Apple is postponing new iOS features in favor of reliability and performance
Apple has decided to postpone new features in iOS in favor of improving the reliability and performance of the operating system, as according to a report by Axios.
According to the report, Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President, Software Engineering, announced the revised plan to employees at a meeting earlier this month. This pushes features like refresh of the homescreen and in-car user interface, improvements to core apps like Mail and camera experience to 2019. What we will get this year is improvements to AR, digital health and parental controls. Apart from that, the OS will largely feature improvements to performance and user experience.
We have seen Apple do this with macOS in the past, where they dedicate one entire update cycle to just refining the OS and make existing features work better. However, we have never quite seen Apple do that on iOS. This is largely due to the hyper competitive nature of the mobile market where competition and customer demands push companies to pull a new rabbit out of the hat every year. But off late Apple's software quality has dropped drastically, with one buggy release after another; iOS 11 is possibly the buggiest release to come out of Apple to date. And this isn't something that's only noticed by reviewers anymore and even the average user can now see and feel how much the quality has dropped.
Whether this actually fixes anything remains to be seen. Even though Apple took plenty of updates to refine macOS, never mind that macOS development moves at a glacial pace compared to iOS, the OS continues to remain rough around the edges and like its mobile counterpart, the latest version is possibly the buggiest release to date.
Maybe it's not an iOS or macOS thing. Maybe it's an Apple thing. It's time the company comes at a hard stop and really evaluates where it is heading and how it intends to get there. And make sure the next release that comes out is damn near perfect because it's no longer a company operating out of Steve Jobs' garage anymore and people are spending far too much on these things to face such issues.
