Comment by thephyber
5 hours ago
The side of my brain that manages organizational changes wonders: how does Apple, a 50 year old company of tens of thousands of engineers and over a trillion USD market cap, manage to keep feature velocity high while not making more of these types of errors?
The bug seems low likelihood but high severity for the few affected users. Other than simply never changing the login keyboard (or any of the keyboard code) or having nearly 100% test coverage, how does a company not accidentally have more of these types of issues?
They do. It’s just that the people using these devices won’t go public with it. I’ve seen so many bizarre bugs in my own experience but I’ve gotten zero articles on them by popular tech journals.
This bug got popularity that’s all.
They do. Companies mess things up all the time. But only a fraction of bugs get discovered and then reported, so it appears that their quality is ok.
I have recently discovered several bugs in different products created by different companies. And none has been reported so far in my research despite the products' popularity. I am not surprised, since those bugs require specific combination of conditions to be triggered, which most people have never run into, like in this article.
And I don't even blame them -- the engineers probably could never think of such use cases and don't have those workflows themselves. You'd have to really go out of your way to use obscure workflows to discover them.
Although in this case Apple dropped the ball by locking user out and not providing any alternatives.
> how does Apple, a 50 year old company of tens of thousands of engineers and over a trillion USD market cap, manage to keep feature velocity high while not making more of these types of errors?
They don't. If you're anything other than an extremely casual user of iOS or macOS for a couple of years, you'll encounter things that really make you pull your hair out by shear magnitude of "how on Earth can anyone miss this!?".
The same goes for feature velocity.