The company will offer testers daily builds of its OSes

Nov 21, 2019 16:08 GMT  ·  By
Apple plans new development strategy for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS
   Apple plans new development strategy for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS

Apple plans to rethink its development strategy for the next major releases of its iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, HomePod, and watchOS operating system by adopting daily builds to discover and squash bugs faster than before.

Until the release of iOS 13, iPadOS 13, macOS Catalina 10.15, tvOS 13, HomePod 14, and watchOS 6, the company applied the same development model that it used for the past ten years, offering beta builds to developers registered through its Apple Developer program, as well as public beta testers.

But starting with next year's iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS 10.16, tvOS 14, watchOS 7, and HomePod 14, the Cupertino, California-based company plans to also offer testers smaller development milestone, called daily builds, in an attempt to find and fix bugs much faster.

According to Bloomberg, Apple's software chief Craig Federighi announced the new development changes at a recent internal "kickoff" meeting. There will also be a new internal process and settings menu dubbed Flags, which testers can selectively enable them on their devices dedicated to beta software development.

No more buggy releases

It's no secret that Apple's latest iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 releases have been the most buggy so far as they received the most maintenance updates to fix small and medium-sized bugs that should have been squashed during their very long development cycle. In fact, iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 were so buggy that Apple released new 13.1 and 13.1 versions just days after their global launch.

Of course, this also had a major impact on the launch of the company's latest iPhone 11 line up, and it doesn't look good for new clients. Until then, Apple is working on another big set of updates to its latest operating system releases for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and HomePod devices, namely iOS 13.3, iPadOS 13.3, macOS Catalina 10.15.2, tvOS 13.3, watchOS 6.1.1, and HomePod 13.3, which should fix more of those pesky bugs.