Malcolm Owen
Apple has reportedly stalled development on iOS 18, macOS 15, iPadOS 18, and other major updates it will introduce in 2024 to work on fixing bugs.
The expected introduction of iOS and iPadOS 18, macOS 15, and Apple's other milestone releases in WWDC 2024 and their eventual release in roughly ten months time seems like a long way off. However, Apple has allegedly decided to pause all work on the future operating systems, in favor of a period of bug fixing.
According to Bloomberg, Apple informed employees of the delay at the start of November, people with knowledge of the announcement explained. Instead of working on new items, engineers are instead working to fix issues and improve the performance of what has already been produced.
After the discovery of what was deemed too many bugs by software lead Craig Federighi's team, it was decided that the engineers would go on a week-long improvement sprint. Following the end of the pause, engineers will return to working on new features.
While a delay in development can be a problem in may cases, a delay of a week with such long development times is a prudent way to try and minimize bugs that could end up in the final software.
Christine McKee
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
William Gallagher
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45 Comments
I LOVE reading reports like this, and hope Apple actually takes even MORE time to vet and crush bugs in their OS's, as they have gotten out of hand over the last few years and could stand to greatly benefit from a Snow Leopard cycle again.
I like this very much and I would also like if developer tools (and websites!!!) would be addressed too !
There are several bugs I have been dealing with, which I hope get fixed every time there is a new release. But then they aren’t. I can’t imagine that a week of concentrating on bug fixes can really be enough.
Contacts: Clicking and dragging across the name of a contact in the right pane only works, if I start clicking in the lower half (maybe lower third) of the name.
Contacts: Adding contact details in the Messages app will lead to that new contact showing up in the Contacts app only after 30 s or so. I do have a lot of contacts (> 5,000), but still…
Calendar: Can’t add coordinates to an appointment’s location, anymore. It’s been years…
Mail: Clicking on the down-caret to the immediate right of an address in the To: field of a message being edited requires the selection of “Edit Selection” twice, before I can actually edit the address. This has been a problem for years, now, too.
They should probably spend a week a month for a while doing this.
Of some importance, Apple has also paused further development of Vision OS in order for those engineers to also concentrate on the atypical number of bugs and stability issues with iOS, watchOS, and MacOS .