48 MACWORLD MARCH 2020
iOSCENTRAL SOFTWARE BUGS ARE APPLE’S GREATEST VULNERABILITYsoftware. But there’s more that could be
done to help improve users’ experiences
with Apple software, and internal changes
are just one component.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD BUGS
The big tentpole software releases that
Apple unveils at its annual Worldwide
Developers Conference and subsequently
rolls out in the fall are usually a time for the
company to show off its latest and greatest
features. iOS’s release, in particular, is
timed to coincide with the announcement
of new iPhones, which have appeared like
clockwork every September for the last
seven years.
But while new features are certainly
great for Apple’s marketing machine, it’s
only part of the story. Updates are also a
time for Apple to fix what isn’t working,
whether that’s features that are unreliable
or interface designs that aren’t quite up to
snuff. With rare exceptions—such as last
year’s iOS 12, where Apple spent a lot of
time making sure the update would work
well on older devices—those bug fixes
have started to feel more sparse over the
years. It doesn’t help that new features
also often mean new bugs to go along
with those that haven’t yet been squashed.
Earlier this fall, former Apple engineer
David Shayer wrote a post at TidBITS (go.
macworld.com/tdbt) explaining some
reasons why the company’s software
might be so buggy. One big reason, in his
experience, was that Apple doesn’t spend
a lot of time addressing pre-existing
bugs—that is, those that were already
broken in previous releases. Or, to
paraphrase the old saying, if it ain’t fixed,
why fix it?
Prioritizing new features over fixing old
ones might make sense from a
marketing perspective, but in the
long term all of those old bugs
start to add up, like interest on a
loan, and end up making the entire
experience less stable.ROADMAP TO PERDITION
One way Apple might be able to
combat this technical debt would
be to change its development
cycle. Rather than releasing one big
software update every fall, thenApple uses its Worldwide Developers Conference to
unveil new features for its operating systems.