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Comment by jamil7 | Hacker News Reader

Apple's software quality has certainly slipped. I'm not sure if I'm just getting old but I find software quality in general seems to have slipped. Or is it just because there's more software around?

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It feels industry-wide to me. Quality was never a high priority, but in the past decade it’s fallen that much further. Everything has become centered around shoveling as much code as possible as quickly as possible, with little to no regard for how well it works. Nobody cares if it requires obscene amounts of memory, turns laptops into furnaces, and functions correctly only half the time so long as it’s getting shipped quickly.

It is industry wide, but I don’t think this gets Apple off the hook. They sell a premium product so it’s not unreasonable to expect something a little better.

> Apple's software quality has certainly slipped.

I've been using and supporting Apple software since the 90s and I think this is more an artifact of most bugs not being especially memorable than anything else. People have complained about bugs after every release, a fair fraction of the complaints circulating online will be attribution error or overly-generalizing a niche condition as global, etc. and that seems to have been basically constant since OS X 10.2 or so.

There is one more interesting discussion, however, which I think is probably a legitimate trade-off: the entire industry has been moving to faster releases since it's easy to ship updates over the internet to huge audiences. When that wasn't possible and update cycles were measured in years, teams did spend more time on QA so you probably did have a somewhat lower chance of seeing bugs of the sort which were caught by that kind of process but at the expense of taking much longer to see new features or get fixes for bugs which slipped through either due to complexity or limited trigger conditions. Since the amount and complexity of software has generally been increasing, I think that this is generally the right trend with the addition of telemetry to collect crash reports, but it does seem like this could increase the perceived number of bugs even if the duration of time where you're exposed to a particular bug decreases.

> Or is it just because there's more software around?

I think there's _less software around_, insofar as there's fewer discrete software titles around, but each title has far, far more software code behind it.

I remember as a sprog, running my cracked copy of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 - that in order to do anything "cool" in PS (especially when you just can't grok how to paint, even with a Wacom) you needed a huge smattering of third-party Photoshop plug-ins: Alienskin, Kai's Power Tools, Flaming Pear, FilterFactory, etc - but nowadays while plug-ins are still a thing I find myself getting-by with only Photoshop's stock functionality. It certainly doesn't help that Apple continues toward completely locking-down their platforms: in-proc and binary plug-ins for Photoshop on iOS will never be a thing.

I think that it has to do mainly with two things: 1. The overall complexity of what's possible is growing, so software is just becoming much more complex.

The other is the fact that server based software has an almost zero time deployment cycle, and even native code for desktop/mobile can be shipped really quickly. This makes software mostly an iterative process. If fixing bugs on a weekly basis in a major mobile app is no biggie, and almost nothing gets blocked because of a bug that can be just fixed next week, you just get a lot more bugs shipped to users.

I think that the slip in quality we are seeing is a result of increased complexity more than anything else.

I think this is hard to recognize but almost certainly true. I have the Airpod Pro and was recently annoyed at how it wasn't quite doing the audio source switching like I wanted. Clearly some sort of software issue. Yet, if I honestly take a step back, the fact that I can put these in my ear and be using one of 3 devices that are right next to me and it seamlessly and correctly switches the audio based on what I am doing is quite magical. It's easy to be annoyed at the few times it doesn't when magic becomes the norm.

This sort of story always reminds me from a bit in Seinfeld where Kramer's phone number is one digit off from the Movie Phone number. He would say something like "press 1 for Total Recall, Press 2 for...". Of course he would not be able to determine which button was pressed, and would say "why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?"

I feel like we are creating really unpredictable, and hard to implement UIs in the name of "magic". Would a button in the UI been better? I think it would have been, at least for me.

I'd expand your reasoning to include organizational complexity, which sometimes overrides technical factors.

That's a good point. I've observed in my own work that complex organizations have a way of driving out expertise. I don't mean that experts quit, as that is an unavoidable fact of doing business. Rather the organization is structured in such a way it is difficult to build expertise in the first place, and many of the experts are the people that were around before the organizational complexity arose.

I'm not so sure, at least in the context of Apple because they have slipped far more than their competitors. Android is way more stable and has far fewer bugs than iOS as a simple example.

Yeah, I agree. Apple has slipped while competitors have improved. Android today (especially the Google-only flavor) is pretty impressively stable. Even worse is that iOS is supposedly more "simple" than Android.

Mostly, my comment was projecting my own experiences with complexity on the projects I have been involved with. You are right, in this case other factors probably dominate.

Computers really are not doing much more today than they were in the early 2000s. Despite the massive increases in home computational power, the only thing that is really visibly improved is the graphical fidelity of video games. All other software is doing the same stuff it did 20 years ago...just worse.

Bad software is more due to needing to ship stuff ASAP for marketing, the board of directors, and for the investors. This decline in software can really be matched up with the increase of startup culture.

I would also argue that complexity is developers own doing, trying to strap every new fangled library, engine, tool, API ,buzzword of the day, etc. to their program...when there is zero reason to. Nothing about what modern software does is more complex than it was in the 2000s

I can Cmd-C on one device and Cmd-V on another. It works wirelessly and securely without explicit network configurarion and even without network access. The amount of complexity that enables this simple feature is staggering if you look into the implementation.

I wasn't a dev when I used it but I remember OS 9 being very very crappy most of the time and OSX feeling like a massive leap forward

There is probably more software written this year than existed a couple decades ago and each new app is orders of magnitude more complex.

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