All of Apple's services are abysmal | Hacker News Reader

All of Apple's services are abysmal

coryd.dev

38 pointscdrnsf21 comments

The author is 100% correct but forgot 1 other Apple service, iCloud Photos (maybe they lumped that in with Drive?) which is far from perfect but is a huge boon for everyone that used to have to deal with "I (somehow destroyed) my phone, how can I get my pictures off it?". "Find My" is another mostly bright spot, it does work very well (especially when sharing location with friends/family). I agree completely on how trash Apple is at any sort of web service (iMessage, iCloud Photos, Find My being the exceptions), literally everything else is an afterthought.

I quite like my Apple hardware but I shy away from all their services or at least not use them for anything important/critical. Also Apple services don't often work with other products/services. For example, you can play Apple Music on Echo's but it's a subpar experience verses something like Spotify.

Now that I think about it, I really do avoid Apple's stuff by and large:

- Mail -> Google Apps (Gmail)

- Calendar -> Google Calendar

- Maps -> I do use Apple Maps, but also Google Maps and Waze

- Reminders -> Things (but I do use Apple Reminders as well, it just sucks)

- Music -> Spotify

- Drive -> Dropbox/Syncthing

- Books -> Kindle

- Weather -> Carrot

And I'm sure there are more. One thing Apple (had? has? probably "had") going for it was a lot of it's services (and apps for that matter) handle the 80% use-case and are good "default" for most people and there are power-user apps/services you can reach for if Apple's doesn't meet the bar. That is slowly not being the case and it's really sad to see (as much as one can feel sad/sorry for a massive company, moreso I'm sad for what was lost.

I liked your list and wanted to add my own. I'm not really into Apple products; I use an iPhone because my wife threatened me with physical harm if I didn't.

Generally, I use Linux, so I want to use things on my phone that I can also access from my computer.

- Mail -> Fastmail

- Calendar -> Fastmail

- Maps -> I do use Apple Maps. It is not great, but it generally gets me where I want to go. I refuse to use Google for anything.

- Reminders -> (Reminders app has one job, which it doesn't consistently do...) Fastmail snoozed and scheduled emails

- Music -> The Pirate Bay + foobar2000

- Drive -> Syncthing

- Books -> The Pirate Bay + Onyx (Reader)

- Weather -> Local News Site

Apple maps was the only GPS app that correctly routed me in rural England; others would occasionally tell me to drive straight through a no entry sign. It’s an interesting exception to the rule.

Some of these problems likely arise from the fact that they're probably already stretched thin working on the next "Liquid Glass". Radars which are not P1 or P2 essentially get punted to the bottom of the PQ, and many of these often end up being age old bugs i.e. not a regression i.e. not a priority.

Recently I tried sync'ing a 10 minute video from my iPhone to my Mac through iCloud. I gave up after waiting for more than 30 minutes and just used Google Drive because airdrop for some reason is just completely broken.

Do you use Little Snitch? Sometimes it used to interfere with Airdrop based on my rules, but I can't remember specifics. Definitely a custom rule I set up though

The UI for Apple Music is frustrating as hell since updating to 26.x. The search function alone needs a human sacrifice.

Want to delete a song? Open the menu then, even though there’s ample screen space, scroll down the truncated menu to find delete well below more useless options. Why.

Want to scroll to the middle of a song? Hold up! The ‘lossless’ info is right there and you always hit that instead. Again, plenty of space to move that down and out of the way.

If anyone at Apple used Apple Music they would know all of this already.

Then there’s the keyboard in general. I spend so much time fixing typos it’s crazy. Someone had a video on YouTube showing that, even though he was typing correctly, IOS was messing up. Horrible experience!

Apple Music got extremely slow for me in (atypical, granted) situations that used to be perfectly snappy. I keep recordings of a radio show in my Music library, with the whole series tagged as a single album, each "episode" as a separate disc, and each half of the episode as its own track. This makes it easy to scroll through, browsing to pick what I want to listen to. But now with 26 Music has been chugging whenever I open the album - it takes ~20 seconds before it starts responding smoothly again. I'll concede that having 1000+ discs within a single album isn't a normal use-case, but this has worked properly for the last decade before they screwed it up.

> Want to delete a song?

Swipe left on the song to reveal the delete button.

> Want to scroll to the middle of a song?

Does dragging the scrubber not work for you? Can also be dragged in the control center.

Search in general on all redesigned Apple apps is like solving a puzzle to figure out where it is. In some apps you have to be on a specific page and then scroll up to magically make it pop out. So intuitive...

This is 100% spot on! Everytime someone misses arriving somewhere on time, I ask -- were you using Apple Maps, the answer is always yes.

I find Apple Maps much more accurate than Google Maps in the US. Internationally, YMMV.

Yea. When my girlfriend and I travel I use Google Maps and she uses Apple Maps. And it's a running joke at this point that if we're struggling to get somewhere, she'll pull up Apple Maps and get us unstuck and bug me to switch. I think it comes down to minor UI polish that makes Apple Maps more intuitive with transit and cardinal directions but I've never done a full comparison.

The one time I tried to use it for navigation (I don't remember exactly why, but I had some trouble opening a link I was sent elsewhere, and I was lazy to copy and paste the coordinates to another app) it sent me somewhere else than where I was supposed to go, around 5km away. I remember I was sent a link with coordinates to the meeting place, but somehow when opening the link in apple maps and asking the directions to there, it changed to a different destination, that happened to be a similar (but otherwise unrelated) place.

How is it that they have so much money And yet can’t hire developers. Something must be unbelievably rotten at the core of the company.

Valuations are memes. The definition of "what the market will bear."

There is something rotten at the core of our society. Behavioral economics experiments run by media to manipulate beliefs and agency to the benefit of the rich.

Maps, Facetime, iMessage, iCloud photos are all great. I like them better than alternatives.

I think this applies to almost all modern software.

Apple Mail automatically adds calendar entries from attachments in my junk mail to my calendar. I get tons of spam/phishing mails with appointments attached that i now manually have to delete from my calendar all the time. There is no dedicated setting to disable this, according to Apple support, deactivating Siri integration inside calendar and mail app settings will prevent this, but it doesn't.

MS Outlook has switched from their native code to a WebView inside a wrapper and that means we're back in the 90s when it comes to email. Basic features like adding an image inline no longer work, the option to enable this is buried in some badly worded menus and of course it resets after each update and also gets renamed in each update.

Software quality, especially from the big corps, is just absolute garbage these days. Designed by people that don't use it and built by people that have 6 months of web dev experience.

All of them? The author points at some particular issues they have had and concludes that all Apple services are garbage?! Well, except for iMessage and FaceTime.

I’ve been using Apple Music, iCloud Drive, bookmark sync, etc. for many years with zero issues. I even host my email at iCloud (since Google pulled the rug on the free Google Apps tier)—no issues whatsoever.

My family has also had zero issues.

Google Maps has a disgusting UX and I hate it every time I need to use it (for the reviews). Apple Maps has been great for the past few years. And don’t get me started on Dropbox with their monstrosity Electron client. F*ck that. Or the silly Spotify client that can’t do smart playlists and has no concept of genres.

IME, while not perfect, Apple’s services’ quality is far above the competition’s.

Yeah same here. Sure they're not perfect, but in 2025/2026 what services are perfect exactly?

To me, the article reads with a lot of exaggerated hostility towards Apple specifically for issues that are so commonplace nowadays. Not defending them, but I think it's unfairly targeting one company.

Apple Arcade is a pretty quick and easy way to avoid games with gambling in them.

Meh, there are probably a few valid nuggets in there, but a lot of it came across to me as “this doesn’t work the way I think it should”, whether the service works reliably or not. That, or a misguided obligation to say something negative about every service.

“Sign in with Apple? It's convenient and permanently tethers your login to your Apple ID.

Weather? That's Dark Sky with paint.”

C’mon, now you’re just reaching for something to complain about.

And proofread if you’re going to complain about the fit-and-finish in the work of others.

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