[bavent]

I’m referring entirely to built-in Apple apps - Mail, Messages, etc. The in-house apps can’t even get it right, which to me means:

- devs are so siloed, nobody knows what’s going on - product is not communicating anything outside of individual fiefdoms - there is zero QA testing - no designers are actually signing off on the final results

…which all seem pretty typical for a large bureaucracy, I guess I just had higher expectations of Apple, since we pay a premium for their products. Some of these bugs are frankly pretty embarrassing.

[nine_k]

Such reclusiveness is not an obligatory property of large corporations. Say, Google around 2011-2015 may have had fiefdoms, but at least things were quite transparent, you could know what other departments are doing, and see all the code. Facebook circa 2020 was surprisingly transparent and peer-to-peer, at least in the area I touched, messaging and storage infra. I've seen companies 1000x smaller that had incomparably more reclusiveness and opaqueness.

What I hear about Apple sounds more and more like what I used to hear about Microsoft, especially Microsoft of Ballmer times, when teams inside it clandestinely warred with each other, instead of cooperating.

Apple has this vision-driven culture, and the inclination towards internal secrecy, so that competitors won't steal their thunder. It worked relatively well under Steve Jobs, and whoever he assigned. It worked far less successfully when Jony Ive's ideas of usability made Macbooks into visually more sleek, but less loved devices. Whoever came up with Liquid Glass, has some interesting vision, but the gimmick value in its current implementation seems to dominate, and the usability shortcomings seem to be ignored. Technology-wise, it's half-baked. This means to me that Apple internally not in a good state, the leadership has trouble hearing the voice of reason.

Apple of course has an immense inertia. But giants like Nokia or General Motors also used to have an immense inertia, wads of cash, and dominant market positions.

[amluto]

Apple’s Mail app has been intensely buggy for years, and the bugs rarely get fixed.

(Search is comically bad.)

[pcdoodle]

Search is so so bad. I just want to find an email with a word in it. All my Apple Devices fail at this.

[bavent]

Search is bad everywhere. If I open Settings, and then search for application $X, no results. If I search for $Y, $Y shows up. They are alphabetically next to each other, and I can see them both if I open the Applications submenu and scroll down to access individual app settings.

Why does one show up and one doesn’t? The one that doesn’t is a built-in Apple app, too. They both have identical settings for “show app in search”. This worked fine before iOS 26.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

A lot of them are SwiftUI apps.

I feel that SwiftUI is not ripe. I use it for one of my apps (I have to, in order to use the charts), but it’s too limited to use for anything else.

[jonhohle]

It’s so bizarre. I wanted to use it for a menu extra and something as simple as animating the icon couldn’t be done. There are several of Apple’s own apps that use animated Menu extra icons and they’re probably doing the same hybrid AppKit/SwiftUI workarounds.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I won’t use UIViewRepresentable. I feel that it’s a kludge, and kind of negates the whole purpose of SwiftUI. I know that some of the “native” types are probably UIViewRepresentable, under the covers (like maps), but I feel as if it’s a “duct tape” solution. Also, some of the code gymnastics that I need to do, in order to implement “non-standard” functionality, are pretty crazy. SwiftUI makes it absurdly easy to do stuff that follows the intended workflow, but completely falls down, if you stray off the path. UIKit complains, but grudgingly goes along with you.

I actually want SwiftUI to work. I think they have a good idea, but it’s a massive undertaking, and really, breathtakingly ambitious, when you consider what it’s trying to do.

UIKit represents a mature tech that has been refined since 2008, and a lot of that is based on lessons learned, implementing AppKit, which has been around forever (especially if you consider that it came from NeXTSTEP, which probably started in the 1980s). With AutoLayout and UIKit, I can do pretty much anything I want.