifests itself in many ways that are not bugs as such.<p>For instance, Notes has gained the ability to share folders via iCloud. But if you create a folder and then share it from a device with the latest OS version, that folder disappears from all devices running older OS versions and importantly also from the icloud.com website.<p>Reminders on Catalina warns you of such version incompatibilities and the wording is telling. It's talking about "converting" something to the latest version. "Conversion" shouldn't even be a thing that users need to know about where no user controlled files are involved.<p>All indications are that there is a fundamental design error at the very core of iCloud's architecture. It feels like iCloud operates not as a single source of truth but as yet another device that participates in peer to peer syncing. This is a very complex architecture and they haven't been able to make it work.<p>So my conclusion is that iCloud which has always been exceptionally buggy has become pervasive within Apple's ecosystem. This is what has changed.
I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch with automated or in-house testing.<p>In contrast, big companies like Apple try very hard to avoid and ignore user bug reports. There is no way to easily E-mail them, "filing a radar" is hard, and even if you do they do their best to ignore your report.<p>When I wrote "percentage of revenue", I meant it. In my software business (<a href="https://partsbox.io/" rel="nofollow">https://partsbox.io/</a>), I dedicate about 10% of my time to reading, analyzing, and responding to user bug reports. Carefully thinking about every report let me catch bugs and problems that I never would have found. I also learned that every user bug report carries some information: even if something isn't actually a bug, getting multiple reports about it might point to a usability or a documentation problem.<p>If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing bugs, they would not have a quality problem like they do now.
Yesterday a coworker was frustrated with his computers, and said something insightful: "When software gets past a certain age it just gets bad." He was referring primarily to Android and Windows (10) but it applies to every piece of software that suffers from feature creep. If it's a cash cow they have to keep stuffing new things in and periodically repainting it to make it look new again.<p>Around 10.9, MacOS reached a "feature complete" state. Now things are just being changed for change's sake. Running older Android versions reminds me of how fast and slick they were, and how many features have since have just added complexity in meaningless ways (they've changed the "silent" mode roughly 4 times since 2011?) and introduced "features" nobody asked for. Half the features end up getting removed later.<p>As an example of good software that doesn't perpetually introduce bugs, take venerable *nix Desktop Environment XFCE. (Screenshots here <a href="https://xfce.org/about/screenshots" rel="nofollow">https://xfce.org/about/screenshots</a>) It has a release every few years and doesn't add anything major or change in breaking ways - it works, and works the same as it always has for decades.<p>(edit) I had another thought - since Apple the company is now so large and most of their resources are focused on churning out new products year after year, it could be that they've stretched themselves too thin and the people that could uphold the quality standard of the systems either a) aren't as much of a hardass as Jobs was and don't have as high standards, or b) just don't use the products on a regular basis. I bet you there's someone working at Apple right now getting paid >$250k/yr that hasn't touched macOS in over a year.
I have been told by multiple sources that Apple engineering salaries are not competitive with industry leaders and haven't been for a long time. I wonder if the dissolution of the Jobs anti compete agreements exacerbated the issue.<p>However Apple seems to be willing to pay for highly sought after skills.<p>I have also been told that they don't have company level hiring standards so you should expect uneven abilities across different teams.<p>I have also been told that things were being rewritten or rather that Apple likes to rewrite. Apple doesn't seem to be very good at limiting regressions caused by these rewrites.<p>That's why there are so many crashes across the board. The crashes are caused by bugs or changes in behavior in common frameworks. This seems to jive with the author saying that Apple doesn't do enough automated testing.
The only iOS 13 bugs I’ve been bitten by are:<p>1. Safari’s back button now seems to lose the position on the previous page - sometimes.<p>2. The share sheet has a row of Messages contacts that I didn’t ask for, don’t want, and can’t turn off - and it creates the risk of super-inappropriate sharing, because all my work contacts are eligible for being on this row, seemingly at random.
I can only surmise (hope) that their resources are diverted towards Something Big. Could be ARM macOS and/or AR glasses. Not that this excuses the bugginess of their current core products.<p>Bringing up comparisons to Steve Jobs must be the tech equivalent of Godwin's Law, but if there was one thing about him, it's that he actually was a <i>user</i> of his own products, like us.<p>It feels like there's no one at Apple (or other companies) like that anymore. They can only try to guess at what it must be like to be a user, so they can't nitpick all the little things that annoy us.
As a VoiceOver user, I can provide a lesser known perspective. I've gotten used to waiting several months until I actually install a new major release. With the exception of iOS 12, basically all releases since iOS 5 were quite buggy when it comes to apples screen reader VoiceOver. Luckily, applevis.com these days publishes a list of known problems with accessibility on iOS a few days before every major release. So those of us that depend on lesser mainstream features feel the bad release quality already since quite a long time. Still, with all the hickups that Apple has during new releases, their accessibility stack is still lightyears before Android.
After doing some iOS/Mac development, I'd say some bugginiess is caused by changing APIs and behaviors inflicted by Apple, expected to be absorbed/dealt with by developers. They mercilessly do this with every release and no doubt that affects their internal projects. Also, xcode has gone the way of iTunes and ObjC was always a huge pain. It's a really hostile environment to develop in, where you're having to play catch up all the time.
Macos used to not have a yearly schedule. New versions took the time they needed. I think it's actually a better model, it allows engineers the time to test and make sure things work. Having arbitrary deadlines just increases the amount of crunch time which usually increases the amount of bugs.<p>Other than that, I wish that Apple did another Snow Leopard and focused for one year purely on fixing bugs in macos x instead of introducing new features.
This article explains why something is buggy. Maybe why Apple's software is buggy.<p>It does not explain why the latest stuff is so buggy.<p>Is Catalina that much more complex than, say, Mavericks?
Are managers playing deadline chicken more?<p>I don't see evidence for this.
Every .0 release for iOS and OSX has been buggy. Every single one.<p>And then a few point releases later and it's all forgotten. And then the next .0 release arrives and the blog posts reappear.
Tangentially related: GitHub has already dropped support for Mojave. The whole site is now broken in Safari 12 because it’s no longer the “current” version of the browser. Well, it is if you run Mojave, as you need to upgrade the entire system to get Safari 13.<p>I can understand not developing new features for Safari 12, but speaking of regressions, why would you go break things that used to work a week ago?
I did not work for Apple but this article describes exactly what I was thinking.<p>Apple has very waterfall cycle. Everything is planned year after year to be released for the September event. When the deadline approach teams realized that are behind and they need to overwork. And when people get tired and under pressure, they usually introduce even more bugs.<p>The article also nails the solution: a more Agile workflow. But it ain't gonna happen: "Apple could address this scheduling problem by not packing so many features into each release, but that’s just not the company culture."
I'm still on High Sierra on my 2015 Macbook Pro. I haven't upgraded my OS nor my machine and pretty happy with it (I only accept updates within my OS version itself) . On my home machine, I do use Mojave, which by itself is quite buggy and I'm waiting for some more fixes before I upgrade my Macbook Pro to Mojave as well.<p>I never install Apple's newer OS'es because I have a lot of development related stuff setup on my machines and wouldn't want them to break post an update. But so far, this lag in my update schedule has served me really well for years now and looks like this won't be changing anytime soon for me, either.
My wife updated her macbook to Catalina the other day and suddenly has low disk space errors popping up all the time. She stores no big files and does nothing on the laptop but school work. Turns out it created a new encrypted disk partition containing all of her personal data, and somehow it kept adding disk snapshots multiple times per day. After some research, it seems that this is a known problem! I had to disable Time Machine and do some kind of tmutil command, then delete the recent snapshots. All that and she still has very little disk space. These are the kind of shenanigans I’d expect from Microsoft, not Apple, where everything is supposed to “just work”. I’m disappointed that Apple has released such a buggy OS update. Not even the Linux distros I use have been this buggy.
I am also finding text selection in iOS 13 hit/miss. I either cannot activate the text selection or I cannot select without the cursor jumping all over the place. Also, I miss the magnifying glass for text selection. Did Apple remove that?
The way I've heard one company deal with noticing non-crashing bugs is to treat warning logs as 'crashes' with backtrace snapshots and upload them as specially tagged non-fatal crashes. Might help apple see if clients are having specific icloud issues.
I could understand iOS 13 being buggy as they are trying cramp more features in every year. But the thing is, there is nothing on Catalina that felt new, unless you take removal of iTunes and new PodCast / Apple Music App as <i>new</i>.<p>99% of the macOS remain the same. The removal of 32bit Apps are long time coming. I just dont understand why it had so many problems.
Ya'll just have hindsight issues.<p>Every MacOS upgrade has been a problem for a non-trivial number of users. It's much more likely that YOU didn't have a problem because you were new the platform and didn't have much stuff to migrate. If you just got a Mac in 2018 moving to Catalina is no problem at all. It will probably go flawlessly and the only issue you might is with Adobe software… but if you use Adobe software on any platform that's nothing new either.<p>Moving from PowerPC to X86 had a bunch of problems. Remember when they dropped Rosetta completely? Or when they dropped support for the first Intel Macs because they were 32-bit only that was a problem. Remember when they changed QuickTime? Or dropped AFP? How about dropping Firewire? Or how about the changes to Filevualt? Or when they integrated your Apple ID into the user login and then removed it? Or how about all those times you upgraded and iTunes stopped working and you had to reinstall it manually. Oh man, how about that total abandonment of OS X Server.<p>Apple has NEVER been good about upgrades. Ever. You buy an Apple device and it's good for that point in time. In 2-3 years when the warranty is up and the platform evolves it's anyone's guess as to what will happen.
<i>But if you file a bug report, and the QA engineer determines that bug also exists in previous releases of the software, it’s marked “not a regression.”</i><p>In case you were wondering why 13.1 got rolled out so fast. Snark aside, this annoys me because the message is, "haha, didn't find it fast enough, and now we don't have to fix it." And you jackasses think this clown shoes attitude should be enshrined on a t-shirt?
I still remember at WWDC a few years back, I went with some older radars to the labs, only to get turned down with a „You already have a workaround - why do you care?“<p>...that made me mostly stop filing radars for older issues.
> apart from a few specific areas, Apple doesn’t do a lot of automated testing. Apple is highly reliant on manual testing, probably too much so.<p>That's the last thing I expected to know about such a big company.
Sounds like the past couple years of hardware "whoopsies" have come to the software side.<p>Over-optimization of existing processes, what Mr Cook made his name doing, seem to have gone a bridge too far.<p>Time to go back to making cool new products and not squeezing every last ounce of blood out of existing ones. And no, starting a TV production division doesn't count.
I refuse to install iOS 13.0 because it's so buggy, and refuse to install Catalina because all it does is take away features rather than adding value. They can't seem to stop to fix what's already broken, so they add a few things, break a few more and remove some I use and say "the emperor's new clothes are awesome."
My number one iOS bug right now: "Hey Siri call Scott's conference line" That exact text shows up on the screen...and Siri says "Calling Don's conference line". Both are in my contacts list. I have not had this problem prior to this week so it's probably a backend issue.
This narrative repeats with every release.<p>But is each release actually worse than the last?<p>My guess is, not really, though the perception persists for a couple main reasons:<p>(1) For a certain subset of people, the last release really was worse than ever before. New releases have new bugs, and those bugs will affect a certain subset of people that isn't necessarily the same as the bug from the last release. Those people complain (justifiably, I think) though of course people don't create a lot of posts to describe the problems they aren't having.<p>(2) We all naturally forget about the annoyances of years past while focusing on the current annoyances. (Generally, that is.)
I made a mistake of installing Catalina. Since the day the system is acting up weird. Apart from rejecting 32-bits apps, Catalina is also having memory kind of issues. After working for a few hours things start getting weird, chrome's extensions start crashing, if I try to open a new tab it does not let me load the page. I also start getting messages "X Application can not be opened" where X is ANY application I wish to open. The issue got a bit better after a recent 1 GB update but the main problem persists. I am seriously considering to downgrade to Mojave.
I've having a feeling that iOS 13 & Catalina is felt buggy b.c. it's not the operating system itself that's buggy but that the updater is buggy. Many things have changed in this release, and the installer/updater had to handle too many different scenarios.<p>For example, when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina, an 'Moved Files' directory appeared that contained some files (that was once) in /usr/local/. I don't remember such directory appearing after an macOS update, and I've had many friends (that aren't really technical) appear that to them. There were lots of new applications (like Music.app and Podcasts.app), and data migration between internal databases weren't perfect.<p>I've installed Catalina two times, first by upgrading from Mojave and second a clean re-install.
When I upgraded Mojave, I found too many bugs that I was worrying about data-loss, which lead to a full backup (I do backups regularly) and a clean re-install. (Admittedly, this was my first clean reinstall for a major macOS update)
I clean-installed Catalina and manually restored all of my files from the backup, and except for some minor bugs I'm good.<p>It's a pity that updates aren't seamless, but if there's anyone having trouble with various Catalina bugs, (while Apple updates it's imperfect macOS updater) I would recommend a full clean re-install for macOS Catalina.
My personal feelings are that #2 (crash reporting) and #6 (complexity) are the biggest issues facing Apple software quality. Apple is a metrics-driven company, and when managers see bad metrics going down (like crashes), they think they are doing a great job.<p>But, just like with police crime reporting, there can be an effect where metrics are massaged or are reported differently. With Apple, I think the issue is that crashes are avoided by design or by nature of growing complexity, which means that metrics will continually be going down, even if user-facing issues go up. An example being that a failed sync does not crash.<p>Apple has attempted to get ahead of this, recently, with the new Feedback Assistant allowing beta users to grab and report sysdiagnoses, but there's still a lot of work to do. I really appreciate the point the article makes:<p>> Besides the fact that bugs are expensive, both in support costs and engineer time, they’re starting to become a public relations concern.<p>Apple would be wise to heed this, instead of continuing to blindly trust metrics.
Apple stores are highly tuned to and responsive to customer experience in-store. The same is true with their AppleCare support online and via phone. The metric they focus on is Net Promoter Score. Maybe this same model could be applied to the OS, Apps and services. Apple user experience would be improved methinks.
<i>"No need to go into the details here, except to say that, apart from a few specific areas, Apple doesn’t do a lot of automated testing. Apple is highly reliant on manual testing, probably too much so."</i><p>This tells you everything you need to know about the poor state of Apple's software. A large, untested code base that's been in development for years and years is going to reach a maximum point of complexity where the cost of adding new features exceeds the business value. The ROI turns upside down. That's when your technical debt turns into a bankruptcy and your software is kaput. It's quite conceivable that Mac OS, which is built on top of NeXTStep OS which dates back to the mid-80's, is reaching this state.
So a few days ago we had an article on the front page claiming Windows 10 was buggy because of automated testing, now we have an article claiming iOS is buggy because they don't use enough automated testing...
I have a theory that this year tons of stuff was rewritten in Swift, because with the lockdown of the ABI it's now possible to write libraries in Swift. This might be why this year is a bumper crop of bugs.
I’ve been super annoyed at some bugs in iOS Safari. In particular, double tap to zoom on web pages is completely broken. It’s a really old feature that just suddenly stopped working in the new iOS release.
I expect the number of the new security vulnerabilities to be a lot more than the bugs visible to the users. Considering the MacOS track of record in the last year ( <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222</a> ), I am pretty worried.<p>When I see a weird behavior I always wonder if it is a Apple's bug or a bug introduced by something trying to exploit a vulnerability.
It's popular tendencies today: release aplha/beta stage product and get free QA from users. Apple isn't an icon of hardware/software quality anymore.
The Apple USB keyboard on my old Mojave iMac works fine but doesn't work when I plug it into the iMac running Catalina.<p>I submitted the bug yesterday.
One of the things that I heard about Windows 10 was that Microsoft switched from testing on real hardware to virtualized testing and relying on end-user crash reports. If Apple did something similar, that would explain why more nonfatal bugs make it through to final release.
Why do any SW/QA engineer <i>routinely</i> accept to work night and WE? Of course this is gonna be non productive and produce only buggy crap. I expect any reasonable person to understand that, and only very naive and/or junior people to not.<p>So just don't. What is your employer going to do? Fire you? Good, you don't want to work there anyway. And especially if you work at Apple, it is going to be easy to find a new job.<p>Refuse to ship crap. Refuse to work in insane conditions. If you don't it is not your employer's fault. It is yours. (I'm saying that in the context of highly qualified jobs, like engineering -- it does not apply to other situations where the employer has all the power and people are easily replaceable and sometimes have a hard time to find a job.)
None of this is unique to Apple — this is all standard practice for giant mass-market software projects. The “closed, not a regression” thing used to drive me crazy at Microsoft. It makes no sense whatsoever!
tvOS 13 seems to also be buggy. After the update I can no longer wake it via HDMI/CEC. Once I wake it some other (inconvenient) way then HDMI/CEC control works. Wake up was working on tvOS 12
Has anyone done back of the envelope calculations into how much it costs Apple in bandwidth to push an update?<p>I wonder if that is a reason there isn’t a stream of x.1 updates every few weeks as things are fixed?
Is there evidence that crash reports are being systematically analyzed? It seems more likely those are collected and reviewed as convenient for the highest priority fix investigations.
Operating system should stop trying to do everything and just focus on giving basic functionalities in almost perfect way.<p>Let third party developer use those building blocks and add this magic!
It's going to take a long time before I can ever trust iCloud with my files again. Such an absolutely trash experience compared to Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
It’s simpler than all that. They’re buggy because Apple inexplicably decided they need to ship a new OS every year rather than when the features are ready. Reap what you sow.
The bugs shows very increased complexity in the system, which causes so many exceptional scenarios that it is hard for QA to catch them all. This is the reason
iOS 13 was pretty buggy but the amount of improvements all across the system has been significant. I can live with it. But installing Catalina on my daily driver: no thanks. Xcode will force me to upgrade eventually I guess.
iOS 13 has been pretty much flawless for me. However, I am waiting to update to Catalina until 2020 because support for 32 bit apps and OpenGL has been pulled.