Respected developer opines that marketing has too much power at Apple today, software teams struggling

Jan 5, 2015 09:57 GMT  ·  By

Instapaper author Marco Arment, a noted advocate for Apple and its products, had to get something off his chest recently. In a reasonably-sized post over at Marco.org, he opines that the quality of Apple’s software has taken a nosedive.

So much so that Arment claims he’s “deeply concerned” for the future of iOS and OS X and, implicitly, the company.

“Embarrassing bugs”

A developer at heart, Arment has a keen eye for problems in software. Despite Apple hiring la creme de la creme in software engineering, OS X is “riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions,” writes Arment. Had the same bugs cropped up in Windows years ago, Arment admits he would have made fun of those same issues.

He attacks the subject from multiple angles, chief among them being this one: that marketing seems to be in overdrive at Apple, while software engineering has been left in a trail of dust.

“I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing has a bit too much power at Apple today: the marketing priority of having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.”

Annual cycles

Indeed, ever since Apple has moved from a bi-annual release of new OS X versions to an annual refresh of the desktop operating system, the bugs have increased in numbers. The same goes for iOS.

However, it’s worth pointing out that both these OSes are still based on the fundamental underpinnings that spawned them decades ago. Some things are so low-level that changing them would branch out into the necessity to rewrite half, if not most of the entire OS.

Although we call point-one releases incremental updates, even major version upgrades are still incremental releases. A new OS X or iOS isn’t entirely written from scratch. Ever. Which means the code keeps piling up, and the chances for new bugs trickling in will increase with every new generation.

But this is not a recent development. This is something Apple has had to cope with for far longer than the last two or three years. Which proves Arment’s point. When the vendor pays enough attention to the details, it gets done right.