Apple Delays Work on Next Year’s iPhone, Mac Software to Fix Bugs
Rare move designed to focus on improving quality, performance
Lately, Apple’s software is full of what is known inside Apple as ‘regressions’ and ‘escapes’ that broke existing features and were missed internally, such as all the Samba network problems in every one of the macOS releases in the last 5 years. It is no wonder some developers find it too costly and nearly impossible to keep up with the operating system changes that broke features and stopped developing for macOS all together, such as the WD Discovery for Desktop that WDT deprecated in July, 2023.
That year, he also adopted what is known within Apple as “The Pact.” The agreement calls for employees to never knowingly allow “regressions” — when software that once worked stops functioning correctly — and quickly fix mistakes. Federighi’s policies have helped: Apple software releases have been less buggy in recent years, and fewer features had to be delayed.
Rather than adding new features, company engineers were tasked with fixing the flaws and improving the performance of the software.
November 7, 2023 at 5:15 PM
But the latest round of development hasn’t gone as smoothly. When looking at new operating systems due for release next year, the software engineering management team found too many “escapes” — an industry term for bugs missed during internal testing. So the division took the unusual step of halting all new feature development for one week to work on fixing the bugs.
With thousands of different Apple employees working on a range of operating systems and devices — that need to work together seamlessly — it’s easy for glitches to crop up. “It’s a problem of 10,000 people typing code and completely breaking the operating system,” one person familiar with the situation said.
