Apple Pauses Next Year's Software Development to Improve Quality

Apple is reportedly delaying the development of next year's software updates for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and other devices in order to resolve the glitches in the system.

Apple Takes a Rare Decision

The decision is actually rare for the company as the usually works continuously on updating the software of each device. However, this is not the first time that Apple has delayed software development. In 2018, software engineering chief Craig Federighi pushed back several unreleased iPhone features and waited until the following year, despite complaints that the current software back then had too many bugs.

In 2019, Federighi also became responsible for Apple's approach to developing software in order to prevent more problems. His approach required each feature to be enabled manually via "feature flags" wherein employees would test the system first before adding it to the devices.

He also adopted "The Pact" which is an agreement for employees to "never knowingly allow regressions" and quickly correct mistakes. His policies and strict development approach have proven to be effective as Apple software releases have been less buggy in recent years and fewer features had to be delayed compared to before.

Apple's Latest Software Development Gets Too Many Misses

Bloomberg reported that the latest round of development has gone roughly for the software engineering management team. The new operating systems, which are due next year, still showed too many "escapes," pertaining to the bugs that were missed during the internal testing. Due to the complications, the division announced internally that it would halt the new feature development for one week in order to work on fixing the bugs.

"It's a problem of 10,000 people typing code and completely breaking the operating system," one person familiar with the situation revealed to Bloomberg. While the company has already completed the first version of the next iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS, the delay will affect the next Apple Watch OS and iOS 17.4 update. The software that is used by iPhone and iPad is estimated to be released in March 2024.

The decision will also be applied to the future versions of visionOS, which is the software used for the Vision Pro headset. While the software is due early next year, it may be possible that the consumer release will not change.