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by mkasu 2441 days ago
This year all their OSes seem to be riddled with issues at release.

- iOS 13.0 was so bad they released 13.1 in less than 5 days, but even now many things are still hit and miss (with 13.2 in beta)

- watchOS 6.0 is also still pretty bad and not yet fixed (with 6.1 in beta)

- macOS 10.15 GM seems pretty buggy

- Well, I think tvOS 13 is ok?

While the situation might be better for people who use the latest betas, it is still a horrible current user experience for all normal users just updating their devices.

Lots of cross-platform features introduced across these updates (like the new iCloud features and new Reminder apps, etc.) are also in a horrible state.

I'm not sure what their QA team is doing this year but it seems almost everything planned for this Fall would have been better off if pushed back a couple of months. Well, if it weren't for device compatibilities... (the iPhone 11/Watch 5 seemed to be more important than stable software across all their platforms and other devices)

4 comments

The question is what is Apple doing in their software development? From the outside, it looks like there are glaring issues within their engineering teams.

iOS 11 was a complete disaster and it took an entire OS upgrade cycle (iOS 12) to control the most pressing issues. Apple is constantly releasing wild bugs and after getting burned multiple times now, they still don't seem to tackle this internal problem.

The theory about the iOS 13.0 is that Apple was forced to updated to this buggy iOS version because of Apple Watch release. Watch was shipped with watchOS 6.0 already installed and it requires iOS 13. iOS 13.1 was still not finished and to prevent situation where new watch customers couln'd use it after the purchase - they needed to update as it is.
That I was hinting at in the last sentence. Apple Watch 5 and iPhone 11 came out on the same day and needed watchOS 6 and iOS 13 respectively, so basically, those hardware releases forced the buggy *OS to be released across all platforms and devices.
For me, tvOS 13 broke HDMI-CEC and rendered AirPlay audio extremely spotty.
macOS was pushed back. Not a couple of months, mind you, but at least a couple of weeks.
Comparing iOS 10~13 with macOS 10.12~15 release dates, macOS seems to always come out 7 days after iOS.

This year it has been 12 days after iOS 13.0, instead. Wouldn't really call that much of a push back. It's less than one week behind the usual schedule..