iOS 13, especially the first couple of versions, quickly gained a reputation for being riddled with bugs and issues.
Bloomberg reports that Apple is changing the way it develops internal builds of operating systems in an attempt to stop history from repeating itself, with work on iOS 14 already using the new approach.
Bloomberg explains that up to now, Apple engineers would ‘cram’ features into daily builds of iOS versions before they were fully tested. This meant that using test devices on these internal versions became a nightmare, with the system running so many different branches of components at different levels of stability.
The publication explains that this made it nigh-impossible for Apple to understand the actual state of its software.
With iOS 14, the plan is that all work-in-progress features for OS builds are disabled by default and have to be enabled using a special configuration menu. This should let Apple management keep tabs on the progress of their new operating system releases and make the software more flexibly adaptable; features that are not ready to ship can be more easily removed.
The new approach will also apply to iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, and tvOS development. Apple expects iOS 14 to be a feature-packed release but is apparently ready to delay some features until iOS 15 if it needs to.
Bloomberg says that Apple engineers started to realize iOS 13 was not up to scratch ahead of the June WWDC conference. The report also says that engineers effectively gave up on perfecting iOS 13.0 and instead focused efforts on iOS 13.1.
Read the full report over at Bloomberg.
