Apple Plans Ambitious iOS 18 and macOS 15 Updates, Seeks to Squash Bugs | Hacker News Reader

Apple Plans Ambitious iOS 18 and macOS 15 Updates, Seeks to Squash Bugs

bloomberg.com

33 pointsGys27 comments

A week of bug fixes doesn’t exactly seem like news. I think most people are hoping for like an entire release dedicated to it.

I just set up a new iPhone yesterday, and it was pretty frustrating. Apparently there is a known bug that prevents seamlessly setting up a new iPhone from your old one unless you first perform an OS update. The phone started the update, but the screen was immediately visually corrupted and the update simply hung. I was forced to restart the phone and go through multiple attempts to get everything to work. In the end, I had to erase the phone and start over from scratch after applying the updates. Some of the advice on the web seems to be to set the phone up as a new iPhone then perform the updates, then erase it and set it up from your old phone afterwards. Every time I’ve done this before in the last several years it has worked almost perfectly. So I would agree… I would definitely like to see more than just a weeks worth of bug fixes!

That is exactly what I want them to do. If the current trend continues I might as well buy an Android phone.

The grass is about the same shade of green on the other side.

At least you can fix the bug when you have the source.. not so much with iOS.

Android is not exactly open source. Everything useful is bundled in Google play services. Almost all Android phones are not designed to be modified.

Let’s say I buy a Samsung phone and find a bug that I want to fix. How do I do it? Can you walk me through it step-by-step at a high level?

Also, you can release source code and still be monopolistic and abuse your competitive advantage. Chrome, Edge, and Safari are essentially open source but their competitive advantages come from being installed as defaults on their respective operating systems. They have an inherent competitive advantage over other open source browsers like Firefox (and the market share statistics prove it).

Only at a very narrow layer, and only if you’re also installing a custom AOSP build.

Want to fix a bug in any of the hardware interacting modules like drivers? Not usually possible because you can’t modify binary blobs. Instead you need to modify the parts interacting with the driver and hope you can get a workaround.

Want to modify the apps? Most of the apps people use are closed source , including many that people take for granted as being vended by the OS. So that’s also moot unless you stick to FOSS apps only.

And even then, to go AOSP, you’d probably lose access to a majority of the differentiating features of your device.

At the end of the day, yes, you can MAYBE fix a small section of bugs if you have the skills and are willing to make a lot of compromises as well.

It’s not as cut and dry as OSS makes it sound

Most people care about user facing code. Which is by and large most of the code. You get the option with open source. You do not get the option with closed.

Cut, dried, dehydrated and delivered to your door.

I was an android fan boy for years. I solved exactly zero bugs myself.

Most of the bugs I wanted to fix where things that worked correctly on the iPhone. Turns out having essentially the same device across the entire platform makes development way easier.

However most functionalities of the OS are ridiculous. File management is the worst. On Android you could do whatever you want exactly with the particular file, not so much on iOS. iOS despite being smooth and consistent only works the way that apple wants.

Do it! I feel empowered using as many cross platform services as possible so switching is relatively painless.

I'd be happy to see Apple iterate on Sonoma until a 10.4.11 quality release is made. It's an interesting dichotomy. The hardware is as good as it's ever been, and I've generally minor complaints about the current MacBook Pro chassis. The software, while not MacOS 9 filesystem destroying level of awful, is probably the worst release I've seen since the switch to Intel.

I'll believe it when I see it. I'm a recent returner to Apple software and mostly only use Facetime / Messenger or whatever it is, and parental controls, but those alone mess up a couple of times a week.

Out of curiosity, what prompted you to return to iOS?

I'm just over a decade on iPhone here, and when I first switched from Android I was amazed at just how fluid and responsive everything was. I don't know if iOS had a dedicated thread just for UI updates/interactions, but it was an astounding improvement over the HTC One S I had (which was also relatively new at the time).

Over time, however, it seems like the iOS user experience has been on its way to a thousand-cut death for me—various little bugs, terrible keypress detection for the keyboard, abysmal yet somehow still declining Siri dictation quality, the UI generally being less responsive even on new phones, and just basic things that absolutely used to work without exception just randomly experiencing obvious bugs.

There's too much to list here, but I'm curious how life compares these days on the Android side. I'm all in on the iOS ecosystem, currently, so I know a switch would be extra painful, but still...

I got my kid a tablet and reckoned the iPad mini was a better choice, and I wanted to call him, read books and play games with him remotely, and the highest recommended app for this (Caribu) worked best on iOS.

I don't really recommend Caribu (now owned by Mattel and the lack of love put into it is showing) but I don't know anything better.

A bug that bites every other day: a request for more screen time comes in (parental controls) while the iPad was last in landscape, and I unlock it in portrait. Messages comes up after I press the alert to approve it, but the messages UI is stuck half way between landscape and portrait, and the message that requires approval is off the bottom of the screen and can't be scrolled back. Rotating the iPad doesn't help. I have to quit Messages and restart it, sometimes a couple of times.

Another thing that creeps me out every time I do it: I download a free app and somewhere along the line I have to press a Buy button, or there is some "Processing payment" notification, that makes me think I was duped.

And I have a generalized gripe about the stores - there are like 3 different store apps on a new ipad, really confusing. Even worse, as an English speaker living in Switzerland (3 major official languages) some stores, like the Apple store, default to German with no configuration possible, and while the App store only shows app reviews written in Switzerland, so I basically see no English reviews for any apps. I can't opt in to seeing UK or US reviews.

Funny you should mention smoothness. After I got my ipad, I immediately regretted not getting the pro because 60Hz animation is quite flickery on a big screen.

Outside video calls I only use the iPad for watching tv shows. It's kind of a redundant device for my lifestyle.

The parental controls are fucked. Buggiest software I’ve used in years. I disabled them.

MacOS has become extremely buggy. Just last week I had to factory reset (!!!) my Macbook, losing all data on it, because Apple's update caused some system corruption. Next year, once a good laptop with a Qualcomm Elite X or Meteor Lake CPU will be released (they should have much better thermals and power consumption than current processors), I will migrate away from Apple and I already replaced all my other devices with non-apple products.

I’ve tried going back to the Mac OS X days of not updating till at least X.x.2, but only for iOS this time.

Unfortunately that’s not how iOS development seems to work and minor releases seem as buggy as the major releases, sometimes bringing completely new bugs altogether.

It’s been a while since I’ve used a Mac in my day to day so I can’t really comment on that side of things, but my wife who had all the passion of a recent convert for the Mac over the past 2 years has completely soured on it due to bugs since the last release.

I see issues with her laptop that I never saw during the 15 years or so a Mac was my only computer, including a completely frozen desktop that I’d never seen despite the fact that I owned a Mac at a time where I had several KEXTs installed.

This is purely anecdotal. My experience, also anecdotal, is that I've used Macs for 30 years and have never had an OS update corrupt a computer and I've never had to do a "factory reset". I always transfer from computer to computer (either directly or via a Time Machine backup) and I buy a new MacBook at least every other year (I keep separate personal and work computers also). I've never had any problems that weren't fixed by a restart or that weren't specific to one piece of software.

Not getting any new reports or feedback from me anymore

For people using Cloudflare DNS:

> By pausing work on iOS 18 — along with iPadOS 18, macOS 15, watchOS 11 and other next-generation operating systems — engineers could spend a week focused exclusively on rooting out glitches.

> The delay, announced internally to employees last week, was meant to help maintain quality control after a proliferation of bugs in early versions.

https://archive.today/TdKi1

“As of right now, the one-week stoppage probably won’t noticeably postpone the ultimate release of the software. At worst, it will give Apple a little less time at the end of the development cycle to eliminate any last-minute glitches.”

So… they’ll be back in the exact predicament this same time next year?

> Apple Plans Ambitious iOS 18 and macOS 15 Updates, Seeks to Squash Bugs

Do they fix known bugs or search for existing ones ? My impression about Apple is that they fix bugs only after they are (openly) exploited by others.

Reminds me of OSX Leopard -> Snow Leopard.

So Snow Leopard yet again?

I honestly feel Apple has reached some kind of plateau in terms of functionalities, features and gimmicks. Most of the things brought to iOS or MacOS are some software gimmicks.

I think the emphasis should be brought on reliability, MacOS and iOS need to bring back this "rock-solid-feeling gap" compared to Windows 11.

I remember that there was a huge gap in usability and reliability-feeling between Windows XP/Vista/7 and Mac OS at the time. With the recent releases of Windows 10 and 11, the gap got narrower.

Windows remain a shit platform to dev. though.

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