Apple Has Another Huge Quality Problem (Premium)

Faced with mounting reliability problems, Apple will again overhaul the development of iOS to address the issue in the next release.

Bloomberg reports that Apple will “overhaul” how it tests software after a “swarm of bugs” has marred the release of iOS 13 (and iPadOS 13, which is literally just iOS 13 with a new name and a small handful of different features).

“Software chief Craig Federighi and lieutenants including Stacey Lysik announced the changes at a recent internal ‘kickoff’ meeting with the company’s software developers,” Bloomberg explains. “The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test versions, known as ‘daily builds,’ of future software updates disable unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and settings menu dubbed Flags, allowing them to isolate the impact of each individual addition on the system.”

Apple’s current software development process led to the issues with iOS 13, which has been serviced with almost 10 bug fix updates, each requiring a device reboot, in the two months since it was first released. This is easily the buggiest iOS release in history, which is saying something given that iOS 11 was so buggy that Apple overhauled the process for iOS 12. So here we go again, I guess.

“Apple measures and ranks the quality of its software using a scale of 1 to 100 that’s based on what’s known internally as a ‘white-glove’ test,” Bloomberg continues. “Buggy releases might get a score in the low 60s whereas more stable software would be above 80. iOS 13 scored lower on that scale than the more polished iOS 12 that preceded it.”

Once again, too, Apple is considering delaying planned iOS 14 features to a future release to ensure quality. It did the same thing previously with iOS 12.

So the data is clear: iOS 13 is the buggiest release of iOS ever, with Apple privately ordaining iOS 13.1 as the “actual public release.” Apple even moved the iOS 13.1 release up one week because iOS 13.0 was so terrible.

And yet. It’s fascinating to see the reactions that people have to the same information.

When I pointed on Twitter out that Apple has released an astonishing number of updates to iOS 13 in its first two months in the market, I got everything from “Seriously. I’m an Apple fanboy and this is just freaking embarrassing” (the correct response) to “This is a good thing!  I remember when they used to wait months or a year for an update and everyone complained they weren't addressing issues fast enough,” which is both untrue historically and muddled intellectually.

This reminds me of the most reprehensible comic of all time, Family Circus, which provided cringe-worthy observations like this every day for far too many years.

So I guess we can all choose to view these things in our own way. But the reality, expressed in t...