This really is quite true. iOS development is moving at breakneck pace and the API quality is starting to show.<p>Most people outside of mobile dev don't know this, but when iCloud shipped in iOS5 the API support was woefully not ready - heck, even Apple's own 1st-party apps that exploit iCloud had notorious syncing issues. To this day iCloud + Core Data support is buggy, poor, and more or less undocumented (the go-to guide for using it is a thread on the forums dozens of pages long full of angry devs and overwhelmed Apple engineers).<p>There are a number of rather egregious bugs still in the API today that date from iOS3, including one date parsing one that any iOS dev worth their salt has run into first-hand - every time a new release happens people circle back and are continually disappointed that major, easy to hit API bugs are left unattended for so long.<p>It really does seem like Apple is having trouble keeping up.<p>I remember when the iOS4 beta came out for developers - it was an incredibly solid beta, and the OS was stable and highly functional months before it was due. Compare with iOS5 and iOS6, the betas of which have both been notoriously buggy, crashy, and downright unusable <i>right</i> up until release. Devs have had to struggle with horrible stability and broken APIs in all beta builds right up until the day the GM drops.<p>It could be worse. Definitely not the worst API I've ever touched. But still, troubling.
I think there are two seperate issues we shouldn't mix up: On the one hand Apple is moving at such a quick pace, that there is less time for quality control, and many bugs stay even between major releases.<p>On the other hand Apple has never been good with networking software. For example, File Sharing is slow and used to be very unreliable. The built-in FTP support in OS X was a joke. Sending files with iChat on AIM often failed. Mobile Me was never really successful. More recently there is FaceTime, where my Mac just randomly fails to connect. Every time I synced bookmarks with iTunes between Safari on the Mac and on my iPhone I ended up with duplicates on both devices. And now we have iCloud syncing, which is incredibly unreliable.
Absolute truth. The more obscure the piece of software in the Apple kingdom, the worse it is. Their OS X server product alone is so unbelievably ratty it single-handedly defeats the notion that Apple doesn't ship garbage.<p>Apple's best code is in the space between Cupertino and new money. Everything else tends to lie fallow.
There is a similar problem for users of non San Fracisco Bay Area maps.<p>There is a general problem with non-SF parts of the world as well. I've noticed that many web apps work better in San Francisco than anywhere else the country. The situation in other parts of the country is different. For example, Houston has much more geographic dispersion per capita. The concentration of VC money in the SF Bay Area means that other parts of the country don't benefit from "eat your own cooking" as much. I think there's an opportunity there.
There are problems but it's not all bad. Sure, some of Apple's technology pushes have turned out to be half-baked, especially those which seem to be more marketing or management driven, such as iCloud syncing, and of course the subject of this article, Game Center. On the other hand, Apple has added some nice incremental improvements recently which will no doubt make life considerably easier once everything is running on iOS 6 as the minimum. Examples include the UIView "auto-layout" system, NSAttributedString support throughout UIKit, UICollectionView, and so on.<p>Things aren't all <i>that</i> different from the OS X days, where there was often a mixture of good and bad. Letting Apple know when things aren't working right is the first step to improvement.
This article and the comments on this thread run into the same problem as the "maps are broken!" arguments did - Apple's overall reputation is mistaken for its actual track record. They have always had their problems, as had other software developers, and everyone just selectively piles on something at some moment in time.<p>With the release of Letterpress, a spike in Game Center activity has brought about some talk about how it sucks/breaks easily, and thus Apple's overall QA is going down the toilet.<p>Criticism is healthy, but let's not forget that the past was not at all perfect or ideal.
Apple would get a huge benefit from integrating their UI code bases, Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. I and a lot of other developers dream about the day Apple will deliver a modern and saner Cocoa implemented with CALayers.<p>If that happens they'd have the resources needed to properly fix these issues that haunt us all.