Apple pauses iOS 18, macOS 15 work to stomp bugs now

AppleInsider

Apple has reportedly stalled development on iOS 18, macOS 15, iPadOS 18, and other major updates it will introduce in 2024 to work on fixing bugs.

The expected introduction of iOS and iPadOS 18, macOS 15, and Apple's other milestone releases in WWDC 2024 and their eventual release in roughly ten months time seems like a long way off. However, Apple has allegedly decided to pause all work on the future operating systems, in favor of a period of bug fixing.

According to Bloomberg, Apple informed employees of the delay at the start of November, people with knowledge of the announcement explained. Instead of working on new items, engineers are instead working to fix issues and improve the performance of what has already been produced.

After the discovery of what was deemed too many bugs by software lead Craig Federighi's team, it was decided that the engineers would go on a week-long improvement sprint. Following the end of the pause, engineers will return to working on new features.

While a delay in development can be a problem in may cases, a delay of a week with such long development times is a prudent way to try and minimize bugs that could end up in the final software.

Read on AppleInsider

magman1979

I LOVE reading reports like this, and hope Apple actually takes even MORE time to vet and crush bugs in their OS's, as they have gotten out of hand over the last few years and could stand to greatly benefit from a Snow Leopard cycle again.

xyzzy-xxx

I like this very much and I would also like if developer tools (and websites!!!) would be addressed too !

dominikhoffmann

There are several bugs I have been dealing with, which I hope get fixed every time there is a new release. But then they aren’t. I can’t imagine that a week of concentrating on bug fixes can really be enough.

Contacts: Adding contacts from the right pane to one of the lists in the left pane ceases to work after the app has been open for a day or so.
Contacts: Clicking and dragging across the name of a contact in the right pane only works, if I start clicking in the lower half (maybe lower third) of the name.
Contacts: Adding contact details in the Messages app will lead to that new contact showing up in the Contacts app only after 30 s or so. I do have a lot of contacts (> 5,000), but still…

Calendar: Can’t add coordinates to an appointment’s location, anymore. It’s been years…

Mail: Clicking on the down-caret to the immediate right of an address in the To: field of a message being edited requires the selection of “Edit Selection” twice, before I can actually edit the address. This has been a problem for years, now, too.

chadbag

They should probably spend a week a month for a while doing this.  

gatorguy

Of some importance, Apple has also paused further development of Vision OS in order for those engineers to also concentrate on the atypical number of bugs and stability issues with iOS, watchOS, and MacOS .

M68000

chadbag said:

They should probably spend a week a month for a while doing this.  

Exactly.  Just a week?   A week flies by where i work.  

dewme

Excellent move, but why specify this as only a single week sprint?

The criteria/gate for transitioning back to regularly scheduled activities should be based on the attainment of a predetermined quality metric, not time.

They shouldn't let themselves fall the age-old trap of prioritizing effort over achievement. 

avon b7

Snow Leopard was one of Apple's best releases for good reason.

Squashing bugs and optimisation should always be main goals. 

digitol

Yes please bug fix, refine, refine,refine. When special Apple iCloud features like handoff and continuity,  (copy and paste between devices; use one mouse keyboard across all devices.) works it’s amazing. The second it stops working is beyond angering/devastating.  Make these iOS sync technologies work 100% of the time, and remove the need to have so many necessary requirements and checks to “make sure” it somewhat works.  Turning on off is an easy fix, but annoying. Making sure Bluetooth is on, WiFi is on and connected to same network, settings are turned on, etc etc. is awful. Please Apple, hopefully this will improve! 

dope_ahmine

And dont forget watchOS. It’s entire UX seems totally untested.

How can anybody at Apple give clearance to release a system that takes five (5!) touch steps (swipes and taps counted) just to stop the recording of an ongoing sport activity? One single step should of course be enough. And then one optional step to restart it again.

Also, the entire touch interface has suddenly become much less responsive with watchOS 10. Why? It was working just fine before. Now, people keep pressing and pressing on that little screen just to get it to react at all.

And what’s happened with the notification mechanism??? Sometimes there are nonsense notification signals, with absolutely zero notifications in the list. And sometimes it’s just the opposite. I even sometimes receive different notifications with mutually conflicting info …and I’m only using Apple’s own apps.

mpantone

dewme said:

Excellent move, but why specify this as only a single week sprint?

The criteria/gate for transitioning back to regularly scheduled activities should be based on the attainment of a predetermined quality metric, not time.

They shouldn't let themselves fall the age-old trap of prioritizing effort over achievement. 

The probable explanation is that senior software engineering management thinks one week is enough to clear an excessively high number of high priority bugs. The goal is to  bring the number of high priority bugs below a certain threshold, not to eliminate all bugs.

Any further delay may threaten the next generation operating systems. As we all know, Apple now ships new OSes in rather poor shape; it has been like this since before the pandemic.

Software development delays will affect hardware development as well. Great hardware does not benefit from buggy software.

I wish Apple did more in the way of making their software better before public release. About 7 years ago, I stopped upgrading my Macs and iDevices to the brand new operating systems on launch day. I began delaying the upgrade and over years, my upgrade point drifted farther and farther from the release.

Today I am upgrading the following Q1, typically late March. So I am still running Ventura on my Mac, iOS/iPadOS 16 on my handheld devices. This coming year I probably will not upgrade my Mac until macOS hits version 14.6. For my handhelds, it will be 17.6 for iOS/iPadOS.

Upon launch, the software is pretty unstable and some features haven't been implemented because they slipped the initial release. Note that there's some dev time that third-party programmers have to put in before their apps can take advantage of the new operating system's features. It's not just Apple.

I don't see any of that anymore. By the time I upgrade the features have all been implemented and the OSes are relatively stable. Third party apps have been updated to take advantage of new OS features by April the following year. So for me, there are relatively few updates (both OS and apps) and less frustration (both from the OS and apps again).

Ofer

digitol said:

Yes please bug fix, refine, refine,refine. When special Apple iCloud features like handoff and continuity,  (copy and paste between devices; use one mouse keyboard across all devices.) works it’s amazing. The second it stops working is beyond angering/devastating.  Make these iOS sync technologies work 100% of the time, and remove the need to have so many necessary requirements and checks to “make sure” it somewhat works.  Turning on off is an easy fix, but annoying. Making sure Bluetooth is on, WiFi is on and connected to same network, settings are turned on, etc etc. is awful. Please Apple, hopefully this will improve! 

Agreed! It’s a great feature when it works, but too often doesn’t.

Toortog

Apple you need to stop trying to meet an event schedule and releasing thing is they are ready or not, have to get to only releasing products when they are actually ready.   Have your events but if something isn't ready just say so and give an estimated release date.   Also build up your QA team and quit trying to use customers as beta testers, customers are terrible testers you need real QA engineers testing and documenting issues. 

saarek

I’d be happy for them to spend a whole year just on bug fixes.

notrs

Feels like this is more just a PR response to all the recent grumbling over their Feedback process. Sure, they’ll take a week to address a limited number of “high priority” bugs. Yawn. 

I’d much rather see the next OSes brag about zero new features again. Take a year Apple, refactor everything. 

hexclock

Good idea. We need another Snow Leopard type refinement. Or two. 

9secondkox2

Great! Apple has historically been the standout company where everything works eat perfectly. M
lately it’s been more of a crapshoot reminiscent of the windows/android world. 

jingo

I think you're all overstating the issue, quite honestly. I am running Sonoma 14.1 on an M2 Pro Mac mini (16GB RAM) and it runs absolutely fine. Yes, there are a few very minor things I find from time to time (which it would be nice to see fixed), but it is in my experience absolutely rock-solid and runs for weeks at a time with a large number (twenty as we speak) of apps running throughout that time, which are also absolutely rock solid too. As a system for depending upon for work it is superb.

I am not trying to suggest it is perfect, and bug fixes and performance enhancements are always very good things to pursue, but the current status really is pretty excellent.

 Windows? Not so much...

royboy

 Fix bugs in which iOS??  The article doesn’t say.  Fix bugs in iOS 17??  Or the ones already cropping in developing iOS 18??

dewme

mpantone said:

dewme said:

Excellent move, but why specify this as only a single week sprint?

The criteria/gate for transitioning back to regularly scheduled activities should be based on the attainment of a predetermined quality metric, not time.

They shouldn't let themselves fall the age-old trap of prioritizing effort over achievement. 

The probable explanation is that senior software engineering management thinks one week is enough to clear an excessively high number of high priority bugs. The goal is to  bring the number of high priority bugs below a certain threshold, not to eliminate all bugs.

Any further delay may threaten the next generation operating systems. As we all know, Apple now ships new OSes in rather poor shape; it has been like this since before the pandemic.

Software development delays will affect hardware development as well. Great hardware does not benefit from buggy software.

I wish Apple did more in the way of making their software better before public release. About 7 years ago, I stopped upgrading my Macs and iDevices to the brand new operating systems on launch day. I began delaying the upgrade and over years, my upgrade point drifted farther and farther from the release.

Today I am upgrading the following Q1, typically late March. So I am still running Ventura on my Mac, iOS/iPadOS 16 on my handheld devices. This coming year I probably will not upgrade my Mac until macOS hits version 14.6. For my handhelds, it will be 17.6 for iOS/iPadOS.

Upon launch, the software is pretty unstable and some features haven't been implemented because they slipped the initial release. Note that there's some dev time that third-party programmers have to put in before their apps can take advantage of the new operating system's features. It's not just Apple.

I don't see any of that anymore. By the time I upgrade the features have all been implemented and the OSes are relatively stable. Third party apps have been updated to take advantage of new OS features by April the following year. So for me, there are relatively few updates (both OS and apps) and less frustration (both from the OS and apps again).

Setting a target of eliminating all bugs is impossible to achieve. Software teams keep track of a number of metrics regarding bugs and technical debt on a continuous basis. They see trends, rates, and where hot spots are occurring that let them know that they are digging themselves into a hole unless they take some preemptive action to address the problem before it cripples their progress towards hitting their development and deliverable goals. They basically monitor measure everything.

That said, development teams occasionally, cough cough, let too much technical debt accumulate to the point where management steps in and pulls the Andon pullcord to stop new development for a period of time to clear out some of their accumulated technical debt that is ultimately going to slow them down later. I know Apple has a very mature development team and processes so they probably know approximately how much technical debt they can deal with in a given period of time with a given number of developers solely focused on fixing bugs - because they measure everything. Teams typically try to whittle down the technical debt backlog as part of every sprint, but sometimes they get behind if the number of incoming bugs is higher than anticipated.

The added benefit of pausing new development is that they are driving the fault injection rate to near zero because they aren't writing new code. It's not at zero because some of the bug fixes will likely create or trigger new bugs in other areas. So with a highly data driven quality management team specifying a time period is effectively setting a quality target. If they don't see a boost at the end of the sprint, they will likely repeat the big bug fix effort again at a future date.