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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

The real question is why doesn't Apple have enough Testing and QA to catch stuff like this? It's not like they can't afford it or they need to suport a bazillion possible HW configurations like Android and Windows. They design and own the whole product stack from silicon to OS so poor QA is inexcusable here.

Edit: if you're down voting my statement could you please elaborate why? Thanks.

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QA is becoming an endangered species. As a software engineer I despise that my end users are my beta testers. Only a handful of times in my career have I had the luxury of a QA team and they were worth their weight in gold.

Of course business doesn't care, all they see is cost centers. Who cares if the bug count is 10,000 or 200, right?

Bugs are only urgent if management's reporting to even higher management is jeopardized.

I once had a manager that, when asked why we don’t hire a QA team, said, “We don’t need one because we have really good engineers”. :/

"Why do you need breaks? We have really good engines."

Or my favorite: "We don't need QA because we have unit tests!"

My post on kicking the can to the extreme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9775799

My theory is that companies like Apple and Google - and, actually, smaller businesses even more so, because they can't afford a QA team - have intentionally offloaded much of the QA phase to the public.

In a way, it's a result of the "agile" approach, to "release early, ship often". And the larger the userbase, the more effective they are at finding and reporting bugs and edge cases. It also cuts down on the cost by reducing the time/effort spent on testing new features thoroughly.

What grinds my gears is when a company doesn't have a centralized bug database where the users can contribute and see the progress being made. If I recall correctly, Apple's support forums are like a blackhole of issue reports. Most of the time it's a bunch of users with the same problem, trying to solve it on their own; no input from an employee/developer; no way to know if they're aware or working on the bug; and no clear path to a solution.

I'd go the other way for big organizations like Apple and Google -- they need to do public testing, because the bug that impacts 0.1% of their users will impact hundreds of thousands. And no QA team, regardless of how they're empowered or resourced, will find every 0.1% bug (or even every 1% bug). You need broad beta testing in those cases, just to get enough hands on.

There is a need for public betas, but a private QA team could catch a lot of bugs before release, and catch regressions. The public beta builds might not be much better, but they'd likely at least come with reported known issues.

Of course, iOS was nototorious for not alarming on January 1st because Steve wanted to sleep in (actually I don't know why, but I think it happened at least 2 years in a row, and maybe three)

Or why don't they bother considering they broke the morning alarms now what... 4 times at least? (DST, new year, now this)

Maybe because Apple users consider themselves locked in tot the ecosystem so they can't vote with their feet/wallets and walk to a competitor when they're tired of bugs so Apple feels no pressure to do right by their users. Am I right?

I only feel locked in to Apple because I despise Google so much and the 2 Android phones I previously had were complete garbage. If there was a another viable option, I would go with it in a second.

Did you try a recent clean Android like Pixel or Oneplus or was your last Android experience some bloated 2016 era Samsung?

If one despises Google, buying a Google phone would be the least optimal solution.

The extremely deep integration with google services was always annoying for me. I'm still finding it hard to untangle myself now that I've fully moved to Apple devices.

My older smartphone (few years old) had less Google-related stuff. And for one, it had its own goddamn music player. Can you imagine? I did not have to use Google Play by default, and go to the Play Store to download a fscking music player. A music player!

Google Play Music graduated Google anyway, and is going to be killed soon...

It doesn't matter so much now, but I don't want them cluttering up my phone's rom with default apps I might not like, or that I can't take with me to a new phone. An ideal Android for me would come out of the box with a dialer (preferably AOSP), clock, keyboard, launcher, AOSP Browser, and a play store stub (play store might not be ideal, but it's the path of least effort).

Yeah, of course. It is a sad state of the store that I had to go through a few music players before I found one that did not shove ads in my face (or at all), and had all the basic functions you would expect a music player to have.

My similar feelings towards Apple ("despise" would probably be too strong, but I don't really like them either, plus I'm too cheap to put up with their prices) means that I am pretty much locked in to Android, but there I at least have a choice between different manufacturers...

It’s nowhere near universal. I read this article before my wake up time. I installed iOS 14 last night. The alarm worked.

I've been running 14 beta for a couple months. Never had this problem either.

Given that "Unfortunately the migration is done by disabling your existing alarm and showing a button to open the Health app to set it up again." this sounds more like improperly specified behavior than poorly implemented behavior to me. Unfortunately bad specifications aren't really caught in QA testing because that's what you're testing to. This probably should have been caught in beta testing, but the author might have a rare set of conditions that resulted in this behavior. Good beta testing is basically only done by have a really large userbase of testers. That said if apple wanted to improve this they probably have the capital to incentivize it through service discounts or something similar.

It’s probably a very rare combination of specific factors that caused this bug for this person. My iPhone alarm had no problems whatsoever this morning after installing iOS 14 last night. Your comment would be more applicable if we had reason to believe that they had simply completely broken the alarm feature and that no one at Apple had bothered testing it.

Probably because cost of testing does not justify profits from well-tested software. Apple is commercial company. They didn't sign any obligations to produce bug-less software. And the fact that they are richest (or one of the richest) companies in the world means that they did math correctly.

No, it means they did some math correctly in the past. They built great hardware and coupled it with a usable OS/UX. I have tried Android several times and found it generally more buggy. However, iOS has progressively gotten more complex and buggy (I still have rotation bugs across all my devices.)

At some point maybe I'll stop paying the Apple premium if all things are equally buggy.

This is one of the big questions! When is it "enough" testing?

When I can set my alarm for Airport or $VERY_IMPORTANT_MEETING and I know it will surely ring in the morning.

This seems like a problem we solved a very very long time ago, but today you're never really sure you'll get woken up on time.

The amish have the right idea.

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