Six Reasons Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

I have never ever seen such a buggy macOS before. Most of the bugs I reported were fixed. But I didn’t even get a notification about the bug fix.

And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better. 15.1b1 foobared dragging a file on the dock. That was fixed in b2. But now the menus get foobared.

So is the fact that Mail in iOS 13 no longer displays the contents of mime-attachments in mailing list email digests a regression, or “Not a Regression”?

I really wish Apple would adopte a longer OS Update strategy say 2 years rather than 1. Sierra/High Sierra (and the Desktop/Documents/Photos cloud trap people fall into - Hey Ben My mac is crawling ! help ! )Mojave - Catalina has made for a fast paced modern update
path (not to mention the phones and now the branch of iPad and watch) but it hardly allows for a user to breathe. For the first time all but one of MY machines need upgrading to meet OS standards (a bottom of the barrel Air is what i run Catalina on right now). I see a lot of issues especially with Apps not thoroughly quitting -Finder issues! Time Machine problems (which has prevented me from loading a backup of a library that got hosed by a third party vendor’s crappy programming) Photos and Music crashing. Really stupid issues could have been tested before released. I do get a boost in work when Apple dumps this crap on users who are are (imho) Bleeding edge wanna bees… but i’d rather deal with other issues. Oh and I had to delete Swift completely in Catalina because it would not download at all. I think i have to Nuke and Repave to get it to work because it isn’t happening at all.
-> my motto -> You can’t download patience.

There’s no way of knowing, but if you report it as a bug or provide feedback, at least it will get recorded.

https://www.apple.com/feedback/mail.html

Fascinating article.

Exactly this. Why does Apple have to release a new OS every year? Who would not purchase a new Mac if they needed it because the OS is 11 months old? Especially since Apple hasn’t charged for OS upgrades in a while. I would much rather have the OS upgraded every 2 or 3 years, but be more polished.

I’m also in this camp. There is no reason macOS needs a ‘major’ update every year (apart from marketing maybe).

So here’s a thought. Arguably, some of the problem here is the effort of developing the core of the operating system and a vast suite of bundled apps and releasing them all at the same moment.

What if, going forward, Apple took a page from ChromeOS and had the core of macOS update itself quietly over time without drawing attention to itself (and hopefully without impacting users in a big way now that 32-bit apps are off the table).

Then, for apps like Safari, Photos, Mail, Messages, Calendar, Contacts, Reminders, Notes, and so on, Apple could still do a splashy release that would showcase new features that users care about. But without the core macOS stuff to develop and test at the same time, the overall project might be a lot more manageable.

Even the splashy app release wouldn’t necessarily have to be all at once in September—Apple could bundle a few apps together into releases that would happen at different times of year in conjunction with the hardware devices that best show off those apps and features.

As a late adopter of everything, I’m not impacted as much, but Apple is impacted. I won’t even buy hardware anymore until it and the software have been around at least 6 months.

I’m so glad I got out of the coding business before the hurry up attitude took over. The stress would have killed me.

For several years I’ve been helping out Apple via the AppleSeed program. Sometimes they reply to bug reports, sometimes not. Sometimes bugs are fixed at a decent pace, sometimes not until the next major release. At the moment, I’m involved with an unsettled iOS bug report that includes documentation and a workaround. The general situation is described here at Apple’s Discussions forum:

Q: Unable to rearrange app icons in ios 13

But Apple’s response to my bug report has been, to put it gently, nonsensical. This has lead me to consider what’s going on at Apple, and likely a lot of other coding establishments. Here are my current conclusions:

1. Apple is indeed in a state of triage. The code clinic has to put less urgent bugs on standby.

2. The volume of complex code has, as we expected decades ago, forced coding-by-committee. We know what that’s means. Human communication, reason, logic and emotional stability breakdown in proportion to the complexity of the task at hand.

3. Object-oriented development means the use of ‘established’ code that’s commonly just as prone to bugs as any other. Fixing object code isn’t on anyone’s front burner. Old code lumbers on, incapable of addressing new features, new security concerns, etc.

4. There are mounting pressures of Time and associated Money. In an age when Quality Capitalism has been overthrown by Quick and Dirty Capitalism (to put it mildly), priorities have shifted away from The Art of Coding toward: Good enough; Skip the code commenting; Feed the stockholders stat; Progress, not perfection; Skip the code verification; Skip the functionality verification; Exploitation without explication! Or as I like to simply put it: Short-term thinking leads to long-term disaster. Pick your synonym. It’s a Spirit of the Age.

5. Modern coding tools are dinosaurian. Improvements in rapid coding have not adequately addressed the ongoing failures of coding fundamentals. Consider the term Memory Buffer and the frequent, constant, voluminous ways in which it is exploited by hackers, crackers, black hats, script kiddies. Pick your descriptor. IMHO (In My Heretical Opinion) everything C-based must go. It’s zombie coding. Let’s cut off its head and move on to the bright and promising young things, such as Swift and Rust. Let’s focus on developing so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ that helps us establish actual Human Intelligence in coding.

Summary: Apple and the rest of the world’s coding community are caught in a conflict between the forces of Expectation versus Realization.

That’s a very interesting take on it from the developer’s perspective. Thanks, Derek.

I have to say I was somewhat startled by your comment on object-oriented coding. I believe in pretty much every seminar I have ever attended where the topic of OO coding came up, the concept was introduced by mentioning that OO became necessary because otherwise code would eventually no longer have been maintainable ( and/or scalable/extensible).

Yet here we are, ~40 years later, learning that our OO code is no longer maintainable either. So maybe it’s not the type of code after all. Maybe it’s the coding environment? And as you indicate that’s both the tools and the economic environment.

I hope you caught my recent edits.

I have a biological systems perspective I find useful in understanding human systems. We humans demand simplicity amidst unfathomable natural complexity. But here we are creating our own unfathomable human complexity while attempting to force our demand for simplicity. Expectation versus Realization.

I haven’t used Rust, but I’m pretty conversant in Swift. I agree it’s a big step in the right direction. Swift, along with ARC, makes it hard or impossible to make a number of basic programming mistakes.

lowengard I really wish Apple would adopte a longer OS Update strategy say 2 years rather than 1.

I think this is unlikely. Apple has a yearly product update cycle, and OS updates are part of that. Apple gets free publicity, and sells more toys, based on flashy new features. Fewer updates means fewer sales, and lower stock price.

Note though that for the Mac that’s not true in general. The MBP might get an annual update. Most other Macs don’t get that level of attention these days.

That’s absolutely true on the Mac side (heck, most Mac hardware changes barely get a press release these days), but all of Apple’s operating systems are so inter-related at this point that it may be tricky to decouple them enough to ship at different times.

Although I do agree with most everything said in the article, I do take exception to the above. My observations are that all of the significant bugs being discussed now were well known to testers prior to release. I think there may have been a small delay in the original release date, but Apple appears to lay out an iron-clad schedule far ahead of time that is rarely violated. If there are bugs, they get shoved into the next update, as long as they aren’t known to be catastrophic.

There have been a handful of cases of near catastrophic releases, but most of these involved a last minute change that was never provided to testers before release. I don’t feel that was the case in this instance.

I watch a new release break something I use. In a subsequent release they fix that problem but something else is broken. In the next release they fix that and …

It appeared to me people are not testing the whole application instead they are only testing the code they changed and missing the code they broke in the process. They need to test the whole application before shipping it not just the parts they think they touched/impacted.

Without likely sounding like a captain obvious doofus, is there also a fundamental lack of engineering staff for all the platforms they’re trying to maintain and develop for?

From previous stuff I’ve read, there’s two issues.

Firstly, are there enough quality engineers to employ or is there still a mass shortage in the industry, thus making it an ever-increasing battle to acquire, and worse, actually hold onto staff.

Secondly, aren’t Apple as a tech company supposed to be renowned for not employing enough engineering staff too (small teams, for example), so the sheer lack of people in the fight makes maintaining and gaining ground in the ever increasing battle to improve software and ever get around to squashing these “not a regression” bugs ever unlikely. I mean, do they even consider having teams that deal with these longstanding bugs, or is that too much of a financial cost pipe dream for us to expect?

All I can say as a customer is it certainly doesn’t sound at all good, knowing these “Not a Regression” things more often than not are never fixed.

From Scientific American June 2015: Why the Upgrade Cycle Will Never End
“Eventually these companies have no choice but to add features that nobody asked for. Meanwhile bloated, overwhelming technology has a very real emotional effect on us; we feel like idiots when we can’t master it. Then, as the software becomes increasingly weighed down with features, the interface must be redesigned to accommodate them all. (Such a redesign is then, of course, marketed as a new feature.) And each time you lose a few days of productivity as you learn the new layout.”

and Douglas Adams in 1984:
“it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws”

My machine booted 3 or 4 times today. Wake on sleep is still a disaster in MacOS, so docking/undocking is a clown show. Will my machine wake up when I touch it? or will I get the apple after some time? Who knows?

I think some of the answers here are simplistic, for sure OO is not to blame for this. Yes companies want new features, but does anyone even know what all the new features in Catalina are? I don’t think there are that many, clearly the problem is that the understanding of what can and cannot be done given an amount of time and a pool of efforters (trying not to call people resources) is become problematic.

I too have been hoping Swift would make this problem better. SwiftUI was incredibly buggy, but by the same token, it is surprising how it was able to make a kind of finish line in a state that approaches usability.

Apple is a lot of things. I hope it will continue to dare to improve (a la SwiftUI) and not just become a shell-shocked withering servant of the feature police.

What machine is that? I’m starting to see patterns with certain models that aren’t universal.

Last time? I reported a bug to Apple, they got back to me one year later when I was running the next macOS asking me to quickly test for the bug again on the old system and report back. Yeah, sure. They simply are not going to receive reports on all the bugs that they have and likely have no idea about them these days. There is really no connection at all (nearly) to customer feedback these days in any big companies. Google for example apparently did not know that they Sync (Google Drive) app did not work with offline files on the Mac when they launched it. I only once got help from Apple ever with something since the 80’s and it was (of course) an Apple-ID related issue and mainly because not having direct access to their servers. I even got blocked by Apple for a week recently because their support webpages doesn’t work as they should in Safari … .

2018 Macbook Pro with 32GBs of RAM and 1TB SSD.

Appreciate the article from a dev perspective! Why Apple insists on tying major OS releases to their iPhone upgrade cycle is beyond me. Decoupling them would go miles towards ensuring quality software releases.

Appreciate the article from a dev perspective! Why Apple insists on tying major OS releases to their iPhone upgrade cycle is beyond me. Decoupling them would go miles towards ensuring quality software releases.

Releasing multiple announcements of software upgrades at the same time increases the chances of getting more column inches in the press. And since upgrades are generally a good thing, it usually means positive publicity and “how too” articles, avoiding the chance of headlines like this really recent one by Josh about a chain gang of product releases:

“Alexa, Throw Spaghetti At The Wall And See What Sticks”

https://tidbits.com/2019/09/27/alexa-throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks/

FWIW, just to comment on this part, I have read an article or two since iOS 13 was released that said that Apple doubled the number of binaries over iOS 12 that were compiled from Swift code, so maybe they agree with you. (As I wen to look for them, it turns out that the articles were all based on the same blog post: https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/ )

How tragic that today’s software engineers cannot be honest about their progress. I’m convinced that much of this problem is due to virtually all of Silicon Valley being run like a summer camp instead of a business with adults at the helm. If I were a manager and had been led down this road by my engineers, I’d want to fire the lot of them. “Just tell me your problems and let’s try to fix them”, would be my mantra.

Can we be so certain it’s the engineer’s being dishonest? Couldn’t it just as likely be that the engineers are quite clear about their abilities and communicate that too, but management simply refuses to adjust scope/timeline accordingly?

It’s a rather commonly found management “principle” these days to deliberately set goals too high, allocate resources too tightly, etc. in order to ensure (at least according to the proponents of this tactic) that people are always churning out at max capacity.

Yeah, when the article says “making it past Apple’s internal testing and the public beta phase,” I was thinking that meant that the bug survived through those phases, not necessarily that it wasn’t identified or reported. As David said, Apple triages bugs heavily, so lots of known problems won’t be fixed intentionally because of the risk of regressions.

@godrifle Why Apple insists on tying major OS releases to their iPhone upgrade cycle is beyond me. Decoupling them would go miles towards ensuring quality software releases.

I think there are two reasons Apple combines hardware and software announcements. First, new hardware (eg: improved cameras) enable new software features. Also, the more features Apple can announce at once, the bigger the media splash, and the more publicity Apple receives.

All I know as a user is that when I loaded IPadOS 13 on my 4G Mini it really introduced numerous bugs to Mail and to the text editor. It looks like e-mails are formatted for a larger screen. The subject matter consumes the trash can, new email, and move to icons. One cannot type into the bcc or cc fields as the keyboard intrudes into those spaces.

Tapping on a word to introduce the cursor to make a change to a single letter selects the entire word. its impossible to place the cursor after a single letter, backspace to erase it and then type in a new letter…the entire word has to be retyped. This is such very basic stuff that I can hardly hold my breath to see what else is broken.

So many of these new “features” are about half past worthless. Sidecar would be neat, but you have to have the latest hardware to use it. Using Files to connect to an external USB thumb drive would be very convenient and a huge step forwards but it’s apparently overly sensitive to what kind of media and how it’s formatted in order for it to work.

Is all this complexity and interconnectedness really necessary? Especially when so much of it doesn’t work? Reminds me of Simon & Garfunkle’s 59th Street Bridge song, “Slow down, you’re moving too fast. Ya’ gotta make the morning last. Just kicking down the cobblestones, looking for fun and feeling groovy.”

Just a point … Could there be a strong profit motive in Apple’s frenetic update schedule? Could the breakneck pace that Apple has kept, be a market dominating move? Could it force customers to follow along with whatever Apple creates, and could it keep any competitors ( 3rd parties) at bay? Is it possible that Apple knows that by keeping customers on their toes and ready for anything by giving them shiny new ‘features’ every 6 months that it also is able to rope them into new limits, and profit windows at the same time? The Apple customer base is so stunned by the pace of updates that things like App Notarization in Catalina which give Apple control over programs that don’t even use the Apple store, slip in as new ‘realities’, along side arbitrary deprication of 32bit apps. I suspect thats the ‘Apple Genius’ using the software update as an offensive business tool to push growth.

I’d like to see Apple move their software releases to incremental, and unplug key apps like Mail from the OS. It will likely never happen, but I believe it would lead to more features, more refinements and more stability. The annual release schedule, based solely on marketing, is hurting them.

Yes, purely for hype. It’s sad.

I’m starting to feel like Apple needs to start paying beta testers…as it “feels” like Apple might be relying on public beta too much. Because if they are…obviously nobody that is detailed or actually uses the OS for real life is reporting back to Apple…other than reporters blogging stories about the “new macOS features”.

I’ve been finding so many obvious things in Apple’ own stable of “standard apps”, from installing to just opening the new Photos App and it crashing and having to rebuild for hours…seriously seems someone there just needs to test their own work as I cannot see how anyone could possibly miss some of these glaring problems, sure seems they would have to find many of these issues, if they tried it themselves (so it would seem). Quality control is way down! Plus, 4 iOS / iPadOS updates in a month…dang.

So now for these other software developers…I say shame on them for both not testing there stuff and they have been warned for years and years that this was coming.

Yet, still Catalina is a BIG change…I compare it to leap that Lion was with no more Rosetta or PPC code. Catalina is a big deal…there are going to be some pains with this gain.