Apple wants to make iOS 14 less buggy

Apple’s been working on making a less buggy iOS for a while now, but iOS 13 wasn’t that release. The software release shipped with so many bugs Apple released 13.1 just a week after. We are now heading for 13.3 just two months post-release. Clearly, something’s gone wrong in Cupertino.

For iOS 13, it seemed to b a matter of too many cooks spoiling the broth. Apple had allowed developers to put so many features in daily builds that not all features and their side-effects got around to being fully tested.

Now, Apple is making iOS more like Chrome. Developers will be able to hide new features behind feature flags and selectively enable them. If something goes wrong, they’ll know exactly which feature cause it.

“The new development process will help early internal iOS versions to be more usable, or “livable,” in Apple parlance. Prior to iOS 14’s development, some teams would add features every day that weren’t fully tested, while other teams would contribute changes weekly,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes. 

The change with iOS’s developer process will also spill over to macOS, watchOS and tvOS. Apple may also, as with iOS 12, push some features back just so iOS 14 remains rock solid. While Apple has a dedicated base, too many buggy releases in a row may test them, and the firm knows this.

iOS 14 will likely make its debut at WWDC next year with a Beta following the coming weeks. We’ll see just how well Apple’s adapted their systems when that’s launched.