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Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what is the reason for that? I doubt Apple code quality dropped significantly. Is it simply because more people started to look for vulnerabilities? Or was it because better tools to discover the bugs became available?

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I doubt Apple code quality dropped significantly.

I'm not sure that's a safe bet. iOS updates have become notorious for things breaking, sometimes in very obvious ways. I have an iPhone and a recent update caused some very obvious degradation of battery lifetime between charges, for example. Given that I have an unmodified phone running almost nothing but the standard Apple software, and the tiny number of apps I do have installed haven't been used since before that update, there isn't much excuse for this.

Meanwhile, I currently have email disabled on my phone pending a fix for a known security vulnerability that is reportedly going to be included in a firmware update delivered several weeks after the vulnerability was out in the wild and doing the rounds on tech sites.

Neither of these is reassuring when it comes to the current state of iOS robustness and security, and five minutes with Google will show that my experience is not unusual among iPhone users in recent times.

There's been widespread claims of dropping quality in iOS updates nearly as long as iOS has been around. I don't doubt that there's been issues with software quality (that'll be true in any organization), but I suspect there's a great deal of recency bias with these claims.

I've used iOS devices of one kind or another since around the 2nd and 3rd generations, and seen some of those devices through years of major updates. Anecdotally, I have never seen things as bad as they have been in the past couple of years, other than Apple's seemingly arbitrary policy on abandoning support for older (but not necessarily old by most standards) devices entirely.

The really sad thing is that iOS devices still seem to be relatively robust compared to either Windows 10 or macOS on the desktop. It feels like Apple and Microsoft have both decided they are so dominant now that quality control doesn't need to be a business priority, and as a result we've left behind the "golden age" up to the mid-2010s when your OS mostly Just Worked(TM) and entered a new age where the most basic reliability of our essential IT systems is in question.

> I doubt Apple code quality dropped significantly.

Oh it did. Earlier OS X releases were way more stable and didn't break shit for no reason.

Quality assurance has gone downhill over the last years, that's what happens when the people in control are no longer engineers taking pride in high quality bug free code but rather managers whose incentives are to push as many new features out as possible - which IMO was also the reason why 86 support was dropped in Catalina, it was too expensive to keep supporting, but heh who cares about users of stuff like VSTs for sound people or people wanting to use their Mac for gaming...

Optimization is not the same as security. The first iPhone was jail broken and unlocked within days of its release IIRC. As the years went on, we were lucky to get a jailbreak at all. In fact, checkra1n was the newest exploit in a long time. Yes, their quality has gone down a bit, but don’t confuse that with their security measures.

No, but QA is necessary for security. If they're letting through bugs that cause crashes or product misbehaviour, then they're also more likely to be letting through security issues.

Apple effectively put an end to the jailbreak scene by allowing people to compile their own applications without paying a dime. Put the incentive away and suddenly there's a lot less eyes on the code.

Every release breaks something - libraries getting disconnected for no reason, not being able to do `sudo ls` because suddenly there's an uberadmin and I have to grant privileges for terminal to run sudo, stuff breaking for no reason, because suddenly logs/tmp/var is not writable anymore (recently - mongodb). Last hilarity that ensued was me trying to get into zoom meeting, which required restart because sound was turning off and THAT required hard restart (something something sound driver stopped working? even though restarting zoom fixes the issue for 2m?); alongside this an update occurred, because why not which actually set hard drive encryption that was supposed to happen 3 months ago (I did restart my computer after that mandatory policy change and was expecting it to have been in effect since then).

How do you do sudo ls on iOS?

Sorry, vented about MacOS. Ignore me.

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