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Apple is Postponing Release of New Features To iOS This Year To Focus on Reliability and Performance: Report (axios.com)

Posted by msmash on from the priorities dept.

For a change, Apple plans to not push new features to iOS devices this year so that it could focus on reliability and quality of the software instead, Axios reported on Tuesday. From the report: Apple has been criticized of late, both for security issues and for a number of quality issues, as well as for how it handles battery issues on older devices. Software head Craig Federighi announced the revised plan to employees at a meeting earlier this month, shortly before he and some top lieutenants headed to a company offsite. Pushed into 2019 are a number of features including a refresh of the home screen and in-car user interfaces, improvements to core apps like mail and updates to the picture-taking, photo editing and sharing experiences.

16 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. flawed dev model by Blymie · · Score: 3

    The dev model used to be "Steve will yell at you, fire you, berate you, or otherwise ensure that you didn't fuck up constantly".

    That's over with, good or bad.

    The new dev model clearly isn't up to snuff, so just pausing -- stopping new development, won't work. The entire development model must be fixed, and quite honestly some people don't produce, or produce well, without someone looking over their shoulder and yelling.

    NOTE: if you take objection to that statement, then you're likely 'part of the non-producers'. Good devs exist, a whole boat load of them, but it only takes one dev claiming to properly test, follow coding guidelines, and 'being a prick' to sour a whole team.

  2. Agile by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Funny

    This doesn't sound very Agile. Customers need new versions of software every few months. It doesn't matter if the software works, or is secure. The most important thing is to complete the Sprints to get to a release milestone and to a release. Customers really want that more than anything else.

    1. Re:Agile by tsqr · · Score: 2

      This doesn't sound very Agile. Customers need new versions of software every few months. It doesn't matter if the software works, or is secure. The most important thing is to complete the Sprints to get to a release milestone and to a release. Customers really want that more than anything else.

      That cries out for a Dilbert.

  3. Apple will still not get my money by bogaboga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I do not begrudge Apple, but I have never been impressed by their products, mostly because of refusal by Apple to inter-operate with other devices. Am I alone?

    1. Re:Apple will still not get my money by amalcolm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't know. I've always refused to inter-operate with their products.

      --
      Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
    2. Re:Apple will still not get my money by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You own non-Apple devices. You're doing it wrong.

    3. Re:Apple will still not get my money by ilsaloving · · Score: 2

      I've been repeatedly accused of being an Apple fangrrl on Slashdot because I've tended to argue in favour of Apple. But the thing is, if I'm a fan of anything, I'm a fan of no bullshit.

      The thing is, when you compare iOS to android (and I'm talking versions prior to the most recent), iOS has always been generally superior.

      Android's biggest selling feature is that it gives you the most control. However, that's not entirely true. It gave google and app developers the most control. You... not so much.
      As a result, android battery life was crap. The whole SD card situations was shockingly brain-damaged. You had better than even odds that your phone would receive only a few, or maybe no, updates even if it was a flagship device from a major manufacturer. And lets not even get started with the malware. The list of issues just goes on and on.

      In a nutshell, an android user HAD to put their sysadmin hat on (assuming they were skilled enough) just to manage their phone. There's a reason the term "Landfill Android" was invented. The whole ecosystem was a cesspool of crap.

      Apple on the other hand, treated developers with serious contempt. They were very heavily restricted. They were also a sole manufacturer so they had exclusive control of the entire pipeline. The end result? You never had to wonder if your phone would shart itself from one day to the next. Battery wouldn't drain magically unless you were using a very cpu intensive app/game/whatever. You got, on average, updates for approx 5 years. Also, the malware situation on Apple's side is a bare fraction compared to Google. I paid a price premium, and it was less flexible, but I knew that it would be there for me when I really needed it. Being confident in your device can be worth a lot of money to people who need it.

      A phone, while a powerful computing device, still has more in common with an appliance than a computer. And I expect an appliance to Just F__king Work.

      The last Android device I had was a Samsung S3. I was forced to root the device and install Cyanogen just to get the thing operating decently cause of all the crapware Samsung put on it. And because Google (despite their protestations otherwise) don't actually support any standards, I had to install a 3rd party caldav/carddav connector to sync with my server, which managed to cut my battery life by about 1/3. Oh, and every time I tried to move apps to my SD card, I would be lucky if 50% of it went over, the rest remaining on the way too small internal storage.

      That was when I threw my hands up in the air and went to Apple. I wasn't able to screw around with my phone nearly as much as my android phone. I couldn't upgrade the storage. But it worked. I could pick it up at any time during the day, confident that the battery hadn't drained or some other nonsense happened. I did jailbreak a couple times, but I gave up on it. Not because Apple made it such a PITA (although that was a contributing factor), but the fact that the jailbreak ecosystem was just as crap, if not worse, than the Android one. Apps that weren't maintained, dubious functionality, stuff that broke other functionality in your phone... It was a complete joke. But I digress...

      But when we fast forward to today, things have apparently done a Dem vs Rep-style flip over. Google dramatically improved permissions. They've seriously tightened up battery/process management. They've (finally) introduced a HAL so updates should now be easy. Apple, meanwhile, seems to be hell bent on seeing just how far they can shove their proverbial heads up their backsides. Their products are sliding into mediocrity while still selling at a premium price. iOS 11 in particular has been a turd-covered locomotive falling off a cliff. I've actually lost functionality since going to iOS 11. It's been less stable. Even my bluetooth headphones are less reliable when on iOS 10 they were flawless. I am *livid*. I bought a premium device, and I damn

  4. Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    You are 100% correct, but that is my real Christian name.

  5. All that matters is how good your engineers are by mrun4982 · · Score: 2

    After nearly 2 decades in this business and having been forced to use every flavor of the month software process (and even having to follow DO-178 in the aviation industry and having to test to 100% code coverage), I've learned there's only one thing that matters when it comes to the quality of your code... how good your engineers are.

    Good engineers write less bugs than bad engineers and no software development practice is going to change that. How long your sprints are, having software reviews before every checkin, forcing people to write tons of tests, waterfall vs agile, blah blah blah. That's all B.S. and doesn't mean a damn thing. You want high quality software? Then fire your bad engineers and hire better ones.

    Focusing on bugs is not necessarily a bad thing but that's not going to fix the problem at Apple.

    1. Re:All that matters is how good your engineers are by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      That seems doubtful. Why do you need quality people when you have Agile and a certified Scrum Master? They are certified so they must be good.

  6. The Right Idea by omfglearntoplay · · Score: 2

    Definitely the right idea. Security and stability matter a great deal to most people, informed or not. Take your car example. Toyota and Lexus are extremely popular for the average Joe or the person with money to waste, in the US or in other countries that do business with Japan. Why? Reliability/stability is the main common theme. And with techie devices, like phones, security is basically another measure of reliability/stability.

    If Apple wants to keep it's name clean, it had better get things RIGHT. The one big selling point is their stuff is fast and doesn't break much (isn't compromised much). If they don't do that correctly, why not get the competitors?

  7. Re:Wrong place to focus... by skribble · · Score: 2

    LOL. What a massive bunch of overly generalized proverbial nonsense. In a complex system (especially a fairly general purpose OS ecosystem) no matter what your process is, you can not test for every use case. Additionally, even Apple does not control it's whole ecosystem. For example, how does Apple's development process anticipate low level hardware issues like Meltdown or Spector? Seriously, nobody who has ever done this sort of thing would make such a statement. That's not to say that there aren't process issues (I'm pretty sure nobody has created a perfect process, and likely no one ever will, especially as long as people are involved). Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

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    --- Nothing To See Here ---
  8. Re:And, I suppose, battery life. by ledow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Every single time an Apple user tells me how great their phone is, I realise that they just didn't understand that ALL phones do that, that there are easier ways, that there's no need to pay through the nose to do those things, or that they didn't realise certain things were even possible because "Apple doesn't have that".

    I have personally never found a selling point for an Apple device over their competitors, certainly not one that justifies the price difference. But people are happy to live in ignorance because they don't actually buy the device to do those things, they buy the device to go on YouTube occasionally or order their shopping or stick the kids on a game. And there, pretty much, you don't require any particular specialities and everything else is just a "toy" to play with.

    Apple is a designer brand sold on the fact that "I've heard Apple are better". I've yet to find that to be true, however, but most people spend a lot of money on an Apple device, use it for everything they were ever going to anyway (i.e. not very much) and are happy that it does that. Fair play to them. But in terms of VALUE for money, I can't even begin to justify that over any other device.

  9. Rather odd claim by Plumpaquatsch · · Score: 2

    There are new features in iOS 11.3: http://www.iphonehacks.com/2018/01/ios-11-3-features.html - heck people have complained about some of the new features here on Slashdot already https://apple.slashdot.org/sto...

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    Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
  10. Re: Wrong place to focus... by UnknowingFool · · Score: 2

    Besides a generalized dismissal of the poster's question, could you answer his specific one: How would you have anticipated Meltdown and Spectre considering that they affect hardware that Apple does not control? Also please be specific as to why your solution should have been anticipated by every single OS out there like Linux, Windows, BSD, and MacOS.

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  11. Re:And, I suppose, battery life. by jameson71 · · Score: 2

    The issue still hasn't been fixed, and Apple seems to be pointing the finger at the car companies to update the vehicle firmware. As if that is a viable solution.

    So now the car is holding the phone wrong?