Apple Puts Focus on Swatting Bugs -- WSJ
June 04 2018 - 03:02AM
Dow Jones News
By Tripp Mickle
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (June 4, 2018).
At Apple Inc.'s annual conference for developers Monday,
executives face the task of not only wowing the audience with new
features but also shoring up confidence that the company can
deliver quality software.
Apple's expected emphasis on quality follows a year in which the
company's software captured headlines for the wrong reasons. Since
September, Apple has issued 14 software updates for its mobile
operating system, known as iOS, and fixed 67 software flaws -- a
46% rise from the 46 bugs addressed in the same period a year
earlier, according to a tabulation of Apple's software-update
notes, which offer a publicly available snapshot of software
issues.
Among the most high-profile flaws the company addressed was one
that caused iPhone users typing "i" to get a character described as
"A [?]" instead, and another that caused messages to display out of
chronological order.
The recent uptick in software flaws reflects the challenge
Apple's engineering team has faced in recent years designing a
system that works across a growing array of devices, former
employees and analysts said. At the same time, Apple has introduced
more complicated hardware features as it tries to differentiate
iPhones and Macs from rival devices.
The battle with the bugs could jeopardize Apple's reputation for
delivering products that "just work," said Michael Covington, vice
president of product at Wandera, a mobile security firm supporting
companies such as Deloitte & Touche LLP and Mazda Motor Corp.
It could lead people to "question why they are paying $1,200 for a
device that is no longer polished," he said.
Apple's reliance on the iPhone -- it contributes two-thirds of
Apple revenue and is the backbone of Apple's App Store sales,
mobile payments and music-streaming service -- means the company
has little margin for software errors, analysts say. In a saturated
smartphone market, Apple is expected to increase iPhone shipments
at a compound annual growth rate of just 2.6% to 242.5 million by
2022, according to researcher International Data Corp.
Apple declined to comment.
The company this year tabled some planned features it had hoped
to introduce Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference in an
effort to improve quality, people familiar with the decision said,
setting the stage for an event this week that will emphasize
software performance.
Steven Sinofsky, former president of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows
division, said Apple's focus on performance is typical of a mature
organization's software-development process. Writing earlier this
year on Medium, he said he believes Apple's software and hardware
deliver greater quality than any company in the history of
technology, especially given the scale of its new iPhone releases.
Apple shipped 18 million iPhone X units in the first quarter of
this year, making it the world's best-selling smartphone, according
to market research from Strategy Analytics.
Underscoring the complexity, Apple is selling 40 different
devices this year -- one-third more than it did five years ago --
increasing the amount of code the engineering team must write to
make sure each functions properly, the former employees said.
And with more high-end features, including smaller batteries and
new sensors powering facial-recognition technology, Apple's
engineering team is facing more challenging software problems than
it did with earlier iPhone models, the people said.
Apple has compounded those challenges since 2012 by releasing
both iOS and Mac software updates annually. Previously, the company
updated Mac software about every other year, giving the engineering
team more time to fix bugs and develop new features, the people
said.
Each new release adds features and layers of code that can
trigger a mistake in the underlying existing code, analysts said.
The code "just gets so big it becomes unwieldy, and that's what's
happening at Apple," said Patrick Moorhead, a technology analyst
with Moor Insights & Strategy.
Software bugs can challenge app developers who want to create
tools that make Apple's devices more useful for customers. For
example, when Apple introduced the Mac operating system High Sierra
last year, Michael Tsai, the Mac developer behind file-organizing
app EagleFiler, said PDFs would crash if a user opened the shortcut
menu within the app. He spent two days identifying the bug and
writing code to bypass it, and then had to check each subsequent
software update to be sure the code worked.
Mr. Tsai said he and other developers would like to see Apple
clean up software issues rather than announce new features. "It's
easier to build atop a solid foundation than something that's
constantly shifting," he said.
Write to Tripp Mickle at Tripp.Mickle@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 04, 2018 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)
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