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Apple plans to make iOS upgrades less awful (and knew how terrible iOS 13 was)

Unlucky iOS 13 had a very rocky, buggy start. Apple has a plan to prevent this happening again.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

Unlucky iOS 13. This was one of Apple's rockiest, buggiest releases to date. It was a release plagued by battery bugs and memory bugs, and so much more. And apparently, things have become so bad that Apple is implementing changes.

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According to a report by Bloomberg, the problem up to now has been that developers would cram new, unfinished, and buggy features into daily builds used for internal testing, but that the resulting instability might mean that "testers would go days without a livable [Apple's internal word for usable] build, so they wouldn't really have a handle on what's working and not working."

Starting with iOS 14 development, daily builds used for testing will ship with unfinished or buggy features disabled by default, with testers having the option to enable the features. This new process will also apply to iPadOS, watchOS, macOS and tvOS.

It seems that Apple became aware of what a mess iOS 13 was in the weeks leading up to its release.

"By August, realizing that the initial iOS 13.0 set to ship with new iPhones a few weeks later wouldn't hit quality standards, Apple engineers decided to mostly abandon that work and focus on improving iOS 13.1, the first update. Apple privately considered iOS 13.1 the 'actual public release' with a quality level matching iOS 12. The company expected only die-hard Apple fans to load iOS 13.0 onto their phones."

Shame Apple didn't communicate to iPhone owners that iOS 13 was not ready for prime time.

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