Bloomberg Details Apple's Revised Software Development Strategy
Instead of keeping engineers on a relentless annual schedule and cramming features into a single update, Apple will start focusing on the next two years of updates for its iPhone and iPad operating system, according to people familiar with the change. The company will continue to update its software annually, but internally engineers will have more discretion to push back features that aren’t as polished to the following year.
It sure looks like this is a case of the feedback loop working. The Apple community complains about software quality, the executive team reviews procedures and makes structural changes. It sounds like engineering will now have less pressure to ship features within the one-year cycle with more flexibility to take their time and potentially push work that is lagging behind to the following year. Do a few things well. Time will tell if this strategy succeeds; it could backfire if too much stuff gets punted to the next release.
As an outsider, I think it’s hard to really assess whether these changes are meaningful rather than empty, ambitious, words. However, I’m glad the way it is portrayed in the Bloomberg report indicates it is a deeper shift of philosophy rather than a one-time focus for iOS 12 followed by a return to the status quo.
In other new tidbits in this report, Gurman says Animoji will come to FaceTime, there’ll be a new Stocks app, and Siri will be more deeply integrated into Spotlight. The cross-platform app project is still on track apparently, which will easily represent the biggest change to macOS in five years. watchOS and tvOS aren’t mentioned in this article; it was previously stated that the development plan for these OS’s had not changed from the norm.
Major iPad-specific changes are seemingly delayed until 2019. This doesn’t bother me too much, obviously people want stuff as soon as possible but the point of this whole exercise is that resource tradeoffs must be made, but I hope they can fit in some minor tweaks to the multitasking model. It’s crazy to me that you can swipe from the right on iPad and be in a state where nothing happens. Literally nothing. If an app isn’t in Slide Over, it should present a recent apps list window as a navigational fallback.