Jeff Johnson in November 2023:

When people wistfully proclaim that they wish for the next major macOS version to be a “Snow Leopard update”, they’re wishing for the wrong thing. No major update will solve Apple’s quality issues. Major updates are the cause of quality issues. The solution would be a long string of minor bug fix updates. What people should be wishing for are the two years of stability and bug fixes that occurred after the release of Snow Leopard. But I fear we’ll never see that again with Tim Cook in charge.

I read an article today from yet another person pining for a mythical Snow Leopard-style MacOS release. While I sympathize with the intent of their argument, it is largely fictional and, as Johnson writes, it took until about two years into Snow Leopard’s release cycle for it to be the release we want to remember:

It’s an iron law of software development that major updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was no exception, of course. The next major update, Mac OS X 10.7.0, was no exception either, and it was much buggier than 10.6.8 v1.1, even though both versions were released in the same week.

What I desperately miss is that period of stability after a few rounds of bug fixes. As I have previously complained about, my iMac cannot run any version of MacOS newer than Ventura, released in 2022. It is still getting bug and security fixes. In theory, this should mean I am running a solid operating system despite missing some features.

It is not. Apple’s engineering efforts quickly moved toward shipping MacOS Sonoma in 2023, and then Sequoia last year. It seems as though any bug fixes were folded into these new major versions and, even worse, new bugs were introduced late in the Ventura release cycle that have no hope of being fixed. My iMac seizes up when I try to view HDR media; because this Extended Dynamic Range is an undocumented enhancement, there is no preference to turn it off. Recent Safari releases have contained several bugs related to page rendering and scrolling. Weather sometimes does not display for my current location.

Ventura was by no means bug-free when it shipped, and I am disappointed even its final form remains a mess. My MacBook Pro is running the latest public release of MacOS Sequoia and it, too, has new problems late in its development cycle; I reported a Safari page crashing bug earlier this week. These are on top of existing problems, like how there is no way to change the size of search results’ thumbnails in Photos.

Alas, I am not expecting many bugs to be fixed. It is, after all, nearly April, which means there are just two months until WWDC and the first semi-public builds of another new MacOS version. I am hesitant every year to upgrade. But it does not appear much effort is being put into the maintenance of any previous version. We all get the choice of many familiar bugs, or a blend of hopefully fewer old bugs plus some new ones.

⌥ Permalink

Howard Oakley:

Over those 11 years, governments have come and gone, my grandchildren have grown up and one is now at university, we survived Covid, lost QuickTime and 32-bit code, and now use Apple silicon Macs. But one thing has remained unchanged through all of that, the Finder column width bug.

Maybe this is the year this bug will bubble up to the top of an intern’s to-fix list. As a dedicated user of the column view, I would not miss it.

⌥ Permalink

Apple is a famously tight-knit business. Its press releases and media conferences routinely drum the integration of hardware, software, and services as something only Apple is capable of doing. So it sticks out when features feel like they were developed by people who do not know what another part of the company is doing. This happened to me twice in the past week.

Several years ago, Apple added a very nice quality-of-life improvement to the Mac operating system: software installers began offering to delete themselves after they had done their job. This was a good idea.

In the ensuing years, Apple made some other changes to MacOS in an effort to — it says — improve privacy and security. One of the new rules it imposed was requiring the user to grant apps specific permission to access certain folders; another was a requirement to allow one app to modify or delete another.

And, so, when I installed an application earlier this month, I was shown an out-of-context dialog at the end of the process asking for access to my Downloads folder. I granted it. Then I got a notification that the Installer app was blocked from modifying or deleting another file. To change it, I had to open System Settings, toggle the switch, enter my password, and then I was prompted to restart the Installer application — but it seemed to delete itself just fine without my doing so.

This is a built-in feature, triggered by where the installer has been downloaded, using an Apple-provided installation packaging system.¹ But it is stymied by a different set of system rules and unexpected permissions requests.

Another oddity is in Apple’s two-factor authentication system. Because Apple controls so much about its platforms, authentication codes are delivered through a system prompt on trusted devices. Preceding the code is a notification informing the user their “Apple Account is being used to sign in”, and it includes a map of where that is.

This map is geolocated based on the device’s IP address, which can be inaccurate for many reasons — something Apple discloses in its documentation:

This location is based on the new device’s IP address and might reflect the network that it’s connected to, rather than the exact physical location. If you know that you’re the person trying to sign in but don’t recognize the location, you can still tap Allow and view the verification code.

It turns out one of the reasons the network might think you are located somewhere other than where you are is because you may be using iCloud Private Relay. Even if you have set it to “maintain general location”, it can sometimes be incredibly inaccurate. I was alarmed to see a recent attempt from Toronto when I was trying to sign into iCloud at home in Calgary — a difference of over 3,000 kilometres.

The map gives me an impression of precision and security. But if it is made less accurate in part because of a feature Apple created and markets, it is misleading and — at times — a cause of momentary anxiety.

What is more, Safari supports automatically filling authentication codes delivered by text message. Apple’s own codes, though, cannot be automatically filled.

These are small things — barely worth the bug report. They also show how features introduced one year are subverted by those added later, almost like nobody is keeping track of all of the different capabilities in Apple’s platforms. I am sure there are more examples; these are just the ones which happened in the past week, and which I have been thinking about. They expose little cracks in what is supposed to be a tight, coherent package of software.

Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal:

Porn, violent images, illicit drugs. I could see it all by typing a special string of characters into the Safari browser’s address bar. The parental controls I had set via Apple’s Screen Time? Useless.

Security researchers reported this particular software bug to Apple multiple times over the past three years with no luck. After I contacted Apple about the problem, the company said it would release a fix in the next software update. The bug is a bad one, allowing users to easily circumvent web restrictions, although it doesn’t appear to have been well-known or widely exploited.

It seems lots of parents are frustrated by Screen Time. It is not reliable software but, for privacy reasons, it is hard for third-parties to differentiate themselves as they rely on the same framework.

Stern:

• Screen usage chart. Want to see your child’s screen usage for the day? The chart is often inaccurate or just blank.

I find this chart is always wildly disconnected from actual usage figures for my own devices. My iMac recently reported a week straight of 24-hour screen-on time per day, including through a weekend when I was out of town, because of a web browser tab I left open in the background.

One could reasonably argue nobody should entirely depend on software to determine how devices are used by themselves or their children, but I do not think many people realistically do. It is part of a combination of factors. Screen Time should perform the baseline functions it promises. It sucks how common problems are basically ignored until Stern writes about them.

⌥ Permalink

The bad news: Apple shipped an alarming bug in iOS 17.5 which sometimes revealed photos previously deleted by the user and, in the process, created a reason for users to mistrust how their data is handled. This was made especially confusing by Apple’s lack of commentary.

The good news: Apple patched the bug within a week. Also, the lone story about deleted photos reappearing on a wiped iPad given to someone else was deleted and seems to be untrue.

The bad news: aside from acknowledging this “rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted”, there was still little information about exactly what happened. Users quite reasonably expect things they deleted to stay deleted, and when they do not, they are going to have some questions.

The good news: as I predicted, Apple gave an explanation to 9to5Mac, which generously allowed for it to be on background. Chance Miller:

One question many people had is how images from dates as far back as 2010 resurfaced because of this problem. After all, most people aren’t still using the same devices now as they were in 2010. Apple confirmed to me that iCloud Photos is not to be blamed for this. Instead, it all boils to the corrupt database entry that existed on the device’s file system itself.

A much more technically-minded answer was provided by Synacktiv, a security firm that reverse-engineered the bug fix release and compared it to the original 17.5 release.

Bugs are only as bad as the effects they have. I heard from multiple readers who said this bug damaged how much they trust iOS and Apple. This is self-selecting — I likely would not have heard from people who both experienced this bug and thought it was no big deal. I can imagine a normal user who does not read 9to5Mac and finding their deleted photos restored are still going to be spooked.

⌥ Permalink

Apple issued an update today which, it says, ought to patch a bug which resurfaced old and deleted photos:

This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.

I suppose even a “rare” bug would, at Apple’s scale, impact lots of people. I heard from multiple readers who said they, too, saw presumed deleted photos reappear.

The thing about these bare release notes — which are not yet on Apple’s support site — is how they do not really answer reasonable questions about what happened. It is implied that the photos in question may have been marked for deletion and were visibly hidden from users, but were not actually removed under an old iOS version. Updating to iOS 17.5 revealed these dormant photos.

Bugs happen and they suck, but a bug like this really sucks — especially since so many of us sync so much of our data between our devices. This makes me question the quality of the Photos app, iCloud, and the file system overall.

Also, the anecdote of photos being restored to the same device after it had been wiped has been deleted from Reddit. I have not seen the same claim anywhere else which makes me think this was some sort of user error.

⌥ Permalink

Over the past week, several threads have been posted on Reddit claiming photos deleted years ago are reappearing in their libraries, and in those of sold and wiped devices.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

There are a number of reports of similar situations in the thread on Reddit. Some users are seeing deleted images from years ago reappear in their libraries, while others are seeing images from earlier this year.

By default, the Photos app has a “Recently Deleted” feature that preserves deleted images for 30 days. That’s not what’s happening here, seeing as most of the images in question are months or years old, not days.

A few people in the comments say they are also seeing this issue.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

A bug in iOS 17.5 is apparently causing photos that have been deleted to reappear, and the issue seems to impact even iPhones and iPads that have been erased and sold off to other people.

[…]

The impacted iPad was a fourth-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro that had been updated to the latest operating system update, and before it was sold, it was erased per Apple’s instructions. The Reddit user says they did not log back in to the iPad at any point after erasing it, so it is entirely unclear how their old photos ended up reappearing on the device.

I have not run into this bug myself. On the one hand, these are just random people on the internet. If any of these were a single, isolated incident, I would assume user error. But there are more than a handful, and it seems unlikely this many people are lying or mistaken. It really seems like there is a problem here, and it is breaching my trust in the security and privacy of my data held by Apple. I can make some assumptions about why this is happening, but none of the technical reasons matter to any user who deleted a photo and — quite reasonably — has every expectation it would be fully erased.

Perhaps Apple will eventually send a statement to a favoured outlet like 9to5Mac or TechCrunch. It has so far said nothing about all the users forced to reset their Apple ID password last month. I bet something happened leading up to changes which will be announced at WWDC, but I do not care. It is not good enough for Apple to let major problems like these go unacknowledged.

Update: The more I have thought about this, the more I am not yet convinced by the sole story of photos appearing on a wiped iPad. Something is not adding up there. The other stories have a more consistent and plausible pattern, and are certainly bad enough.

⌥ Permalink