It’s been less than two months since the release of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS 14, but Apple is already well underway on the subsequent versions of those popular operating systems. Apple has settled on a yearly upgrade pace for its major software platform, and with that quick iteration has come questions about bugs and stability. According to a new report, Craig Federighi, Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering, temporarily paused the development of iOS 18 and macOS 15 to meet quality targets.
The goal for the pause was to give programmers some breathing room to deal with a plethora of bugs that have crept up early in the gestation process, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Apple’s primary goal is to fix the bugs causing performance problems or breaking apps to ensure customers have a stable experience on day one. Once those major issues are resolved, then work can proceed on adding new features that will become the highlight of operating systems like iOS 18 and macOS 15.
According to Gurman, the one-week “pause” was initiated last week after senior management identified an alarming number of “escapes,” which refers to bugs not discovered during internal testing. A pause of one week might not sound like a long time, but it’s a significant event for a company of Apple’s size and scope. "It’s a problem of 10,000 people typing code and completely breaking the operating system," said one of Gurman’s anonymous sources.
Apple reportedly finished work on the M1 version of iOS 18/iPadOS 18 (codename Crystal) and macOS 15 (Glow). M1 refers to the first development milestone of an Apple software platform. The pause in development refers to the M2 versions of the above operating systems.
Apple has already issued several updates for iOS 17 to address bugs that customers encountered. The most recent release, iOS 17.1, fixed issues with screen “burn-in” on the iPhone 15 and keyboard responsiveness, among other things. Owners of new iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro users even encountered a strange bug that would put the phones in an update loop when trying to transfer data from an old iPhone.
We hope that Apple’s latest step to boost software quality means that customers will encounter fewer of these bugs in the future.
