Linked List: October 22, 2019

Tuesday, 22 October 2019

David Shayer on the Spotty Quality of iOS 13 and MacOS 10.15 ★

Terrific piece for TidBITS from David Shayer, who worked as a software engineer at Apple for 18 years:

Remember what I said about changes causing new bugs? If an engineer accidentally breaks a working feature, that’s called a regression. They’re expected to fix it.

But if you file a bug report, and the QA engineer determines that bug also exists in previous releases of the software, it’s marked “not a regression.” By definition, it’s not a new bug, it’s an old bug. Chances are, no one will ever be assigned to fix it.

Not all groups at Apple work this way, but many do. It drove me crazy. One group I knew at Apple even made “Not a Regression” T-shirts. If a bug isn’t a regression, they don’t have to fix it. That’s why the iCloud photo upload bug and the contact syncing bug I mentioned above may never be fixed.

Tim Cook Named Board Chairman of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management ★

Not the best timing for this, I think we can all agree.

Bipartisan Letter From Congress to Tim Cook on Hong Kong and China (PDF) ★

Bipartisan letter from the U.S. Congress to Tim Cook:

In promoting values, as in most things, actions matter far more than words. Apple’s decisions last week to accommodate the Chinese government by taking down HKMaps is deeply concerning. We urge you in the strongest terms to reverse course, to demonstrate that Apple puts values above market access, and to stand with the brave men and women fighting for basic rights and dignity in Hong Kong.

It’s a strong letter, but unfortunately it conflates apps censored in mainland China with apps censored in Hong Kong — these are very different things. When China declares an app illegal in mainland China, Apple has no choice but to comply. The HKMaps decision was different — it was a political decision, not a legal one — and that difference is worth emphasizing. Apple could have chosen to fight for the HKMaps app.