TECHNOLOGY

Is Chicken Wire and Duct Tape Holding IOS Together?

It sure seems like that sometimes

Photo by author

According to recent rumor mongering , IOS 16 betas may be delayed a bit because the betas are “buggier than hell”.

Part of me knows that operating systems are hard, but part of me wonders why? After all this time, why do so many bugs pop up when the OS changes?

Sure, things were easier in the olden days. Unix systems were very stable. Drivers for new hardware would sometimes cause problems, and there were utterly stupid buffer overflow bugs that went on forever, but it all seemed smoother, at least from the outside looking in.

Of course, things actually were easier. Those systems needed drivers for the network, the keyboard, the mouse, the display, storage, serial and parallel ports. They were much less complicated than all the hardware that IOS deals with.

The OS software was simpler. There weren’t as many things competing for resources. An engineer could have a fairly good grasp of all the code. Today things are much different. I wonder if there is anyone at Apple who truly groks the whole picture of IOS.

I think we know that different teams are responsible for different parts. I remember reading once why searching in settings can…