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Former Apple iOS Engineer Explains How the iPhone Ended Up So Full of Bugs

“Engineers lost the freedom to decide when a feature was ready to ship,” engineer who worked for Apple says

Feb 14, 2018 09:09 GMT  ·  By
Apple says it wants to focus more on performance, reliability, and security in the next updates
   Apple says it wants to focus more on performance, reliability, and security in the next updates

Previously praised for its refined software performance, the iPhone has been the subject of massive criticism lately, mostly following more or less controversial decisions made by Apple in the last 12 months.

Leaving the battery fiasco aside, the user experience on an iPhone has been a roller coaster ride due to the performance of iOS 11.

Often described as the buggiest version of the mobile OS, iOS 11 caused a wide variety of problems on devices that installed it, including lag, freezes, app crashes, battery drains, and others.

And while Apple hasn’t discussed these problems too much, a former iOS engineer took to reddit to explain how the platform ended up being so full of bugs at a time when it was actually supposed to lead the market in terms of reliability and performance.

“Everything is always in crises mode”

User jarjoura says what Apple needs right now “is a culture not beholden to the whims of their EPMs (project managers).”

This is because Apple focused entirely on Radar, the company’s bug tracking system, and the majority of engineers were spending their time delivering fixes for the reports with the highest priority numbers. And while this could be a good thing for the existing versions, it doesn’t help next releases, as new feature development receives less time, and consequently, could end up shipping with bugs.

“Everything is always in crises mode. Also why I and everyone around me felt bad for taking any vacation. If we weren’t constantly thinking about fixing those P1s, we were some how letting our team down. This is how you get bugs in shipping software. EPMs driven to schedule things and over manage engineers would decide on a whim that something was a P2. That was basically always shelved to a follow-up .1 release. Ultimately, engineers lost the freedom to decide when a feature was ready to ship,” the reddit user explains.

Apple itself has acknowledged that its software is suffering from a reliability and performance crisis, so the company is slowing down the rollout of new features in the coming releases, instead putting the focus on addressing bugs and improving security.