Apple pauses iOS 18, macOS 15 work to stomp bugs now
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
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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.
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.
Squashing bugs and optimisation should always be main goals.
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.
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).
lately it’s been more of a crapshoot reminiscent of the windows/android world.
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...
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.