Counterpoint to Rumours of the Nature of a Snow Leopard-Esque iOS Release ⇥ mjtsai.com

Stephen Hackett, on Ina Fried’s report earlier today that some iOS 12 features would be delayed until next year so the development team can focus more on reliability and quality:

That would be a bold choice in the mobile space, but in taking their foot of the gas, I hope Apple can address some core issues in iOS. That said, High Sierra was a release framed this way, and it has had a litany of problems since its launch in the fall.

And Michael Tsai:

I imagine that it’s normal for some features to get cut, so it’s not clear how much of a change this is.

[…]

All of this is to say that this sounds good on the surface, but I would have preferred to hear about schedule changes rather than feature cuts. I would be more excited about a 10.13.11 than a less ambitious 10.14.0.

While High Sierra experienced a couple of fairly serious security vulnerabilities and has its share of irritating bugs, Snow Leopard — the go-to example of a refinement-oriented release — wasn’t exactly immune. It shipped with a bug that sometimes wiped user data after logging into a guest account, a bug which took months to fix; and, like High Sierra, Snow Leopard experienced a text rendering bug. We should hope software gets better over time, of course, but you can look back at every single new version of MacOS and find bugs that categorically should not have shipped. I don’t expect the next version of iOS — or MacOS, for that matter — to be an exception, but I hope it is.