Apple's Software Quality Crisis

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process:

- on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens

- click on 'Custom Color'

- now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds

- stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues jumping around erratically (it's impossible to actually select the exact color you want)

- same thing happens when using the linear slider below the color circle

This bug doesn't lurk deep in some obscure part of the settings panel, it's the only way to change the desktop background color. A QA specialist would stumble over this in 5 minutes of trying to break the app.

I made it a hobby to check this bug after each OS update, it's broken since the new settings panel was introduced in Ventura. As a good citizen I also wrote a Feedback Assistent ticket (FB13805690 - 21-May-2024) with attached screen recordings and all, but of course I could just as well have sent that report into a black hole :)

This has been going on for years. I used to do a lot of iOS development, and have an eye for bugs. Almost every Apple app/service has been regressing in quality.

Take basic functionality - a phone app (calling). After certain audio sessions use (calling via WhatsApp) I can’t make regular calls over cellular - the UI app immediately cancels the call. Only reboot helps.

Or notes - for many years/iOS versions, they lived with a bug where a text note may just become blank - and only restarting Notes app makes it visible again.

Or AppStore - if an app has to be updated (I have auto updates off) - and I press Update - it gets downloaded, installed - and then AppStore is back to showing “Update” button! If you just go to the app, it’s a new version. But if you press that “Update”, it will redo update from scratch.

Sometimes I’m so frustrated, and thinking of my options - it’s either move to Android, or go get hired at Apple with a mandate to fix bugs in various products… but knowing Apple secrecy culture/silos, it’s not going to work, and requires change in their hiring process/perf review/QA.

I had an iPhone I was fixing up. I backed up what was necessary, disconnected the old iCloud account, and created a new one to use when updating the OS. I created a spam-blocking address (mailgw) for this account. It created fine and I logged in from the phone without problem. I did the OS update, but then I got a dreaded error that it couldn't log in. I tried to log in with the account on the PC and it has been deleted. Apple deleted the account out from under the phone and now it's iCloud locked, all within less than half an hour. I called but they said I'd have to go to an Apple store and produce the original receipt. If this was really about theft, why couldn't I just regain control from the AppleID that had been logged in for years from the phone? I checked from that account but it had no option to report that the phone was fine. This was a many-year-old phone and the receipt was long gone. So Apple basically bricked the phone, with no recourse. I will never buy an Apple device again.

When you upgrade MacOS 15.3.0 apple automatically enables Apple intelligence and then turns on Apple intelligence reporting (15 min intervals) by default.

You are not prompted or asked to enable.

After disabling Apple Intelligence when you do the next mini update to 15.3.1 Apple intelligence is enabled. Again no prompt and your previous choice to disable is ignored.

This IMO is a bad sign for Apple software quality. Looks like they are moving to more dark user methods seen in Windows 11.

I drank the "creating products that prioritize user experience over feature checklists" kool-aid back in ~2013 sometime, and got myself a first Macbook when I worked at a software startup the first time. While it certainly gave a more "premium" impression in terms of hardware/UI/UX for the first few years, around 2016 I had to move back to Linux because the software experience and the user experience is just too poor, outright buggy and changes all the time.

Even basic UX like "Can still see navigation map on CarPlay when someone calls you" seems to be just not thought of at all, or not being able to move the cursor left/right because the current iPhone keyboard mode only allows number. There are a thousands of these tiny cuts that just makes it such a pain to use daily.

Which is a darn shame, because the hardware is truly amazing, from everything from the displays, to keyboard and trackpads, to the general feeling and the CPU. But the software experience been so shit for the last decade that it's hard to justify going back.

I think it has more to do with a gradual industry-wide race to the bottom in terms of quality. Reliability, attention to detail, correctness occupy a tiny fraction of the "budget" compared to security, slopping out features, and beating competition to market. I suspect that startup culture being the crucible where a large portion of engineers learned their chops and the massive amount of new blood in the industry who are primarily there for money are the biggest factors.

I got Homepods for all my rooms. Woops. The unpredictable bad behavior is maddening. All intermittent but frequent problems:

• I ask Homepods to play some music, and music starts playing in another room.

• I ask a room to play something, it says that is not in my library. I ask again. Same response. The problem comes in two flavors: One, I have to power cycle the Homepod to get things to reconnect. Or two, there is a halflife of disconnect where each time I ask there is an independent 1/2 chance of resolving the problem.

• I ask the Homepod to play something in multiple rooms. Some rooms play others don't. Sometimes, one room will start and stop playing randomly. Sometimes all the rooms will start and stop playing randomly.

• I ask a Homepod to play in a Zone. Same issues as asking for multiple rooms explicitly.

• Sometimes paired Homepods will both play, sometimes only one.

• Sometimes Homepods in a pair respond differently. If I carefully ensure only one hears me, it might be the one that starts the music that the other one refuses to do.

I can go on, but my experience is Homepods don't scale. A single pod or pair are much more reliable. Obviously, the more components a system has the greater chance of a problem, but it shouldn't be every day, or multiple times a day, for an integer we normally think of as "small N".

To say my Homepod use has been shaped by these failures is an understatement.

Apple has completely dropped the ball on Homekit. The app interfaces are completely ridiculous. Bad parody of bad app interfaces ridiculous.

My take: over success breeds complacency. Apple knows where its money is coming from. It has carved out an extremely hard to establish hardware production chain via iphone and macbooks, and is able to provide a certain consistent level of quality for it. Software is an afterthought, especially for software that is not in service of this primary hardware revenue source. From a business point of view it literally does not make sense for them to do anything differently. Of course, disruption is always a possibility. Google was the undisputed AI leader for years, but their reputation as a House of Knowledge was overshadowed by their comfort as a search, cloud, and advertisement business. These are steady services that just need to be reliable to remain profitable, no invention required.

For a while I was surprised by Mircrosoft's signs of life around generative AI by the time OpenAI came about, but it seemed to relapse into complacency too.

I honestly believe there is some unstated law of success, I think there is a "ceiling" to success, at which point it becomes impossible to expand. It has something to do with the correlation between success in complexity. As a business grows more successful, it becomes more tied down to various commitments, constraining its ability to innovate without assumptions. There's a limit to what any given entity can handle.

Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.

> Premium Hardware, Struggling Software

This sums it up well. The hardware is great, the software isn't.

I recently programmed the same app for iOS and Android. iOS took twice as long, simply because Apple's APIs suck. Case in point: The background task APIs (plural, yes, unfortunately) are so bad that Apple felt compelled to publish a video "Background execution demystified" [1]. If a dev creates an API and then has to publish docs "[my API] demystified", then the API sucks. Period.

I value stability and the freedom to configure the OS to my liking. macOS is stable but forces countless things on me that I do not want. Windows offers freedom but comes with many glitches. Linux is extremely stable and puts me first by letting me configure it. I love it.

[1]: https://wwdcnotes.com/documentation/wwdcnotes/wwdc20-10063-b...

My work Macbook sometimes drops random characters from the lock screen password input. You hit a key and a black dot does not appear; the password is consequently rejected.

It's not exactly this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/458099/macos-lock-...

The system is not lagging at all.

It's not this:

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/08/29/mac-wont-accept-correct-l...

It's a bit like this, but only for the system password dialog and nowhere else:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1azl16n/macos_skippi...

I think a major part of the problem is Apple's attitude towards bug reports: they basically DO NOT WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU. Which means that rare bugs go unnoticed and get swept under the rug.

I know that it's difficult to triage and process bug reports at scale, but I guess that's where some of those hundreds of billions of dollars could be put to good use.

It seems to me like the iPad in particular has the worst software quality. Not that iOS on the iPhone is perfect, but it really seems like their workflow is to build for the phone first, then hammer it in place to work on the iPad as an afterthought.

There's so much basic stuff that doesn't work, like if you pull out the keyboard into its split mode, it constantly covers the text input that you're typing in - even in Apple's own apps. The split keyboard may as well not exist for how impossible it is to use.

But there's also just been a lot of usability issues seeping into iOS over time in general. Like those text effects they added in the latest iOS update that constantly force their way onto my messages when I don't want them. And more recently, the "recent emojis" tab doesn't update to my recently used emojis. I think it's been stuck on whatever were my recent emojis were when I did the last iOS update.

I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches.

In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it.

Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.

I recently got an M4 Mac Mini which is an amazing piece of hardware. (When it came in the mail I couldn't believe it could fit in the small box it was in!)

My wife was angry about the large volume of advertising, both on web sites and on the desktop, on the machine out of the box. Part of it was needing an adblocker, which meant switching to Firefox, because installing an adblocker on Safari requires an Apple account which my wife doesn't have and wouldn't want to make.

I was amused that, by default, I got numerous nags in the form of 1999 retreads of the confirm dialog from the 1984 original mac. I'd contrast that to Microsoft's nags which look like a modern HTML-inspired interface [1].

Apple's model of "local account but you get nagged into attaching an Apple account so you can use the store and other services" is inferior, in my mind, to Microsoft's model where you can use use your Microsoft account to log into the desktop and your XBOX and all the services that Microsoft has to offer. I know a lot of people don't like it, but since Microsoft introduced it I've had no trouble authenticating into SMB shares in home and SMB environments.

[1] I won't apologize for thinking that's an advance, particularly since HTML/CSS has been adding things like Flexbox and Grid which are exactly what the doctor ordered for application development.

Here's what I find most puzzling about these things: Apple does amazingly helpful WWDC sessions on how to profile and improve your code, how to prioritize performance...but when it comes to their own apps, it's like they forget everything they know?

Messages on Mac is one of my biggest annoyances. How do you make one of the most used messaging tools and have the keyboard lag so badly while typing - sometimes even skipping typed letters? It's a complete mystery to me.

I used to think these reports were exaggeration until i had to use the apple tv app to watch severance. I am beyond shocked how bad this app is and how every interaction feels like a downer. Buttons miss hover effects, icons are off center by a few pixels. Whole interaction workflows were obviously never tested and just don't work. I hope the explanation is just that the app was outsourced but if this is the level of quality apple works at now, users are doomed. The other issues i see daily are more signs of just stopping to invest any resources whatsoever into base components. I don't understand how google image search can show me faster image results than quicklook from an image that is sitting in my dock on my local hard drive. Or how the finder is unable to browse network drives without freezing, giving up or taking 30 seconds to show thumbnails or even file names.

It's not just Apple guys, it's everywhere.

Software quality has seriously declined across the board, from Spotify to Slack to core operating systems like Windows and macOS. I think a major factor is corporate culture, which largely ignores software quality. Another issue is that many engineers lack a solid understanding of CS fundamentals like performance, security, and reliability (perhaps this is why many are not able to solve basic algorithmic questions like linked lists or binary trees during interviews)..

I've seen code written by so-called "senior" engineers that should never have made it past review; had they simply paid attention in their CS 101 courses, it wouldn't exist.

On top of that, as long as poor software quality doesn’t hurt a company's bottom line, why would executives care if their app takes 20 seconds to load?

Consumers have become desensitized to bloat, and regulators remain asleep at the wheel..

I just don't understand why Apple UI designers hate scroll bars with such a passion.

It's probably just me, but I feel that many apps on Apple follows the same pattern. For example checkout and compare the scroll bar experience on ChatGPT website (Chrome) between a Mac-book and a Windows laptop.

I have work provided macbook pro.

Siri/intelligence is disabled through company managed profile.

When there is some noise in the room a popup appears saying "You do not have permissions to use siri".

There is nothing you can do, siri is disabled (can't enable or disable it myself, it's managed) but this stupid popup appears all the time so many times per day.

There is nothing in settings to make it go away.

Mark Zuckerberg on a podcast with Joe Rogan (massive grain of salt, please) talked about the protocol that Airpods use to connect. Apple is reluctant to share the protocol under the guise of "security" and "privacy". But when Meta finally had a chance to review it, it was apparently all unencrypted and all the keys were stored in plaintext.

But this tracks with a lot of other explanations they have put out over the years about why they can't put out basic features or fix UI flaws.

For interpreting Apple PR, I have re-appropriated Hanlon's Razor: “Never attribute to User Experience that which is adequately explained by incompetence or indifference”

As someone forced to use a Windows laptop for work with the new job, I've stopped complaining about my Mac. It's so much worse on the other side of the fence...

Working on Windows makes me appreciate the Mac ecosystem so, so, so very much.

Yeah, it’s been a while:

- Music (the app, not the service): almost unusable UI/UX, sync problems, two search fields, etc.

- Calendar is confusing, glitchy UI.

- Mail is a disaster… even the simple search filter doesn’t deliver as expected.

- Safari “Inspector”: will swallow async errors, unusable for development.

- Control panel: messy, ugly and slow.

- Spotlight: was good, doesn’t work so well anymore (web results, why?).

- Finder: visual glitches, extremely slow in some contexts (file list doesn't update).

- (pre installed) tools and commands slowly disappearing from Terminal/Shell

In general all the nice little touches and the refined experience are gone…

When i type on iMessages, any time the message gets longer than ~8 sentences, ie... a mildly long message, it starts to lag extremely bad, where 1 keystroke has like a 250ms delay. it gets worse the more characters get added on

ive tried every single fix i can find, from turning off AI to predictive text. nothing fixes it. so many other people have this issue... it is absolutely insane a messaging app cannot message

In comparison, my experience with a Quest 3s with MetaHorizonOS.

It has a screen recording feature that when you use it the first time it asks you whether it can use the microphone. It claims that this can be reset somewhere in the settings. So the first time I used the feature, I disabled the mic.

A couple days later I wanted to record with mic and searched through the settings but found nothing. Googled it and discovered little. Many posts and answers pointing out that other feature settings require a factory reset to be able to alter initial settings made.

I searched again in the settings, fiddling here and there but found nothing in the settings nor anything that fixed the setting.

In the end, I had to do a factory reset. Then I was able to enable the mic for screen recording.

The device is good enough but the UI is a nightmare. Bulk deletion of notifications? Not possible. Getting out MetaHorizion? Three to four menus until a pause button can be used.

Much prefer my Apple devices - no BS, no factory reset.

Quality is a synonym for care. And if the leadership doesn't care, the teams building the software won't care (at least, not as much).

Putting a logistics guy like Tim in charge was great for ensuring Apple kept shipping existing hardware products and growing revenue, but almost guaranteed that quality across the board would falter. For all of his faults, the one thing that Steve Jobs did that's impossible to replicate by force is care.

I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.

I have a feeling that user testing just gets completely avoided.

One thing which bugs me since the last redesign of the horrible apple photos app, is that they changed its order of showing picture?!

After going on a trip, i like creating a album and sharing it with my family, I also put there some comments, and try to turn it into a story. I believe this is what an album is supposed to do, tell a story.

Therefore rendering the pictures by default from oldest picture to the newest one is very important.

This however did not fit properly into the new design of the Photos app, as they changed it to `Date added`.

Whatever that means, at the end of the day, it starts showing pictures from the newest one, to the oldest one. Which means it’s the opposite way. Think about watching a movie backwards…

As an iPhone user, I can only agree that Apple's software quality is just going backwards. Keyboard is terrible, it suggests words that are completely unrelated. Control center is becoming worse at every update. You can't still select text in the messages. Wifi is always unstable. You can't turn off wifi, etc.

Also my father used to use the feature of announcing outgoing calls when call is made by Siri, they removed it and I saw that many blind people also used to use this feature. I don't know what they thought while removing this feature.

> For years, many of us have willingly paid the "Apple tax", the premium price for Apple products justified by superior user experience, design, and ecosystem integration. But if software quality continues to decline, this value proposition becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

Just today I was thinking how the best hardware gets crippled by software that has become as shitty as Microsoft's.

By now it has become incredible that “Doesn't Suck” was once motto and slogan for the user experience on Apple devices.

I know people tend to get very upset by this but if I’m not mistaken the M1, M2 and I think the M3 processors all now have “unfixable” hardware level security bugs on par with SPECTRE that destroy the concept of a Secure Enclave AFAIK.

https://wccftech.com/macs-running-apples-m1-m2-and-m3-chips-...

So essentially they might be fast but they all have genuinely fatal flaws in them.

But it’s not just the software that stinks.

Apple creates excellent hardware but mediocre apps. Look at Reminders app for instance. Try to create a task. And then drag it to another list. Absolutely not a smooth experience. Feels like it‘s not a finished product. Now compare that to another app: Things3, where the drag and drop of list items is rasor sharp: You have the feeling you have full control over the item.

That’s just one experience. Another: Look at Photos app. Apple recently changed it. Total chaos. No lists anymore but tiles. I have to scroll up and down to find out where my lists of photos are. Germans call it „verschlimmbessern“, making it worse by trying to improve.

Or look at Finder app. And compare it to any competing product.

No app created by Apple really convinces me. None of them. Every product by an indy dev is magnitudes better.

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade.

But most of all it seems like it was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. That combined with the superficial “implement my Figma masterpiece in code” development approach that includes little to no user testing. Tog weeps. Don Norman weeps. Observe how much breaks when you do something as trivial as bump the default font size by one notch. I am sure it is pixel perfect at default size though.

Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. Watch as it jumps to the next day when you save because you are editing the date after 0000 of the next day in utc time. That bug has now been in MacOS/iOS for at least 17 years.

Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently.

Late last year after an OS update, notifications in macOS mysteriously stopped popping up. They were getting triggered and could be seen by opening the right sidebar, but the banners were no longer popping up in the corner anymore. I had been using them to remind me of any upcoming meetings in my employer's Google calendar, so when they stopped appearing, I suddenly found myself unintentionally missing those meetings altogether. (I found a workaround by using Slack's Google calendar integration to send me reminders there.)

Well, turned out that although the Focus -> Do Not Disturb settings had been disabled, the settings were behaving as though they were enabled anyway! It was set to only allow certain apps to show banners. Only when I changed this setting (a few months later nevertheless) did notification banners finally start working properly as before. Perhaps I ran into an extreme edge case that the Apple engineers overlooked somehow, but it does make me wonder whether they are doing anything at all to identify and cover such edge cases.

I really hope someone high up the chain at Apple reads this post because it's only the tip of the iceberg in describing the myriad of things wrong with Apple's software experience lately. For a company so flush with cash and resources, it boggles the mind how they could let things get this bad.

Did anyone mention that on AppleTV I now get ads on my home screen?

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I am also using a Macbook for work and in addition to the fantastic battery life and the fact that it mostly "just works" I feel parts of the experience has significantly improved since last I used Mac, for example I can now remap ctrl and fn!

On the other hand I still miss the consistency and ease of use of Windows XP, Gnome 2 or KDE Plasma.

Then again, Windows manages to get a little bit worse every release, Gnome 2 was replaced with Unity (on Ubuntu) and later Gnome 3 which I understand still breaks extensions and which I still don't like despite trying hard.

The quality crisis is systemic throughout the whole economy. So many fields are getting more disorganised, messy and chaotic.

On the one hand things are moving faster, doing more with less, being more responsive etc. But this comes at the expense of quality and long-term reliability / support. Applies to hardware too.

I reported a bug in their mmap syscall on Apple Silicon. You can hard freeze the computer in about 4 syscalls (basically system C functions). It's still there and they won't fix it, or acknowledge that it's a vulnerability.

The frustrating thing is it locks the IO system, but the kernel thinks everything is fine. One by one each thread that does IO never returns. So you frantically click around wondering why your computer isn't doing anything.

MacOS has gone downhill like crazy indeed. On an M4, searching my safari history is super slow, searching for a password in the Passwords app is also really slow. I mean these are just lists. Apps steal focus all the time, Finder window column widths reset whenever they feel like, search in Mail sometimes just refuses to work. iCloud tab syncing? haha, not today, maybe next week again. You could probably write a dissertation on the new, new system preferences app.

> Feature prioritization over optimization: Engineering resources appear focused on new capabilities rather than fixing existing performance problems;

This point really cuts to the heart of my frustration with Apple lately. I switched from Windows XP Pro to OS X 10.2 in order to have a dead simple, bulletproof desktop experience without all the nonsense. I recently booted my old macbook to grab some files and was shocked at how lovely and simple 10.2 was.