If you blink during Apple’s latest iPhone ad, you might miss a weird little animation bug. It’s right at the end of a slickly produced commercial, where the text from an iMessage escapes the animated bubble it’s supposed to stay inside. It’s a minor issue and easy to brush off, but the fact it’s captured in such a high profile ad just further highlights Apple’s many bugs in iOS 11.
The fact Apple’s marketing department signed off on this ad with such a bug in it is baffling.
That’s the worst smartphone ad I’ve seen since …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY5CSqwVF_w
ACK, totally agree, total nonsense dance. In a galaxy, far away, a long time ago, Apple made solid products, sigh
PS: actually this old Samsung ad is more interesting than this new Apple locker thing, … 
Edited 2018-03-18 16:09 UTC
Yes, I’m really annoyed. Their mute doesn’t work with Bluetooth devices when on calls just to add to that.
They should slow the hell down with their releases and focus on bug squashing and QA.
IMO it’s all about discipline, aka forcing developers to fix any known bugs before being “done” with a feature story/ticket. Bug squashing is an expensive task (because the code is no longer in the developer’s head and he will have to re-remember or even rediscover it) so if you go down that path (aka being “done” with a story without fixing all the bugs) you will soon be faced with a mountain of bugs and always be short on time to fix them.
It’s that discipline that gave Apple the success that was the first iPhone. I bet there was a story about video recording support and more options in the camera but didn’t make it into the release. But those three things the original iPhone did (music, YouTube and web browsing) it did them well and with a nice UI, unlike your average smartphone at the time that did these badly and with an awful UI, which is why the original iPhone was a success despite Ballmer mocking its lack of features.
Maybe Cook needs to become more of a benevolent dictator like Jobs was.
Edited 2018-03-17 12:13 UTC
…is it really a thing in any shop for the devs to decide when a ticket is done instead of QA?
I mean they have the option to hit that button, but if the PM or team manager notices, there will be questions.
It is, even though developers aren’t QA, it is actually taught in the top computer science schools in USA at least, that a good developer makes sure their code is correct before hitting submit.
Same goes for QA for testing, before certifying it’s good. One project manager or two are not going to catch what every other step and developer has checked already.
Aye, in the place I work for, we use a Bitbucker Stash, and it has that convenient “Blame” button which shows who made the last modification in every line of code in a file. And boy, does it enforce some discipline in the teams. If some bug causes some customer to file one of those dread P1 tickets in JIRA or causes the DevOps team (aka where I work for) to complain about broken tests in the integration environment, you don’t want as a developer your name to be all over that bug.
There will be no shouting involved, just some polite remarks to test your code before comitting because we are a “relaxed” working environment.
Which is even worse for the perpetrator, because they are being told off by a friend. And this is why we rarely get real P1 (or P2) tickets as a company.
Of course, customers are told not to set arbitrary deadline and feature combos (pick one).
Edited 2018-03-18 02:46 UTC
I don’t know if benevolent is the right word, but he was certainly beneficial. I think the board should get rid of Cook and get another leader in there instead of a bean counter. I don’t think Cook could become that leader, at least not judging from his presentations and ideas (Apple town squares, really?!)since he took over.
Well, the good news for Apple is that no one is going to notice that little mistake since the whole ad is a gigantic clusterfuck of stupid.
While I’ve moved on from app development into embedded automotive solutions I still remmeber last year as I was messing around with weird iOS 11 and XCode 9 bugs. I tried the early betas and as I noticed the issues, I mostly dismissed them as it was a beta after all. They were about SceneKit – a 3D library built into iOS and we used it to animate the 3D models on top of Vuforia Augmented Reality library. Certain models didn’t animate at all or animated wrong.
As the time went on and july turned into August and that turned into September and the release date became really close, I still noticed that even latest releases still contained the bugs. Did a bug report but nothing – no response and no reaction. Ticket just stood there. iOS 11 was released with still same bugs. As our app was in store then on iOS 11 it didn’t work.
Finally used a special feature of developer program to get directly in contact with Apple to discuss the workarounds. After couple of mails back and forth (they even asked if I had filed a bug and I referred to my earlier ticket) I suddenly discovered the issue – If the armature of the 3D model contained a dot in its bone name then that bone would not animate. WOW that was a bummer as it is a norm to name the skeleton with .L and .R suffixes for easy mirroring and manipulation. After replacing all the dots with underscores, the models started to work OK. If viewing the iOS 11 release notes then there is a point about SceneKit – substantially reworked animation parsing logic. Well it shows. After mentioning this to Apple SceneKit engineers, all they had to tell that it was an “interesting use case”. Were I the first one to tell about the real world use case of their SceneKit library?
Second issue was with XCode 9. Again together with SceneKit library. XCode is used to convert a standard COLLADA model into Apple’s internal binary format which iOS app and SceneKit can dynamically load. So that you can download the blob from server and dynamically display it in the app instead of including it in the app binary. The issue was that suddenly with XCode 9 the conversion failed miserably claiming that some bones were missing. WTF – the model is OK and worked OK when converted with earlier XCode. In fact we had to keep older XCode 8 to convert our models as XCode 9 was unusable.
However as I moved away from Apple world since November 2017 haven’t looked if things have improved. However after 3 years of mostly trouble-free development experience, the iOS 11 and XCode 9 was a very bad surprise.
Edited 2018-03-17 21:57 UTC
I’ve been saying it for a couple years now.
We are past Peak Apple.
I don’t mean in stock-price. That measure will always lag the actual consumer and corporate attitude.
Developers at my office are buying PC laptops again. They’ve lost ‘it’. They had ‘it’, but they’ve lost ‘it’.
Even the app-store phenomenon is starting to fade, and that’s going to leave Apple with a touch-enabled set of fondle-slabs with an OS that’s been piling up layers and layers in a rush, while they neglected their classic market where the finally nailed ‘it’ — only to let it languish.
I don’t know if there’s much of a future for laptops as we know them now, but I sure wish the future of Apple products wasn’t the iOS interaction model.
I’d actually go further and say we’re past peak mobile. The days of solid development on any of the big mobile platforms are, it would seem, over. When picking between iOS or Android, I don’t get to pick which one I like but rather which one pisses me off the least.
Indeed, from developers point of view – mobile is same as web. Totally boring place that everybody want. Still every company tries to create their mobile app for no reason other than its an app. So this job of creating “yet another app” is good for college graduates to get their toes wet in the world of software development and not for advanced developers with 15+ years of experience.
Mobile Apps is so 2015
Personally I believe now more in embedded systems and robotics etc. Thats the future
Edited 2018-03-19 14:49 UTC
My goodness the mobile world is a mess. iOS is buggier than ever, Android is the most insane security nightmare imaginable (millions upon millions of devices with outdated software, due to hardware manufacturers failing to port Google’s updates to their devices), and Windows Phone/Mobile is fast becoming a distant memory.
The duopoly may have killed off any competition (Symbian^3/Windows/Sailfish/UbuntuTouch/etc), but like most markets without any real competition the incumbent players are lazy and increasingly out of touch.
What a disaster! And what an opportunity for a disruptor to enter the playing field.
Really the Android problem is a political problem. Per the GPLv2 the OEMs are -supposed- to provide source code to their kernels so that Google could just update the kernels and push system images OTA without so much as asking the OEMs or carriers. They refuse to enforce this as most of their OEMs are Chinese and would just go “nope :^)” to any GPL request.
too many #peakbugs – https://twitter.com/search?q=peakbugs