Sure security is important but integrity is too.
* iTunes/Music app randomly reassign my Album artwork, with different (incorrect) art showing up on different devices!
* Reminders app: shared reminder lists can end up with the name of a different list
* Ghost photos that are deleted from my phone, and come back later.
* Maps, when I say "navigate to $friend" set a route that ended in my own driveway.
To me, these bugs suggest a fundamental design flaw, perhaps they are using a simple Integer as an index rather than a UUID?
Or maybe the database schema are solid, but there's some sort of race condition in their synchronization frameworks and the data is getting scrambled in RAM?
Whatever it is, it's absolutely insane that in 2025 these kinds of bugs are happening.
I still use Macs because data on a physical disk seems perfectly reliable, but I've been bitten by so many of these bugs in their apps. iCloud files completely disappear, then reappear a day later. Highlight a couple chapters of a PDF in Preview, then reopen the file and they're gone because iCloud thinks the older unhighlighted version is newer or something. Madness. I don't touch any of these Apple services/apps anymore.
There's very clearly a fundamental bug in whatever sync framework they seem to share across everything. It's bad enough to have data disappear entirely or deleted data reappear, but then when data shows up in the completely wrong place, and this has been happening for years and years and still isn't fixed... I don't know what to think.
You're right. There's no other word for it but "insane". They can engineer their A-series and M-series microchips, but it's been over a decade now and their sync is still fundamentally broken.
There are certainly other words for it. Lazy, anticompetitive, disinterested, any of those are more plausible than all of Apple being insane. They sold you a microchip that you knew you wanted, now they are beholden to little else. For over a decade, Apple didn't even offer the iOS APIs for third-parties to implement cloud storage. They know you need their software services, regardless of how shit they are.
Insanity would be a pretty satisfying explanation. Fickleness fits a lot better with Apple's track record though.
Apple's hardware is absolutely trash for anything that needs reliability. For shiny disposable entertainment use, it can be great.
I then subscribed to Apple Music and relied on its matching function. After switching from an Intel Mac to an M2 and redownloading my library from remote, it now believes that each and every song in my library are rented Apple Music copies. Even those it shows as having been added in 2003.
Some songs are missing; some go missing, then inexplicably come back months later. Worse: so far I have found around a dozen which have been replaced by different versions.
It's a real mess.
* prompts in settings for adding an account recovery contact that never go away, even after months and months of successfully setting it up multiple times.
* OS account profile picture can barely stay associated with the most recently picked option. Happens for non-iCloud local accounts on Mac, happens when I change profile pictures on iOS for iCloud… weird.
* OS account update screens on iPad, iOS, and watchOS will forget that they are in the middle of updating if you navigate away from the settings screen. Thankfully, today they at least recover from it (it’s probably still happening in the background), but it takes several long seconds of spinning for the settings page to remember that it was doing an update two seconds ago before I navigated away from it.
* similar to your ghost pictures bug, deleting a large media file from a media player app moves it to recently deleted, but you can sometimes end up in situations where you can’t permanently delete the file, or it doesn’t show up anywhere but still takes up space. (Talking about 20GB-80GB file sizes where it makes a big difference on OS storage space)
Some of these bugs have been around for a VERY long time.
But the weird thing is I don’t see them in 3rd party apps.
Not sure when exactly that changed, but it was probably a few OS releases ago?
I just use KDE's default one, Klipper, and I raise the max entry number.
If something bad replaces your copy, you can get the good one back from the history.
There are nice features like QR code generation for your copied text if you want to quickly share something with someone else's phone as well.
I use it as a remote control to adjust volume during movies from the phone to the computer playing them for instance.
The Safari reading list can't even sync properly between devices for me. Image Capture ("Keep Originals"??) or AirDrop is a little minimal for such a keystone part of the phone -> computer if you don't want to use Apple ecosystem after.. Let alone the other more complicated issues.
Yes, but not before syncing it with (NSA)iCloud. /s
How do you know? Why do you believe that they're competent on writing security code but not competent enough to write a general purpose app? Is there a different company culture applied to the latter?
Then apple fucked everyones libraries up completely in an auto update, destroying the metadata and making them unusable, except for songs bought via apple music that is...
Btw, it was fine from withing iTunes, just never stop using iTunes I guess...
Is that a necessary qualifier? I used to get that impression, but on the outside it's gradually become a rarely believable pitch. Without having an iPhone and without having an Apple Watch, and without having already had them years ago, it just seems like I've sort of made the right choice with just mac over the years, and with the latest OS that's becoming just a tiny bit more questionable; their decision making with software seems sus.
Like I've never had to qualify my setup of using a mac for work, Android phone for phone, and I guess Audio Technica for headphones. It's not super nerdy, it's not super integrated, but if I wanted it to be super integrated, "what value would I get out of steeping myself into the Apple ecosystem further" is the question that comes to mind. I also have an old iPad that I tried to make useful, and the iPod nano 3rd gen which was actually amazing, but ultimately was hampered by software limitations that they don't seem to have advanced on much in 10 years. I've always found their discrete hardware products to be amazing in terms of industrial design, but they've never really been compelling in terms of their utility.
The software engineering standard at Apple has clearly tanked in the last decade, which is sad because the exact opposite appears to have happened to their hardware.
Used to be, these were full software engineers embedded with dev teams, with a mission to destroy, document, and harden the apps and frameworks.
During the 2010s in all the FAANG that I’m aware of (have worked at 3), QA as a high paid American profession was completely offshored to India and responsibility for quality removed from developers concern. It’s a blocking item on the Launch Checklist. Automated testing was expected to fill the gap but has mostly been ignored.
The complicated thing is, they were kind of right, and kind of wrong. QA in some orgs were staffed by engineers who weren't "quite as good" as the development teams, and it showed. Horrible QA tools that broke frequently, QA test passes that were fragile and took forever, and just low quality bug reports. Work that should have been automated just wasn't due to a lack of talent. Part of this is because any really good engineers who started off as an SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) ended up moving to the SDE career track after a few promos, because the career trajectory for an SDE was much better (despite the company trying to resolve this repeatedly over the years).
So basically the SDET teams had an ongoing brain drain problem.
That said, the good SDET teams were just as good, if not better, than the development teams. The really high quality test software was incredibly good. And when debugging means going through assembly code in a debugger and figuring out what is wrong, the top engineers come off looking like magicians.
But there was too much rot in the QA orgs for them to ever be agile enough for daily releases. Microsoft went with the cost cutting approach of just laying most of them off and allowing software quality to drop, as did the vast majority of other companies.
Once Microsoft got rid of their SDET career track, it became career suicide to even bother going into QA and the entire field basically died. Microsoft SDETs were on the same pay scale (and same hiring requirements) as SDEs. When i was in college my goal was to be an SDET at Microsoft, I loved the idea of being the last line of defense against bad software, of being the one responsible for protecting users around the world. (Yes I played a lot of Paladins in D&D, how'd you guess?)
I eventually achieved my goal, became an SDET on a compiler team, got to take over maintaining one of the most impressive test systems I've ever seen [1], and spent a lot of time wiping up my own drool as ARM assembly code scrolled while I tried to trace compiler bugs.
SDETs died, I moved to be an SDE. I loved being an SDET, I loved having a job that could be summarized as "be angry for the sake of the customer". I loved that I worked in a company where the most junior of SDETs could stop an entire build from going out by saying they didn't think the build met the quality bar for a release from Microsoft (something I actually did once, emotionally it is a hard thing to do!).
Unfortunately that love and passion for quality is gone from the industry.
[1]https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested...
So they do a terrible job from a data security point of view;)
Recently when I load new music onto my phone I find that random unrelated album art has been mangled or switched with other albums from other artists. And some music, which exists on my phone's hard drive, is now greyed out and when clicked says "This item is not currently available in your country or region." I am considering switching back to a iPod with an upgraded drive and giving up on keeping music on my phone completely.