iOS 11 bugs are so common they now appear in Apple ads | Hacker News Reader

iOS 11 bugs are so common they now appear in Apple ads

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261 pointsMononokay105 comments

I know a lot of the comments are saying what a bad example. And how trivial it is. But it’s a clear illustration of Apple’s lack of attention to detail now. I dare say there was a time when Apple would never have published such an advert. Likewise there was a time they would never publish software with the embarrassing bugs we have seen through macOS and iOS.

You mean like back in the days when Apple Maps was released? Or when we had Antennagate?

Or back in the Mac OS 9 days? Remember that spinner, that indicated that one userspace app crashed you?

By this point, blue screens in Windows were quite rare.

The joys of cooperative multitasking.

> Likewise there was a time they would never publish software with the embarrassing bugs we have seen through macOS and iOS.

When was this?

Remember Snow Leopard? The release The Internet likes to parade as the Last Good OS X Release? It had a bug where your all user data will be deleted if logging into the Guest account. Here's a headline from the time: Snow Leopard Bug is a Doozy, How Did Apple Miss it? [1] Sound familiar?

Or in 2010 (and all the times after) when they couldn't get DST right and would screw up people's alarms.

[1]: https://www.cio.com/article/2423952/security0/snow-leopard-b... [2]: https://www.cultofmac.com/60691/ios-alarms-broken-for-new-ze...

That bug didn't appear in an advertisement. The point isn't that Apple is making mistakes (they always have), it's that they're bad enough at even noticing the mistakes that one was able to slip into an ad.

planetjones made two statements, one on the advert, and one on their software in general.

Given that (s)he quoted the latter, that wasn’t the part that madeofpalk replied to.

The ad is from ATT, not Apple.

wait what? the ad in OPs article is definitely from Apple

i quite agree with this. I don't remember a single os release that didn't have some kind of embarassing bug. Yet there are a few differences :

1/ ios used to be new and evolved a lot. So having mistakes were understandable. iOS11 new feature is the larger navigationbar and some drag n drop. Compare that to adding autolayout (iOS 7) or ARC (iOS4).

2/ very shortly after the release, apple would quickly update the os and after just a few months the os started to work a lot better with few if any noticeable issue. iOS 11 is close to a year old and hasn't improved by any noticeable margin.

3/ iOS lag was expected because new feature would consume more cpu. User interfaces became more complexe (few people remember the time when the official UIKit guideline said that one screen should have only one view controller). Hardware was still a bit short, and they came with brand new interactions , fancy animations and twice the image resolution. But now that the hardware is pretty much as powerful as a regular laptop,and the UI has basically stayed the same, having a new OS version making your phone lag becomes unacceptable.

I think it's a perfect example, actually.

Apple made its fortune by paying attention to the small details.

I think that's only partially true. There are two types of quality. There is defect free quality and quality that delights. Apple under Jobs really shined with quality that delights.

So, I spent EUR 1799 on the new MacBook Pro.

The keyboard started missing keys and typing 2 characters per keystroke after two months. Then, the shift key started working only once ever three times. Battery would last 2 hours at the most.

I brought it to the Apple store. They ran tests and found out the battery was defective. So, they replaced the whole bottom case since the keyboard wasn't working, either.

After 3 days, the logic board died. All data was unrecoverable (sure, _I_ have backups, but not everyone does).

Went back to the Apple store, they replaced EVERYTHING. I put an ad and sell the laptop. The guy calls me 3 days later that the laptop died again (logic board).

Bad unity? Perhaps, but then again lots and lots of people compain about problems with the keyboard. They also replaced every single component, and it still failed.

That was my main computer, so I had to buy a shitty laptop while I was waiting days for them to repair it. The Asus worked GREAT. I could finally type, at least. I just sold it and in 6 months it never gave me one single problem. Battery was 5-6 hours under heavy load.

I just don't think Apple sells defect-free computers, or at least not what you'd expect after spending USD 2000. Of course, quality that delights comes after the thing actually working (tes, it's a computer so it's not acceptable to me that it barely looks pretty, I also have to use it for work).

I am now using a Chinese lqptop that I bought for 500 with hidpi touchscreen, fingerprint recognition, etc., and it actually works. I will buy the Surface Book as soon as I have some money to splurge.

How does the broken logic board render all data unrecoverable?

SSD is part of the logic board and not removable

And it's not unheard of for disk controllers to make a right royal mess of your data on non-integrated storage during the act of topping themselves.

It's one piece on those laptops.

My experience is the same with the new keyboards. My friends, too. It's like nobody tested them longer than a week or two. My computer is 3 months old, various keys stick/misfire, and my T key stopped latching. It comes right off. My Macbook Air didn't have this problem in 4 years of use, it has to do with these new tiny-action keyboards.

The action of the keys is so small that a tiny grain of dirt will stop the key. So the testers must've only tested it for a week inside a cleanroom.

I can't recommend the new Macbook Pro. My next computer will be an Air (if they don't "upgrade" the keyboard), a 2015 Pro, or something else entirely.

Yup, it's tragic.

I lost all trust in Apple. Specially because it was my first high-end laptop.after always buying MacBook Airs...

I’ve heard numerous complaints like this, yet I’ve never once had the problem despite owning multiple 12” MB and new generation MBPs all under heavy usage. I really wonder how I got so lucky or if it’s that your somehow usage is just really that different.

Their USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter is a small detail. If they paid attention to it, they would stop selling it. It's an insult to customers that they even continue to sell it.

sorry, what do you mean?

What part of that do you not understand?

Their advertising has always been top notch, but I don’t really care about that.

I can’t disagree more with regard to their product bugs. I’ve been around Apple software and hardware for a long time, since the beginning, and they’ve always had terrible bugs and design mistakes. Always.

I think you have to be a certain type of user to see this. You can’t be one of those people who has ever fallen victim to their reality distortion field.

"there was a time they would never publish software with the embarrassing bugs"

I don't understand where this myth of Apple software quality comes from. There are many examples showing the opposite. Here is just one:

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-news-digest/data-loss-b...

That myth probably a part of Apples success.

> But it’s a clear illustration of Apple’s lack of attention to detail now

Others might call that setting the right priorities. With attention to infinitesimal detail comes infinitesimal increase in battery use, to paraphrase the old spidey.

I agree here but to be fair that was a time when as a company Apple produced one single operating system. That type of attention to detail comes with such singular focus.

If you’re an Apple VP right now, your concerns are about branching into new industries like driverless cars or heads-up displays. A graphical bug on one OS isn’t going to perturb you.

A lot of the flack going Apple’s way should be directed at the lack of innovation in the rest of the industry. If Apple felt their smartphone dominance was actually threatened, you can be sure the focus would be put there.

This is the price of the success Apple fans like myself were hoping for through the OS X era.

So because they have 2 operating systems, they're allowed to be sloppy now? And indeed they're focusing on expanding into other industries, rather than refining their products, I think that's the point.

macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, embedded systems on AirPorts & AirPods, and more in the oven I’m sure.

Apple is “allowed” to do whatever they choose but their decisions are likely constrained by the reality of organizing so many complex products.

Not necessarily the wrong strategy or even a bad strategy. If there are enough people out there willing to pay in money and effort to switch ecosystems, there is space in the market for a smartphone with more simplicity and attention to detail.

If not, which I think is most likely, this is just what we’re stuck with.

> Likewise there was a time they would never publish software with the embarrassing bugs we have seen through macOS and iOS.

As someone who's been an Apple fanboy since the 80s, that's just bullshit.

But actually aside from the example in the article being rather silly I believe that something we could learn from this as developers is that in some situations it might be valuable for us to record our monitor with a high speed camera and look at it slowed down.

This mainly has value for game development I think, but other programs that feature a lot of animation could benefit from it as well.

When I say “high-speed camera” you might think of cameras that cost in the range of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars but actually from what I’ve seen on YouTube even a camera that would capture some hundred FPS could provide interesting insight. Preferably at a not too low resolution though. Some cameras like that exist for the price around some hundreds to under a couple of thousand dollars. It might be worth looking into. And let me know if you find one that seems especially good and with not too big of a price tag because I am looking too and haven’t found quite the perfect one yet.

Btw it probably helps if you have some other intended use for the camera as well like for example to take photos and pictures of things in the nature.

I normally write my CSS transitions [1] at 3-5x the time they will be in the final version. So if I intend for `transition: all .3s ease`, then I'll write `transition: all 1s ease` and test it like that. I actually try different speeds, first a decent one (2-3x) not to be slowed down and then a slower one (~5x) to make sure it is works as intended. I've found this much easier to debug and find issues.

The only problem with this approach is that, since you are making things in slow motion, it's easy to over-animate things and make it look messy on normal speed. So just compensate for that and everything is fine.

[1] example: https://picnicss.com/

Chrome's devtools let you set all animation to run at at 1/4 or 1/10 speed, simplifying that process a bit.

https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/insp...

Recent iPhone cameras (and high-end Android too, I assume) can take video at 240fps so you won't need to buy anything extra if you have one.

Speaking of which, do you know if it’s possible to start and end recording in slow motion immediately instead of it starting and ending at normal speed with transition between?

Also when I transferred videos from my iPhone to my computer and watched the videos in VLC they played back at normal speed so I guess the slow down is actually recorded as meta-data either inside the video or someplace else in iOS so that it is non-destructive. In turn of course that means that I can watch the whole thing on the computer at any speed I desire but when I talked about the normal speed stuff I mean when I watch it on the phone itself.

IIRC you can edit what portion is slowed down in the video editing UI on device after the video is saved.

Thanks I checked and you are right :)

Game dev here - We usually make sure to have the ability to pause anywhere and step frame by frame forward.

Yes that’s true. However I think recording full game play on high speed video could be useful as well because then you can jump straight to some point and also if you watch the whole thing at normal speed you might notice something and then you can go back and look at it in slow motion and then once you have identified it you can investigate that part or situation with in-game frame stepping and code debugging.

Can't you capture the output of the graphics card directly? Cameras seem like an inefficient way to do things.

Depends on how intensive your game is and how fast your computer is and how much memory you have and so on. Personally I can not afford a top-of-the-line computer.

I meant after processing. The stuff that comes out of the monitor end of the graphics card isn't going to be affected by processor speed or memory, its just raw data being sent to the monitor (unless my understanding is way off).

You can slow down animations on the simulator.

So I thought people were exaggerating but something I recently found that is weird is the time slider not progressing for music/podcasts playing while on the lock screen. I thought it’s just when you play something out of Safari but it’s also happening with the official music app? Like what the hell?

I thought it was just 3rd party apps like Spotify but that sounds like an iOS bug.

Seconded. It does reveal the right playhead once Face ID unlocks the screen. Perhaps playhead position is sensitive info?

Me personally, I've had less issues with iOS 11 than with previous iterations and I'm happy overall with wit iOS 11.

Is the data (say, normalized number of issued bugs) really showing a decrease in reliability of iOS over time or rather the contrary?

Not an Apple evangelist here, but it would be good to be fair.

Let's please remember that often a few loud voices are just that, loud, but few.

Everyone i know who's an iOS developper noticed the same thing about iOS11. But you're right in the sense that every new release (at least since iOS 7) brings its share of bugs and slowdowns. Which isn't a reason not to be angry..

iOS 11 is by far the buggiest iOS release in my experience. I have multiple devices and I held off as long as I could to upgrade my main device after seeing the myriad of bugs on my other devices. They broke the touch screen. Even clicking on buttons isn’t reliable anymore, never mind the keyboard issues. Speaking of which, they also broke the keyboard in iOS 11. Typing is almost as bad as old Android.

IMO, it all went downhill after the “flat” iOS 7 release. It was unstable beta software then, and it’s still unstable beta software now. Apple would rather add Animoji than fix these long standing iOS 7 bugs.

> They broke the touch screen. Even clicking on buttons isn’t reliable anymore, never mind the keyboard issues.

What keyboard issues? The symptoms described sound like a hardware problem.

Not the poster you replied to, but the keyboard is ridiculously slow sometimes. It can take a second or so for letters to echo until the keyboard code warms up its cache, or whatever it’s doing immediately after it is displayed.

I’ve also noticed that I sometimes have to click the fingerprint sensor 4-5 times to get the pin screen to display. Clicking works reliably once the phone is unlocked.

They definitely broke the touch screen on iPhone X, at least during winter weather. They had a point release of iOS where that was one of the headline bug fixes.

> It can take a second or so for letters to echo until the keyboard code warms up its cache, or whatever it’s doing immediately after it is displayed.

This is rare but it also goes back to the earliest iOS releases. Once background apps became possible swapping became common, especially since most people just enable it for every app which asks.

> I’ve also noticed that I sometimes have to click the fingerprint sensor 4-5 times to get the pin screen to display.

This also sounds like memory pressure. It doesn’t happen normally even old older hardware.

A few months ago I've bought an iPhone for testing and development. I've used it for a few days total, yet I can already count something about a dozen of UI glitches I've found just by using it, and one severe stability issue with underlying frameworks. It looks really untidy.

I don't know iOS inernals, but to me it looks like they started using multiple threads for the UI? Smart when you want to update multiple areas of the screen at once, buggy when multiple areas have to sync animations?

'text-display' should be triggered on 'animation end', surely multi-threading wouldnt mess with that as it's an async/event-driven thing (I know nothing about multi-threading)?

...or the text could have an animated mask to reveal it in sync with the bubble animation.

Either way, fairly basic stuff to implement.

The balloon probably isn’t specified to clip the text because normally it is big enough anyway.

or it was made to clip, but someone else fixed a bug that was caused by clipping, so he disabled clipping, causing this bug

>I don't know iOS inernals, but to me it looks like they started using multiple threads for the UI? Smart when you want to update multiple areas of the screen at once, buggy when multiple areas have to sync animations?

iOS has always used separate threads for UI rendering standard since GCD was added in iOS 4. This is just lazy mistakes and poor QA.

GP is implying they started using multiple threads exclusively for UI instead of a single one.

I'm pretty sure that iOS renders UI on a single thread? You can't even create UIImageViews off the main thread without risking severe breakage. Fortunately, modern Xcode has an Analyze option that will flag attempts to access UI off the main thread.

GCD is a nice API for scheduling async tasks but that doesn't mean those async tasks can access UIKit or OpenGL contexts safely?

Correct, you need to do everything that touches the UI on the main thread. But I never ran into problems that it would lead to frame drops, scrolling frame drops are because too large calculations are done (especially on the main thread) while displaying a new cell. I don't say it's trivial always to do complex stuff in a non-blocking way but if I can do it probably somebody working at Apple can do it too.

I‘m intrigued where you got that info. As an iOS dev, I can tell you that an app should not access UIKit stuff off-main-thread. Facebook does off-main-thread layouts [1], but they still rely on backing views on main thread.

Or do you mean that the rendering/compositing itself is multithreaded?

[1]: https://code.facebook.com/posts/721586784561674/introducing-...

>I‘m intrigued where you got that info. As an iOS dev, I can tell you that an app should not access UIKit stuff off-main-thread. Facebook does off-main-thread layouts [1], but they still rely on backing views on main thread.

Right, I wasn't implying UIKit stuff is done multi threaded. I just meant that the best practice is to do all your UI work in the main thread, and use GCD for any blocking operations which shouldn't be on the main (animation) thread.

for any ad, I'm sure the editor and the final stackholders are going through every scene in detail, those frames showing the text message on the lock screen, I'm sure has been viewed hundreds of times by multiple people. Yet no one thought that the UI was weird with that messed up animation?

You know what's funny? The base premise of the ad would be that you can unlock anyone's phone with your face. In the ad she is unlocking everything, even those that do not belong to her. How could they miss this?

Yeah, from where I sit, sure—maybe this UI thing is a glitch, maybe it’s to preference readability, have to assume it’s a glitch because it doesn’t look good. But really, the problem for me is that the ad itself is a colorful simplistic mess.

And am I the only one who finds it infuriating that the timing in other parts of the ad is off? At one point one of the cars bursts open before she looks at it. If you’re going to follow through on this concept, IMO it really needs to be frame-level precision.

The whole thing is stupid. If I look at my phone, does that mean I want it unlocked? Not really.

A way to interpret it is that when she looks at her phone and it unlocks, it gives her the idea that it’s her superpower and she can look at anything and have it unlock.

In reality, it’s the iPhone doing it, and it only does it when she looks at it.

Basically, the ad tries to show how the girl feels. I think it captures that pretty well; at least I liked it (more than most other recent Apple ads).

Exactly what I was thinking. This is supposed to make me want to use FaceID? To me, it highlights the bad side of FaceID.

The iMessage bug though just made me laugh.

QA, software development and UX is at an all time low for modern Apple. I've been an Apple product user for a long time while watching this decline. Yes bugs have always existed, but not as ubiquitously as now.

I think this yearly new iOS release schedule is really wearing on the quality of iOS, although its still leagues about Android its just not high quality as it use to be. iOS11 has been riddled the bugs and bad design. Apple in general seems to be suffering from this as High Sierra has also been a cluster fuck.

Have you tried stock Android lately.

I just switched to a cheap (<$300) Android phone from an iPhone and it's been better in every way except the camera. iPhone used to be miles ahead of Android, but the lack of product focus and the decreasing attention to detail at Apple have allowed Android to catch up.

One example: my iPhone shit the bed recently and I tried factory resetting it. In the OOBE, I had to enter my Apple ID credentials and do two-factor auth 3 separate times. Apparently the different screens were implemented by different teams and didn't share the authentication context. I only had to sign in to my Android once.

Shitty animation no one notices is nothing to worry about.

Those utf8 bugs that kill your phone on the other hand... How many of those had Apple had by now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUE9mCN7sek

Apple was once known for its attention to details like this. That attention made iPhone and iPad such hits.

If you have been an apple costumer for a long time you should recognize this pattern.

Once the product gets too complex and competitors start closing in attention to details will be replaced by bugs. It's like apple can't do agile development of their life dependent on it.

> Shitty animation no one notices is nothing to worry about.

Jobs would've had a seizure at this statement.

I think it may even be a way to raise the dead.

This is how we get a fire-breathing ZombieJobs stomping on Cupertino.

Is it possible that the multiple bugs in iOS 11 could be attributed (in part) to the frustration felt by Apple's engineers about the open office floor plan in the new campus?

no.

(not least because they didn't move in until a good while after ios 11, which was released a good year after the development was heating up the most.)

Has anyone considered the possibility that this isnt a bug?

This is more of a jank: https://medium.com/@nathangitter/designing-jank-free-apps-9f...

So crap by design? Who would do that on purpose?

People think that this is a bug. But it’s not. The way it is rendered helps actually people to read the message faster. This was proven in studies.

Interesting, got a link?

I'd be inclined to agree if it weren't showing dark colored text on a dark colored background.

Agree, this may have been a deliberate choice. Human perception is weird.

Even if the animation is intentional, the second line of text should still be clipped to the bounds of the notification.

Do you have the link to the studies?

Poe's Law strikes again...

Found the Apple fanboy. I get it, their stuff is nice (and I own many products) but it is obviously one of their many bugs.

This is a satire right? They could just not animate the container if that was the case!

Frankly, after the misguided whimsy of "what's a computer?" I don't expect much from them.

(It was the first Apple ad to mock a segment of its own customers, as opposed to mocking competitors' customers, a dubious but established marketing strategy)

I thought it was impossible, but I guess those that said that Apple without Steve Jobs would go to waste were right.

They won't go bankrupt anytime soon, but it's not the same Apple.

I've personally switched to PC with Xfce after a few nightmarish 6 months with the new MacBook Pro...

Oh no, not a glitch that needs to be slowed down about 10 times to be anything more than unnoticeable. Those are the worst!

So it is visible for like 50 milliseconds during the animation and not at all looks bad when you actually see the animation happening in real time.. Yeah, APPLE IS DOOMED!

I'm not creating excuses but this is ridiculous. As if there is a shortage of Apple stuff to complain (like shitty mbp keyboards breaking all the time, siri the moron, fucked up security issues popping up weekly..) this is making headlines.

I've been developping ios apps since ios 3, and i can't tell you how glad i am to see this apple media bashing trend. They build the most expensive products, lock you in using their tools and their hardware, take a 30% cut on all income, rejects apps for very very various reasons, some of them borderline illegal (like the competing with apple apps clause), and they're the most profitable company in the world.

AND, their software quality has been declining for the last 4 years without any sign of them taking notes. So, yeah, please more shitstorm, someone needs to shake something inside, because a whole ecosystem of businesses (like mine) has been built relying on their product being flawless.

I wish I could give you more upvotes.

I will not argue against your experience. I had my share of problems with iOS (and Android and really any large enough piece of software).

Two points though. As someone living in the wrong EU country to sell apps on Play store I am far less bothered by Apple's 30%. I would certainly welcome that percentage to be lower and have more flexibility on the platform itself, but it is not a particularly offensive number when compared to any other industry where you need a distributor.

Second, do you really rely on any product to be flawless? To me that seems an unreasonable position to have.

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