Apple software isn’t at its best lately. I’m not the only one to have noticed.
Russell Ivanovic (via John Gruber, who agrees):
I just wish that Apple would slow down their breakneck pace and spend the time required to build stable software that their hardware so desperately needs. The yearly release cycles of OS X, iOS, iPhone & iPad are resulting in too many things seeing the light of day that aren’t finished yet.
Marco Arment in late 2013:
I’d be perfectly happy if Apple never made a TV or a watch or a unicorn, and instead devoted the next five years to polishing the software and services for their existing product lines.
But what is wrong exactly? It’s hard to pinpoint (you just learn to untrust the interface). Why is it so? Because keeping tracks of bugs you experience demands a tremendous amount of mental work.
I decided to do it for a week anyway.
I’ve found over a hundred distinct bugs, in a week, by using my two iPads (4 and mini 2) pretty much as I usually do.
I’ve accompanied the majority of bugs with screenshots and/or videos, to keep a record of just how bad it is in 2014.
I use an iPad 4 with iOS 8.1.1, the latest version, and an iPad mini 2 with iOS 8.1.0 (because of a bug, as you’ll see below). 8.1.0 was the latest iOS version twelve days ago.
I report bugs and jitters the same. A big part of the iPad’s appeal was that it was so fast (I can attest that my iPad 4 with iOS 6 was screaming). Most videos are shot on iPad mini 2, with the iPad 4 as a camera, to demo that even the A7 struggles with responsiveness.
Ah, the A7. Apple’s grandiose hardware engineering feat. One year later and no Android device had caught up with it yet.
Yes, that processor. It can’t run iOS smoothly.
No matter how much money you put in an iPad today, the iPad 4 was more responsive than that in 2012, with iOS 6.
The A7 is pretty much top of the line (for some devices, like the iPad mini, it is). But Apple sells lower stuff than this. Life must not be so sweet on today’s iPad mini 1, which is five times slower than the iPad mini 2 and 3.
“I think if I bought one of those tablets and used it, and I thought that was a tablet experience, I’m not sure I would ever buy another tablet, the responsiveness isn’t there. The basic touch is really off.”
That’s a quote from Tim Cook, from September 2013, about Android tablets. Hilariously (and sadly), this now applies perfectly to the iPad.
On the hardware side, Apple’s recent products, like its processors, are incredible. But I don't marvel at them the way I marveled at my iPad in 2013 with iOS 6. Now, I just see them as technological prowesses, not the perfectly integrated user experience they used to be.
At Re/code, Greg Joswiak said that Apple is fixing bugs very fast. That’s just plain false. Since iOS 7, Apple is introducing bugs more quickly than it fixes them. iOS 8 was released two months ago, it has already lived more than one sixth of its life; and it hasn’t improved much.
Apple, who previously had very high standards on responsiveness, seems to have completely abandoned the idea. That was comprehensible for iOS 7, as they designed and shipped it in eight months.
But what’s the excuse for iOS 8? It shipped with a lot of new features, and a heck of a lot of regressions. I don’t care about most of those new features, but these regressions annoy me greatly.
I use stock iOS apps like Notes, Reminders and Safari a lot. I don’t use all of the stock apps though, so you’ll mostly only see bugs from the apps I use.
There was a handful of bugs I knew and triggered on purpose, but most of them (95+%) I just stumbled upon during the week.
Here it is below, the more-than-a-hundred bugs I experienced in a week.
29 November update: You can jump to the most severe cases: Safari (jitter), Notes (jitter), Reminders, Safari bookmarks, Crash, iCloud, Safari (jitter).
When erasing my history from the last hour, the UI froze and I couldn’t interact with it for 3 seconds.
Exploring your favorites or your history makes the iPad struggle.
Unfortunately, lags aren’t well reflected on YouTube, but this really felt laggy.
Note that this was on iPad mini 2 with an A7, it is way worse on iPad 4 (with an A6X):
I’m typing in Notes right now, and when I press “return”, there’s a delay.
Lagginess is always hard to gauge when watching a video, but contrast with when I type “Alex”.
iOS’s stock apps aren’t well executed since iOS 7. A real shame, because I like to use stock apps as much as possible.
Later-in-the-day update: It gets worse when the note is long and you’re near the beginning of a document.
I used Notes quite a lot on iOS 7 and I don’t remember this behavior. Surely this is coming from the inclusion of WYSIWYG (bold, italic, …) in iOS 8.
That’s another iOS 8 feature I don’t care the slightest about that introduces a terrible regression.
Sometimes I’m on the home screen, or anywhere when there isn’t an active keyboard, I make a movement that registers as a shake, and the shake-to-undo dialog appear.
(Unrelated: Shake to undo always seemed odd to me on iPad.)
In private browsing mode, videos continue to run in the background for ~10 seconds after you’ve closed a tab. Private browsing mode is the worst time for having that kind of bug.
I’ve just discovered it’s only for 10 seconds today. Until now I always killed Safari before that, I’m sure a lot of people do, too.
Changing the wallpapers takes a lot of time (especially with an A6X). My gosh. That stuff was just instant in iOS 6.
A lot of apps have this (it’s most visible with Reminders): an element that has this transparent thingy, but when the app starts up it’s got this hideous gray that pops.
And it’s not just in apps. Here it is in Notification Center:
When you open it, the interface gets a grayish flash. That’s the app I use the most and that’s really annoying.
I suspect this is due to that transparency you get in the new tab view.
See, all that transparency in iOS is nice when you just look at it. But in use it’s a poor experience due to all those shortcomings.
When you swipe to get the Control Center on the lock screen, it’s just not smooth.
(This means that “swipe to unlock” animation on the lock screen must be quite a hog.)
When you dismiss it when it’s not static, the screen stays gray during the dismiss animation.
This is so stupid of a feature (I think it’s a feature) that I count it as a bug.
When you slide the volume or brightness to the lowest/highest, the slider bounces off.
Oh, and the volume/brightness bounces off with it, too.
What the heck? Who wants that?
Previously, it would do the same thing with brightness when you pulled the control center to the top and let it go. They removed that either in 8.0 or 8.1. No idea why they left the rest.
I opened the Camera app, and the status bar was still there. I didn’t think of catching it in a screenshot before I had closed the app.
But fortunately (kind of), that bug reappeared later and I was able to catch it:
The status bar loses its extra-saturation once you scroll a bit.
On the video above: On, off, off, on.
Tap a photo to make it full screen. Start to zoom out, cancel your zoom out. The status bar is there.
I took a video, did something else in another app, and reopened Camera. The frame was now square, as if I was in square mode. Going into and out of square mode didn’t fix it, an app restart was needed.
(Yes, I have no pants on.)
I took a screenshot and cropped it in Photos, earlier in the day.
When I tap on it, it’s zoomed like when you double-tap on a video. You don’t see the right and left sides.
You can manage to temporarily display it correctly by zooming in, then by initiating a zoom out and canceling it.
Reminders periodically reorders my list alphabetically. I can’t put the finger on what triggers that.
Items have random display bugs.
I like to use stock apps as much as possible, but iOS 7/8 makes it really, really hard.
If I remember correctly, these things where even worse with iOS 7.
When you close them, during the animation there’s a glitch, they become more transparent than they should, then they go back to normal. An unpleasant flash.
Open the app when you have no videos. So gross.
Do something, anything, with a bookmark. Do something, anything, again. You’ll invariably get this obtrusive message.
This is just crazy. Safari can’t sync correctly, in 2014. The Notes apps syncs very fast and very reliably in my experience, how can Safari have a problem like that?
To top it off, in iOS 8.0 that pop-up had a display problem. Hilarious and sad.
It’s there since iOS 7 (I don’t remember seeing that in iOS 6, but it must be there too).
You can shut down your iPad by sliding another part of the screen than the slider.
Wondered why the previous video lasted so long? Because I wanted to show the loading indicator as a confirmation that the iPad was shutting down.
This loading indicator appears after too much time. And the black screen before it looks like my iPad has already shut down.
Even though the iPad is really unloading, it shows a loading indicator. The combination of this and the delay make it seems as though the iPad is rebooting.
There’s useless space under the frequently visited pop-up. Like the space at the top to accommodate the hidden features, but empty.
So lazy.
Edit somewhere. Quit the edit mode. Scroll. Go into edit mode. The view will scroll from where you’ve been previously.
Very confusing, as it looks as if you’ve been scrolled elsewhere.
Quitting the keyboard is super slow.
Switching language is slow (especially if it’s emoji).
Going into “.?123” or “#+=” is a bit slow, enough to be noticeable (especially with an A6X).
That was instant in iOS 6. Just instant.
Tapping the status bar to go to the top is super slow, both on the A7 and A6X.
Regular scrolls also just aren’t smooth, a little bit with the A7 and particularly with the A6X.
I’ve got a fake update notification. The red bubble won’t go away. Every time I reopen the App Store app the update for Google Chrome switch from “Open” to “Update”, even though Google Chrome is already updated.
I’ve disabled App Store’s notifications, but if I didn’t the App Store icon on the home screen would have a red bubble too. Super annoying.
On the home screen I’ve swiped to open Control Center and one of the app I have in my dock (Reminders) launched instead. It registered the tap on Reminders over the swipe, even though Control Center revealed itself too.
26 November update: Happened again today (with Notes). I saw Control Center being revealed while the app icon was grayed out.
When you enlarge the system’s text size, lists (<select> elements in HTML) are cropped.
It’s also like that in the App Store (for the “iPad only”/“iPhone only” filter during a search).
When Text Size in Setting is four ranges away from the little “A” it’s chopped a tiny little bit. It starts to get noticeable five ranges away, like in my screenshot (it’s what I use on my iPad mini 2, I like it).
Multitasking gestures have an effect.
In iOS 7, you just saw the moves in the blurred background but it didn’t make the shutdown screen go away.
With iOS 6, you put your device to sleep, and if you pressed the button again immediately, the device would wake up instantly.
Not so with iOS 7 and 8. You have to wait. And presses done during that wait aren’t executed after, they’re not even registered. You have to press the button again.
Make a typo, make a space, delete that space, tap the autocomplete button to correct. The typo will still be there.
I want “Alexiq”, it autocorrects as “Alexif ”. I go back. I tap “Alexiq”. The button understood my tap, but in the text field it’s still “Alexif”.
Fixed in iOS 8.1.1 it seems.
When you tap on a suggestion, suggestions don’t update, the words stay the same.
Fixed in 8.1.1.
This iOS 8 autocomplete thing is something I don’t use much. Why is that? I’m asking myself now.
Well, it’s because suggestions are so slow to come I’ve already typed any but the longest words. The animation maybe doesn’t help, too.
I’ve typed a fair amount on my iPads since iOS 8, so I know it doesn’t get much better when it knows you.
Why did they ship it?
I double-tapped the home button and just had a crash. They’re not gone.
Update, Wednesday 26: I’ve had two more since then.
The animation when you focus on the search bar isn’t smooth.
As always, it’s way worse on iPad 4 with the A6X.
I opened the tab view in Safari on the mini to get to a tab that is open on my iPad 4. I opened the tab, Safari crashed.
Monday 24 update: Got that again.
Sometimes getting out of spotlight just isn’t 60 FPS on the iPad mini 2. Especially when you have typed something into the search field.
I used the four-finger gesture to switch apps three or four times, and my iPad 4 crashed.
It makes an unpleasant flash when AirDrop is off, the AirDrop icon is going from blue to gray. The text is also updated on the fly.
When you search inside the page, the search bar has an animation. When you’re done with the search, it awkwardly disappear without animation.
Sometimes the language key gets morphed with the space bar, here in Mail.
When you’re switching apps with a four-finger swipe and you see your background image blurred in the background of the app, it gets transparent (and not translucent).
The splash image gets a centered search icon, which then appear more to the left.
No new bug today! But I crashed twice during the day after double-tapping the home button, on iPad 4.
After you enter or delete a reminder, the list scrolls twice.
The animation to bring it up isn’t smooth inside a folder.
Sometimes when it’s really not smooth the Control Center detach for a moment from the bottom of the screen, because it’s bouncing too heavily.
On iOS 7 I could trigger that detachment every time by swiping fast enough, on the iPad 4.
Sometimes the button to show the new tab view is grayed out, the only way to access this view is then to pinch close the web page.
I quit a book (went to Library) and the list of books became transparent on my iPad 4.
With "Scrolling view" on, scrolling to another chapter makes the UI freeze a second or so.
The translucent background is just gray in your list of running apps (when you double-tap the home button). It’s also gray when you reopen the app, then it switches to translucent.
If you tap an icon while it’s moving, the app’s window will be offset, it will then readjust to its correct position once the app is started (or immediately after the animation if the app is already in memory, like on the video).
When pressing the home button, the animation hasn’t been smooth multiple times today on my iPad 4. That’s maybe the most important animation in iOS, and the iPad 4 sometimes can’t keep up with it.
This list is slow to come when you double-tap the home button.
On the home screen, double tap and stay on the button pressed (that’s the trigger, not releasing it (since iOS 7.1, nice touch, but insufficient)). Opening your list of running apps has had a heck of a speed regression from iOS 6.
In Today, when you tap Edit the cell resizes after the animation is complete.
That animation is slow on my iPad 4, by the way.
In the keyboard if you tap the right-most button at the bottom to quit the keyboard (on iPad) the button doesn’t become white on tap if you go too fast for the device to track. The sound comes after too.
Instant in iOS 6.
If you double-tap the home button while iOS is rotating (to landscape or portrait) the foreground disappear for an instant.
This image hasn’t been rotated. It’s what happens when you rotate your device while in panorama mode.
Swipe the row of icon to the left too much (where it’s gonna rubber band), tap in the row of windows where it’s empty. This will stop the rubber banding. If you quit the list of running apps and enter it again there will be no animation for windows to appear, and sometimes the device will crash.
When you display an app modal, the background color changes on scroll.
After you’ve changed your wallpaper, put your device to sleep. You’ll have to wait noticeably more than usual before you can wake it up.
Scrolling through your reading list sometimes isn’t smooth.
Why isn’t it smooth sometimes? I don’t know, but being sometimes smooth and sometimes not is a big pattern in iOS 7 and 8.
The Cancel button and Delete button are totally at odds, yet they’re very close here.
Not really a bug, but quite a devastating (literally) UI.
Edit a document, go to the menu, swipe to be able to delete an item. The delete mode will go away.
Tapping the share button is slow the first time. It was always instant in iOS 6.
Share buttons taking a long time to display the share sheet is a recurring pattern in iOS 8 and 7.
When you share something by mail, if the title of an article has a link in it, the subject of the mail will get two spaces instead of one after that link.
(I did this and the previous bug discovery at 5 minutes of interval, recording bugs interrupts your workflow a lot.)
This is what I get when I tap the address bar:
The problem is when I want to go to a frequently visited site (by the way, oh, a new feature in iOS 8 that I find useful, that’s one) and it’s not in the top row of icon.
There’s two hidden favorites. There’s two row above with horizontal room to spare, why not have put them there?
You also don’t see the titles of the second row of sites (a particular offense in my case, as most don’t have icons). Negative space is cool and all, but I’d rather have something that works.
I previously reported that there’s an useless area if you scroll this view, at the bottom. This is more evidence that Safari’s UI didn’t get much love at Apple this year.
Scrolling in the pop-up you get when the address bar has focus, it makes two out of four site icons disappear.
Displaying Control Center while the frequently visited websites view is open is super slow.
In my list of running apps there was no keyboard displaying.
I’m waiting for my two iPads to synchronize together. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. It’s been three minutes now. What I did: Mark one item as complete on my iPad mini, create a new list with three items, mark one of those items as complete. iCloud can’t keep up. It’s been five minutes now, the network indicator in the status bar is still spinning. I’ve killed the app on both iPad, launched it again, waited two minutes, but still nothing. I’m using Notes right now, and the synchronization is flawless. Ten minutes later, still no synchronization done.
Have at list one item as completed, tap on Show Completed, switch to another list, go back to the list with the completed items. The completed items will pop for a moment, then disappear.
I’ve just restarted my device on my two iPads (to see if it resolved the Reminders syncing bug). It asked me for my Apple password on both.
Now even syncing in Notes doesn’t work anymore.
It asked me again after two minutes in the iPad mini.
I’ve just logged into https://appleid.apple.com successfully, so my password did not change.
I’m fearing for the integrity of my documents right now. Let’s make a iTunes backup.
I got asked about my password again on iPad mini. I entered an incorrect one and it warned me.
So if my password was invalid before, it would have warned me too. So this is not a hack. Good.
18:11 Again it asks for password.
18:15 Again.
18:19 I see that Notes is now syncing correctly.
18:21 I get a prompt to login again though.
18:38 I haven’t been prompted again, looks like it’s gone.
18:45 Nope, it’s back.
19:06 Again. This time I hit "Cancel". It seems to be no different than when I type my password: the modal just disappears.
20:10 My reminders are still not synced. But iCloud stopped asking for my password on both of my devices. Looks like hitting Cancel was the best choice.
Friday 28 update: Still not synced (an update to 8.1.1 on the iPad mini 2 didn’t solve it). Unbelievable. Gotta switch back to Things…
I don’t know if that counts as an iOS bug, but iTunes just took a bloody long time to back up my iPad mini, one or two minutes or so, for no discernible reason.
I’m typing "That's" or "I'm typing" at the start of a line, and it automatically corrects into "That'so" and "I' typing".
I’m in Notes right now, but this bug is across the OS.
No wonder I usually use the real apostrophe, ’ instead of ', the one that you get in ".?123" by sliding upwards on the apostrophe.
This bug isn’t reproducing on my iPad 4 with iOS 8.1.1 though, so apparently that got fixed.
When a document has been updated by sync, you’re sometimes switched to another document.
The text about that update “spits”. Like when websites do weird stuff with their CSS and anti-aliasing.
This is a pattern in iOS 8, a lot of Web Views in Apple’s app had this spit effect. It’s getting corrected one Web View at a time, it seems.
After you’ve written enough that a sentence is at least two lines, It’s pretty hard to select anything on the last line.
You just have to scroll before being able to select.
The reason I haven’t updated my iPad mini to iOS 8.1.1, I now remember, is because I was waiting to see when the Settings app would prompt me to do so.
It did in the day of release on my iPad 4, it downloaded it automatically, then prompted me to install it with a system modal, as iOS usually do.
Yet no signs of a warning on my iPad mini. I was expecting it so much that I forgot about the update because it didn’t come.
I’ve found about that non-update by connecting my iPad to iTunes. I don’t know how long I would have stayed on iOS 8.1.0 had I not connected to a PC.
Two iPads, same OS, one has a bug, one hasn’t. iOS bugs are very very random it seems.
Sometimes a note becomes duplicated. Because of iCloud I guess.
When it’s like that you can safely delete the oldest one. You’re afraid when you do so every time though.
Rotate your device, and sometimes you then can’t unlock it by sliding anymore.
You can get out of this by going to the Camera or Timer from Control Center and pressing the home button.
If my memory is any good, putting your device to sleep and waking it up doesn’t solve this. (I’m pretty sure that’s correct, otherwise I wouldn’t bother opening Camera every time).
If you swipe while rotating, you don’t have to make a full swipe. It unlocks.
Not a bug, but it acts exactly like one. You can’t tap the app’s name who is playing music, under the play button, and get it right on first try. You can’t. It’s too small. That has always been a problem on my iPad 4, and it’s worse on my iPad mini.
I believe this got corrected a bit since iOS 7 though, it was worse. Either that or iOS 8 upgraded my agility substantially.
Sometimes frequently visited websites’ icons disappears and are regenerated.
I have 3,7GB of free space on my iPad 4. So it’s not about iOS making sure I don’t fill my drive.
Tapping on a button to upload a file takes an awful lot of time to display the modal.
29 November update: Clarification: It happens on every site where there is an upload button, not just the website on video.
Contrast with the links I tap in the video (made instant with a combination of InstantClick and FastClick):
It’s an upgrade from 8.0.0 though, where you just couldn’t upload any file.
Sometimes a page becomes just its background color. You need to refresh the page.
The content is there when you’re in tab view, nagging you:
Sometimes refreshing the page isn’t enough though. You have to copy the URL and access it from another tab.
This bug has bothered me so many time since iOS 8, it’s quite nice that I didn’t experience it in a week. It’s still there sometimes though, at least in iOS 8.1.0.
When you pinch close on a web page, during the animation the web page changes its vertical position, the bottom of the page is duplicated, making an unpleasant effect.
When Safari’s Chrome is reduced to just the status bar and the page’s title, and when you pinch close on a web page with a floating element at the top, the top part of it will disappear. See the gray "iOS developer library" bar at the top on the video.
Sometimes I can’t select "iPhone only" in this list. I have to quit the list and display it again.
The fact that the "iPhone only" is displaying partially is another bug that I recorded a previous day. These two bugs aren’t related, as I already had this one before tweaking the system’s font size.
In “Today”. Just had this bug where the day is overflowing over the Calendar’s bar.
Same thing on my iPad 4 when I tap Edit and remove "Today Summary".
Notification Center customization, another thing to put in my iOS-8-features-I-don’t-care-the-slightest-about-that-introduce-bugs folder.
Rotating your device is dog-slow.
I was just typing a lot of dashes, and wow it was slow to type. On iPad mini 2. Now it’s back to normal. Random bugs.
It’s got artifacts with iOS’s perspective zoom. You can slightly see them in video.
Sometimes perspective zoom is off in this view. Even though it says it’s on.
On iPad 4 (8.1.1) I went into tab view to access a tab on my other iPad. Everything but the blurred background disappeared. Scrolling and pinch closing restored it all, and it opened a blank new page (not the page I was looking for). I don’t remember in details how the animations went, but it felt as if the interface just traveled really fast across space.
On my iPad mini 2 (8.1.0), this sometimes resulted in a crash. Maybe now that’s only this weird space travel.
Sometimes double-tapping the home button is so slow (for no discernible reason), it looks like our device is going to crash.
I have no videos, so I get this view where I can see the background blurred.
The bug: I used my four finger to swipe to the left to switch to another app (Music), after Music appeared I had a black flash.
I’ve had two other glitches, but the black flash is the only one I remember in details.
Sometimes a word such as "lol" gets uppercased ("LOL"). The only way to go back to the lowercase version is to erase it and type it again twice.
In french when I want to type “aujourd’hui”, I start typing “aujourd”, then I do a nice apostrophe (with the Azerty keyboard you can do that directly by swiping up the apostrophe button, which isn’t there in Qwerty). iOS corrects “aujourd” as “aujourd'hui” (with a typewriter apostrophe), and when I finish typing I end up with “aujourd'hui’hui”.
Also, when I type “qu’”, it corrects “qu” as “au”. Very annoying.
The french keyboard corrects me “vas-y” as “vas-tu”, although “vas-y” is perfectly valid. The correction in 8.1.0 does lots of weird shit.
As you can see in the bottom of the image, when a list is too long Reminders doesn’t display the number of items.
When you open Settings, the left pane is scrolled and Airplane Mode is chopped.
You can hit me up on Twitter @dieulot.
— Alex Dieulot, Friday 28 November 2014