Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut
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For years apple mail on iOS would always show 1 unread message in "all mail" for gmail.
On my iPhone 11 pro (and the 6S i had before it) the camera app will sometimes only show a black screen and a freaking reboot is needed to get it working again. I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that.
Multi-monitor support was so good on MacOS up until maybe 5 years ago. You could easily PIN apps to certain monitors and virtual desktops on specific monitors. If you started an app on a laptop and then connected to external monitors apps would automagically go where they were supposed to. Now it's a complete mess.
MacOS's UI seems more jerky in the last two major releases.
Time machine's performance has slowly gotten worse and worse, leaving me having to cancel backups just so I can go home.
I could go on. The worst part? These have all been ignored open issues that other people have submitted and for years they just sit there...open.
You just missed taking pictures. You were still there to live them :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21298470
We probably feel the need to preserve/hoard everything in a subconscious desire for immortality.
For example, I can go a whole vacation without taking any pictures. But with my kids I love to take their picture and get videos because they grow up so fast and it's fun now to go back and revisit a time when they were younger. They also love to see themselves when they were an age that they don't remember.
The human brain is way better at remembering where to find information than remembering information itself.
「カメラを向けるのではなく、この空間をご自分の目で見て、体で感じてください。そして、思い出は心の中に大切にしまって持ち帰って欲しい、これが私達の願いです。」
Which translates fairly literally to:
"Rather than aiming your camera, please see this space with your own eyes and feel it with your body. We hope that you carefully store these memories in your heart and take them home with you."
Your brain can use pictures as triggers later in life to reconnect a lot of those memories that get fuzzier over time.
Taking a video of a whole concert? Obnoxious and rude to the other members.
But I’ll take around 5 photos here and there and later on I’m glad I can go back and see them.
So it’s like, hey, phone/camera doesn’t work? Put it down then. You’ll remember what your toddler looks like because you’ve got other pictures.
I'm administrating TimeMachine for my employer. It sucks so incredibly hard on a lot of points:
1) it requires the aged AFP protocol instead of Samba
2) No user-/machine-defineable quota, only one across the whole server
3) Extremely poor behavior in higher-than-10ms-latency scenarios
4) no way of scripting the configuration if one wants encryption of the backup image
5) Audits/reporting? Forget about it.
6) All backup images end up in one directory on the server, no way to specify e.g. the user's home directory
7) Restore takes ages
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/23/inside_mac_os_x_1...
Time machine hasn’t required AFP for years. SMB is in fact the preferred protocol.
The SMB server does require a few extensions not all servers have adopted, so perhaps that’s what you’re referring to?
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/releasenotes/Net...
When you hire expensive developers, they don't want to work on years old bugs. They only want to work on new features.
I also don't think my job is to be entertained, but to provide value for the company and its users.
Making good quality software, or improving poor quality software, is something I enjoy for its own sake. The fact that it also benefits users and my employer is an additional reward.
I'm in the exact same position as you (now 11 Pro, previous 6S) and what I find is that apps that use the camera cause this. Snapchat is the main culprit for me. If that happens again, try closing out of Snapchat/FB/Instagram/anything that uses the camera from the multitasking window. That usually brings my camera back much more quickly than a reboot
You were still there. You missed out because you reached for a camera.
Or that constant updates and logging in are good things.
I'm no fanboy so it's easy to spot flaws. It blows my mind how quick people are to defend poor quality.
you could try to increase the backup service‘s priority with ‚sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0‘
Personally, I find TM bordering on unusable for backups these days. Maybe I'd feel differently if I still had a desktop Mac, but with a bunch of files on a laptop that moves around and sleeps, having to tether to a USB disk for several hours to do a backup is ridiculous. And network backups are even slower and frequently self-corrupt, especially over WiFi. The glimmer of hope is that APFS replication has some really cool new features in 10.15. It's clearly still very much a work in progress, and some big parts are missing, but the stuff that's released seems to clearly point toward a future where we can do block-based copies of filesystems or even deltas between snapshots. Which is much better for performance on spinning hard disks than the eternal disk seeking and grinding that file-based backup solutions all do.
Isn't "Power Nap" (in System Preferences » Energy Saver) supposed to help MacBooks do backup and other maintenance while they're sleeping and on AC?
It seems obvious to me that TM was intended to run on a snapshotting filesystem such as ZFS* and when this didn't materialize the engineers tried their best to make it work using the tools available to them. Unfortunately thsoe were sparsebundles and hardlinks. I would hope that TM will get updated to use APFS snapshots sooner rather than later, assuming the feature is proven and stable. iOS makes use of APFS snapshots for rolling back failed updates, so one would assume it is.
* http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/15/apple_and_zfs/ and https://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/08/4995/
Still, I've got three million files on my computer - that's a lot of stuff to walk through. Looking forward to the APFS based replacement!
Instead the issues are a lot more frustrating: failure states where no indication of failure is provided (other than what you’re trying to accomplish isn’t happening), no reason is given, and no means to try again is available.
It’s become even worse now that most things have some sort of web sync aspect. You’re just left turning things off and on in different combinations, in the vague hope that you can reset some piece of state somewhere.
For example, when the camera stops working, the first time I tried opening & closing the app numerous times. (Didn't fix the problem). Then I eventually restarted. It probably took me 10 minutes to figure it out. An immediate crash & reboot would take less time.
If their OKR's state to reduce number of hard crashes, congratulations, they did. Doesn't mean they delivered on product quality, however.
We had to abandon ARD so I don't know if they actually fixed it, but the price is still $80, and at no point has Apple ever lowered that price, even when it was unusable.
Taps on my iPhone 11 Pro sometimes don’t register because it’s in the middle of an animation or it’s just unresponsive. Moving apps around has become the biggest pain. Apps are killed in the background after about 5 minutes. Typing has become a huge pain to deal with autocorrect and swiping. Sometimes holding the space bar doesn’t move the cursor and when it does there’s almost a full second until it returns to normal typing mode from “cursor mode”. Sometimes the lock screen is completely unresponsive to touch. Sometimes the screen doesn’t even come on until 30 seconds after hitting the power button leaving me to wonder why I’m staring at a disabled screen. Sometimes the phone will lock and require the pin instead of FaceID for no discernible reason. Some of the stock apps have become the buggiest apps I use.
Finally, I woke up this morning with my phone completely off despite it being on charger and with a full battery, which means my alarms didn’t go off and I was late for work. My guess is it tried to auto update in the middle of the night and wouldn’t turn itself back on. I’m basing that on the fact that I had a notification saying the update failed and I had to start the install again manually once I did finally get to work.
That’s just iOS. macOS is becoming equally frustrating. I’m seriously considering moving to Android, but I don’t know how much better (or worse) that would be considering I haven’t had an Android phone since a couple of years before the iPhone 4 released (had a Windows Phone in between Android and the iPhone 4).
I ended up switching back to an iPhone 8 this year, as it’s the last iPhone I found to actually “just work”.
They may not leave immediately, but at some point a competitor will come up with a 'just work', and it will be very hard to get them back.
You have a setting to whitelist a Group from your Contacts from Do Not Disturb mode so that they can always ring through. But there's no way to manage your Groups from iOS. It doesn't exist. You must have a Mac with iTunes, or whatever is used to administer the iFoo stuff these days to do simple CRUD stuff with contact groups. This is total nonsense.
The Bluetooth toggle button in the quick menu on iOS now doesn't switch Bluetooth off, it just switches it off for one day. NO!!! I want it OFF when I want it OFF, and I can be trusted to turn it ON when I want it ON! Make UI design that respects my choices!
Whenever I plug my phone into my car, it starts playing the same song from my library every time. It doesn't care if something else is playing in SoundCloud, or FB2K or some other app. It will stop my music that's playing, so it can go and load up this other song and play it. Why?
My five and two year old daughters always say "awww, the annoying song again??" Even a two year old can see that this is hogwash!
Everyone makes mistakes, but when things like this appear and persist, it's a signal that the brain has separated from the body, long ago...
http://osxdaily.com/2016/04/17/speed-up-time-machine-by-remo...
Just in case you are still seeing this, I had a similar issue that turned out to be a bug in Gmail and how Google put old Hangouts (or perhaps Google Talk?) conversations in your mailbox. Some very, very old conversations of mine were for some reason marked as unread, and this was showing up on the iOS unread count, but not the one on macOS.
Not just on the user side, but the developer end as well.
Perfectly valid code which used to work up till Xcode 11.1 throws errors inside the Swift runtime or toolchain on Xcode 11.2 (and 11.2.1). Even the Swift engineers on the official forums don't seem to know what you can or can't do with the new language features.
And after seeing bugs I reported eons ago still not fixed, it feels futile to even bother reporting them anymore.
It's still not quite bad enough to make me want to flee back to Windows or switch to Android, but it does make me depressed, like there's nothing left in the world that "just works", except maybe my Nintendo Switch.
Can you link to some examples? I write Swift full time and haven't noticed anything like this.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58657087/after-upgrading...
Property Wrapper initializers with #file/#function: https://forums.swift.org/t/compiler-segmentation-fault-when-...
With the disconnect between the Swift team and Apple after Swift going open-source, it's not clear if these goblins are spawned inside of Apple's APIs or the Swift runtime.
Seriously, why don't they open source it? There are so many so bad security issues in Apple software last years.
That Apple freely releases anything is tied directly to Stallman resisting Jobs's snow jobs during the '90s, and later Jobs's Flash snuff.
What does this mean?
Jobs was notorious for snowing out free software people. If you don't know what that means:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snow%20job
A primary example was when Jobs tried to convince Stallman to allow NeXT to break the GPL, Stallman resisted, and a bit of NeXT got released under a GPL-compatible license.
From a mail exchange between him and the developer of clisp:
I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.
What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.
So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not allowed by the GPL.
The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed, they made it free.
So I don't think the GPL actually requires a correction for this. But perhaps it would be a good idea to add a note explaining this.
More accurately, specific projects from certain releases of macOS and iOS have had parts of them posted online.
False. Proportionately they release an insignificant amount.
even maintains the open source CUPS print server, which is heavily used in Linux and Unix systems?
This is only because no vendor or developer would use anything compatible with mac OS were it only supporting macOS.
just about all of their past releases of MacOS, iOS and OS X Server are open sourced as well
This is false, and you haven't done due diligence. (XNU being free software (though usually not anything touching ARM) does not mean macOS, iOS and OS X Server are free software.
It literally invites developers to make your platform better for you, for free.
Last I checked Apple doesn't take external commits.
I'm not an Apple fanboy, but you gotta give Apple some credit here where its due.
They are due no credit.
Keep in mind - I am not pro or against open sourcing it - just I don't think it will help currently at all.
So confused by how enabling someone to see the source code will somehow hurt the code that would still be maintained by apple. It would still be up to them on whether or not to include a fix that was proposed by someone that viewed their code and tried to fix it.
Also, I think that fresh eyes on a problem can be quite beneficial. I believe a tunnel vision can occur when one group of individuals are trying to fix the same problems for years.
But at least the Switch OS has no oopsies (that I've seen.) :)
My [New] 3DS has also been rock solid for years, hardware and software.
But I never minded much, because they kept replacing my 3DS because of the scratches, and back then, your 1-year warranty would reset every time a repair was done. So I just kept sending it in, and kept getting a brand new 3DS every year...
Some would consider the lack of folders an oopsie but that's probably not what you're referring to.
3DS is indeed a damn solid device, though. Nintendo did really well with it.
The Joy-Con drift is embarrassing
It's one thing to admire the work/output of a company, but once you identify as a "Company X" supporter you are just closing yourself off to being critical of "Company X".
I cringe at every WWDC session when people applaud for minor features (new themes in Xcode!) and long overdue bug fixes.
I am embarrassed whenever someone online talks about a problem they have with Apple hardware or software, and they are met with passive-aggressive replies along the lines of "I've never seen that problem, what are you doing wrong..."
I develop for and use Apple platforms. I really like some things they have done, but I'd never consider myself an "Apple supporter".
I'm the customer, they are the vendor. They are here to support me.
If they don't do a good job at that, I'll try to find another company to take their place.
Also companies change, as do their priorities. There was once a period in when MS were making the best internet browser (really)...
Because they consistently make what I want to see. For example SwiftUI, which I had been waiting for my entire life.
Call it the lesser evil, compared to my experience with other companies, if that's more acceptable for you.
Here's a funny observation: I have 20+ upvotes on my previous comment criticizing Apple, but a negative score for the supportive statements on this one.
So you see, some people will staunchly attempt to bury anything remotely positive about something they begrudge, so others feel they have to balance that out. :)
I think this is less a case of people being too for or against a company, and more people interpreting the same statement differently depending on their own context.
I just figured it was a nicer word to use than fanboy/fangirl.
Should we hinder people from appreciating Flutter either then, because I'm sure it too, did not really ""innovate.""
Everything is a copy of BASIC anyway, just without the line numbers.
Not to mention that time in 1997 when Steve Jobs came on stage and I stood and cheered with everyone else at Moscone.
The more people on the ecosystem I like and develop for, the more money I make.
• Randomly failing to download or not allowing me to download purchases or Apple Music songs that I previously added to my library.
• Outright deleting downloads!! without any explanation!
• Duplicating downloads, and creating copies of playlists with differences. [0]
• Being more aggressive with DRM checks: Once, I had logged into my Apple Music account, then a few hours later I had to turn off my WiFi. It demanded me to connect so my computer could be authorized and wouldn't let me play the downloads. Same with Books.
That's why it's called iFumes.
I don’t want Windows, Chromebooks or Android. If not Apple...
(Love Linux, use Linux, but it’s not providing what I get from macOS.)
(Yes, in my book, the official dock counts as a USB-C peripheral that doesn’t “just work”. I’ve used to of them, and one is severely janky.)
I've reported a number of bugs to WebKit over the years and it's the same thing, none have been fixed. You're lucky to even get an answer from someone in the WK team.
Development took twice as long as planned, the release was fairly bloated, and required 2 or 3 updates in the first month or two.
When Craig took over he introduced a sprint model so that there were periodic relatively stable releases. If something wasn't ready and there were still sprints left, you could push it back.
But it sounds like there has been milestone creep causing those sprints to either become more heavy or less missable. And I'm guessing the consequences for missing a sprint are more career limiting than they were when the methodology was still new.
It's like Rich Hickey said, we're smarter than runners, we just fire a new starting pistol every 100 yards and call it a new sprint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPT-DuG0UjU
Nowadays, thanks to Apple effectively deserting Macs for long stretches, less and less new people move into the ecosystem, which means the bulk of users are now upgraders -- who are bound to have more issues.
Sprints are just the classic computer science "divide and conquer" strategy applied to development.
Plus `divide and conquer` is used like a task you need to do with the goal of finishing, but Sprints never quite get to the end of the conquer phase, generally it's divide, and conquer...some tasks, and then divide in some more... and more... and more. You end up losing all sight of what you are actually trying to do or make.
The only way to fix sprints in a small to medium size company that exists and is shipping products is to realize that they should be tied to a set series of tasks and that every now and then you really need a stop point where you can take a week or two, define what your goals, needs, and issues are for the next 6 weeks or so, and then start anew with a clean backlog and roadmap with full buy in from the developers of what they are making. Otherwise you just turn developers into ticket pushers for tickets that they themselves do not understand, or have any context to understand why they are doing them. It's depressing and causes burnout and bad products. It's a symptom of the hustle culture bleeding into development and a lack of understanding that having long term end goals and sustainable pace is healthy to good products rather than `move fast and break things`.
The classic computer science "divide and conquer" (quicksort being a canonical example) has no state to carry over from one divided part to the next.
Divided parts should also be interchangeable -- whereas in sprints they aren't -- they're different stages of a release/feature, with different stuff to be done in each.
Finally, sprint is a total misnomer for "divide and conquer" -- as its very definition is about giving it all for a short time from start to end (a small race). It's not about dividing parts of a larger race.
"Hey, so you know how our application is pretty much always working, but will error out once every other blue moon? It does that less now," doesn't sound as flashy as "Look at this thing our app does that it didn't do before!"
Quite literally a 40% reduction in crashes
A little over 28% since it is a 0’02 reduction over 0’07 non-availability rate.
It got marketed as a "no features" release and that's how it seems to be remembered. But in fact it probably was probably the highest-risk Mac OS release ever. It rewrote a huge amount of code for almost no direct user benefit, at time when testing was quite limited.
In the end, Snow Leopard did end up very stable. I'm stilling running it today on an old Mac Mini hooked up to some old peripherals I want to keep around. But it definitely did not start that way.
The worst part is with all these bugs, you kind of feel that Apple will probably never get to them, given there are just so many (and on top of that Apple may just not care about non Face-ID modes of entry anymore, probably how this bug appeared in the first place). It is especially maddening since it feels like a cruel joke to have both the physical keyboard on the laptop mess up entry AND the virtual one on the phone.
Note that there were also some... "interesting" iCloud sync design choices. You need to upgrade all devices (including macOS) to be sure of proper syncing in some cases, with odd behaviour ensuing if you don't.
1/10. Would not upgrade again.
Uh, I'm not very confident on this helping; wouldn't this mean fewer people will be using and evaluating beta components?
> Apple privately considered iOS 13.1 the “actual public release” with a quality level matching iOS 12.
It certainly didn't reach that quality level…
Probably. But the benefit gained by doing this is that every issue discovered should be directly attributable.
If everything is broken, it’s very easy to normalise broken behaviours, or to deflect responsibility.
It's been a standard practice in my world for at least a decade.
Why the fuck did they let this happen in the first place?
Where is this mentality that even the backside of a cabinet should be build well?
Pride in quality of work? Why does the backside have to be be NOT built well? I hate crappy pressed wood furniture, but the same piece of furniture built by real craftsman using real materials raises the price from ~$250 to over $1200. Admittedly, apples and oranges, but the point is valid.
Blame the annual expected release of a new iPhone that Apple trained us on and that markets and consumers now expect. For those phones to be ready to ship on the date that Apple promises, they have to be produced and boxed up. The phones require a new version of iOS for hardware support (which makes sense) meaning there's a certain time before the phone release date that a GM of the newest version of iOS has to be released to manufacturing.
The brand has a momentum, even if things start getting worse for customers there isn't an immediate response on a large scale.
A certain quality is important for the "true" advocates, but we're a small minority. Growth is driven by at scale customers who don't notice these issues because they're buying the products for different reasons.
In this context, improving quality to keep the hardcore fans happy costs money, but doesn't impact the bottom line significantly in the short term.
Growth is the only goal at this scale and that's driven by other strategies and not hardcore fans.
I guess long story short is corporations are cash machines and product quality does not play an important part at this scale.
How it works is that your brand suffers, and sales drift downwards.
When you attempt new projects outside of your skill envelope - a Maps application, a self-driving car, VR/AR hardware, a move to ARM - you either don't finish on schedule, don't finish at all and are forced to cancel, or you unleash a shit storm of bugs and negativity that costs far more than any nominal savings you might persuade yourself you've made by not doing QA properly.
It's a cultural problem. Not only is skimping on QA and customer support cheap, it looks and feels cheap. And that's not a good look when you're trying to sell yourself as a premium brand.
To be fair, customer abuse is not unusual among premium brands. Prestige cars are notoriously crap for reliability and build quality.
But Apple is a prestige consumer brand, and the brand experience is the most important asset.
If customers stop believing in the brand, all Apple has left is Dell or HP but with nicer packaging.
USB storage support, network drive support, multiple instances of apps, multiple apps switchable in slide-over, major improvements to Safari.
I've run into some bugs, but I wouldn't switch back to 12.
EDIT - Forgot to mention the contextual menus, which are new to iPads this year as well. I think iPhones with 3D touch hardware had similar actions available in some places, but it's a big addition for iPads and the fact that it's supported across all devices now means that 3rd party devs will bother to implement it.
I think the multiple app stuff was a mistake on Apples part. It complicates the OS significantly and starts to make it feel like a computer operating system.
Improvements to Safari make sense, but then I'd consider that an application and not part of the operating system.
For instance, if I'm doing research on something, I might have Notes or MindNode running with a copy of Safari paired alongside it. Those research related tabs are kept in their own world, not mixed with my main Safari instance and it's accumulated tabs.
And then let's say I'm writing an email about my travel plans and want to pull up the airline's website to look at my reservation. I can do that in a separate Safari instance instead of taking away the research sidebar from next to my MindNode document.
And the new Mail message can be its own window while I write it. If I need to refer to another message in my inbox, I don't have to close the draft I'm writing to get back to my inbox, and then go fetch it out of the drafts folder when I want to get back to it. Just swipe over to the main Mail window and swipe back when I'm done.
Or take an app like GoodNotes, where I have several notebooks on different subjects. I can open two of them at once instead of having to close notebook A, open notebook B, make a note, close notebook B, reopen notebook A every time I want to jot a quick note down in a different topic.
There's an adjustment period if you want to get in the habit of thinking about the iPad this way. But being able to operate it in terms of different tasks and projects, leaving their workspaces intact and unpolluted to come back to later, is a much more productive setup than having to play "How can I best allocate my single instance of the text editor?"
I get how multiple windows is great for productivity, but I'd rather seem Apple push macOS for those use cases and keep the iPad as simple as possible.
13.2 had an issue with apps terminating and having to be relaunched every time you backgrounded them, but that hit the iPhone too so it wasn't an iPad multi-window problem. Speculation I saw was blaming iPhone 11 camera RAM requirements for more aggressive memory management, but who knows.
At the time I was depending on macports to install a lot of dev dependencies: mono was broken, and a bunch of other libraries were also not compiling anymore. It is to this day the only macOS (then Mac OS X) release that I had to downgrade from. But I'm more cautious now... still running Mojave.
That said on principle I agree: I want an OS that works better and faster, not more features.
It was a strange way to manage tens of thousands of people.
But then for iOS 13 they tried to catch up with 2 years worth of features in 1 year...
They just need to either slow down the pace, or figure out how to scale their developer count better.
Personally, I think the annual release cycle is the problem. They keep having to release these “clean up” versions because they didn’t have time to perfect the originals.
Of note on the macOS side, everyone’s fondly-remembered Snow Leopard was also the last non-annual release.
Yeah, this is a problem. They announce a bunch of features at WWDC in June, and everyone expects them in September. If their WWDC announcement was just developer API stuff, and they announced the iOS features a few weeks before release, they'd have a better idea of what was actually ready. Then they could release features in point releases spread across the year.
Same exact issue exists today.
PS: I know Win10 LTSB exists, but that's enterprise only.
Has the balance of push push push for features just passed a tipping point of what developers could mostly keep up with?
Is it a process thing (eg the review process changed or testing practices changed)?
Or a developer skill level thing? Are seasoned coders being replaced by less seasoned ones?
Or is there a finger to be pointed at some piece of technology (for example, I've been pretty pro on swift for the last couple years, but recently have become aware of what a nightmare the marriage of closures and ARC are and how easy it is to make mistakes around them)?
I’m not talking about “complex” things here, it is what worked and then someone broke it step by step. Whoever is responsible for that, please get an early retirement. You did enough to me.
iOS 13 was jam packed with new features, but released too early because of hardware release schedule. I waited it out until 13.2. Still some weird bugs here and there like adding a phone number as a name from new contacts from incoming calls.
That’s very strange; none of these things should be happening. Actually, there are explicit checks to make sure that it doesn’t happen. Is there anything in particular you’re doing that might be triggering this?
Then press the Safari icon (or alternatively, press and hold on the Safari icon and choose "Show All Windows").
Now, all of those floating Safari windows are shown, and you can "toss them away" and close them.
Yes, it's not a very intuitive discovery process :(
Considering Exposé and its default gestures exist on MacOS, you'd think maybe they'd take cues from that?
Because in my experience so many bugs seem to have something to do with some kind of underlying data or sync model (not even remote sync, just on the device itself).
E.g. half the time I delete a voice memo, it re-appears 10 seconds later. Or maybe a quarter of the time I send an e-mail from the "Share" button in an app, it shows up as an unsent draft when I switch to my Mail app (despite the fact the e-mail was actually sent). Or sidebar shortcuts to folders I create in the Files app gradually and randomly disappear over the course of days/weeks.
It's like there's some funky async stuff going on behind the scenes, where either a common library has flaws or race conditions that seem to pop up everywhere, or it's so hard to use the library correctly that even the internal teams which program the apps are making mistakes with it.
According to https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/11/19/apple-io..., the battery discharge issue has apparently not been fixed, so I'm not planning to update my phone yet. Hopefully it gets fixed in the next iOS release.
1. Return text selection back to 12.x functionality - it is now literally impossible to e.g., select a single word from a link’s anchor text without first selecting some random portion of text (half the page at times), and then walking back the blue knobs for 45 minutes. The ideal UX is to offer to select a word if I click next to it, and if I press down and hold, give me a movable cursor every single time, and never automatically start selecting whole chunks of text just because I hold my finger down. The current iteration of this functionality randomly switches between both of those modes.
2. allow me to use dictation in offline-only mode so that it actually works AND so that I don’t get 400 words into a message and then watch my phone magically backspace the entire thing and then type it out again, incorrectly, in slow-motion
3. Stop putting my cursor in capitalization mode every time I backspace a word when I’m typing
4. After I dictate a block of text, please do not make it look like you have highlighted the entire block of text for me, when in actuality it’s not highlighted at all, and if I tried to do some kind of operation with the assumption that it’s highlighted (like delete), I will be disappointed by instead performing an accidental operation
5. If I start typing a URL into Safari, let me backspace the characters at the same rate that I have typed them (currently, if I open Safari and click into the URL bar and start typing “new” like I’m going to go to “news.ycombinator.com”, but then decide I first want to go to “google.com”, I have typed 3 chars (“new”) so I should be able to hit backspace 3 times and then start typing “google”. Instead, I must first hit backspace one time to get rid of the auto suggestion because hacker news is in my favorites list. Then I can hit backspace three more times, then start typing “google“. This is an idiotic bug.
6. If I am using dictation and then I click somewhere in the text to prepare to fix the inevitable incorrect word that dictation will put in my text, but I click there before I end dictation, and then I end dictation, please do not insert everything that I said twice, once originally where the cursor was, and then a second time where I clicked to make that correction. I don’t think there is much value in having two copies of the same paragraph, one inserted into the middle of the other...
7. If I try to share a photo while in the Camera app by selecting Share > Messages, and then I turn my phone vertical while I’m typing the message (to make typing easier), please don’t make it so that I can no longer see the keyboard, the text input field, or the photo that I’m sending, and I have no way of getting out of the situation besides losing the message, by closing the app and starting over
8. If I click in the Camera app to start recording a video, start recording immediately instead of waiting a variable amount of time between half of one second and two whole seconds, causing me to A) miss whatever I was trying to record or B) click a second time, resulting in me stopping recording... and missing whatever I was trying to record
9. If I open the Camera app, I am, at that moment, more interested in seeing the Camera app open then I am seeing a black screen with no functionality. Can we make the default such that the Camera app is what I see instead of a black screen that doesn’t go away until I restart my phone? I like that camera feature better than the black screen.
... please add to this list in replies
I occasionally have it happen when pulling down to do a search and aside from it bring completely uncanny valley creepy it never quite finishes it’s animation so I can’t use the keyboard to type anything
Unfortunately I’ve not found any rhyme or reason to it to report the bug aside from what I’ve typed above “sometimes iOS is weird” would probably not get a response
0: https://tidbits.com/2019/10/21/six-reasons-why-ios-13-and-ca...
I never had crashes on my iPhone, ever, period, until the recent iOS 13 update. Photos crashes on me. The text messaging app crashes on me. Safari crashes just about every other day. Apple Maps, which had gotten so much better over the years, is now crashing too. Screw the new iPhones. Apple, you crapped on my relationship with you by screwing up what I’ve already paid you for. How do you expect me to trust you and give you even more of my money?
And after 5 years I am also wondering if Swift was the wrong bet.
Especially on the Mac, no one buy a new machine every year, and hence the Mac as a platform are more for new comers and replacement cycle. So as long as the hardware were kept up to date, they will come. Why not just stop making new features on macOS and start fixing bugs and paying down those technical debt, all the way down from the Kernel to application layers.
I cant even name 5 features that were must have in the last few macOS release.
It is not.
It has been this way with macOS for several years now, and iOS has gotten just as bad: You cannot, under any circumstances, update a device that you depend upon to the newest OS version available. It will take at least 6 months to iron out the worst bugs, and sometimes you need to skip the whole release and hope that the next one will be bearable.
Try editing something in a text area with more text than fits in it without scrolling to see how “fixed” it is.
One issue with feature flags is identifying what a “feature” even is. A single flag is insufficient to enable target features in systems of interconnected frameworks. There will be an entire graph of dependencies! Testers will need to understand the series of flags that need to be enabled for a target feature to work.
And of course, there is a risk that this will make disabled features seem like bugs themselves! I am imagining Apple colleagues having to waste time reminding their testers how to enable a feature, after receiving a “bug” report about something not working.
Apple doesn't push out weekly releases to the public. Are you suggesting that they should?
That’s MORE than one per week.
None of the updates included fixes to critical bugs or security flaws AFAIK; they were incremental improvements in stability.
Who is determining that patch 1 needs to go out rather than being rolled into patch 2? On what basis?
Of course this happens on all iOS browsers since all are running on Safari web views.
This might be the new heuristics to make desktop-class browsing work.
it was like this in the early ios days before css media queries
Ah, from the article:
> some “testers would go days without a livable build, so they wouldn’t really have a handle on what’s working and not working,” the person said. This defeated the main goal of the testing process as Apple engineers struggled to check how the operating system was reacting to many of the new features, leading to some of iOS 13’s problems.
Now it is all free and 99% Jankytown. Apple, take my damned money and give me my productivity and happiness back!