alt Hacker NewsBugs Apple Loves
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Had the pleasure of making an Apple account to join our company's developer team. I filled out the form on the website 7 times: Edge on Windows, Edge on macOS, Safari on macOS, using 2 different phone numbers. No matter what, Apple just refused to send the verification code to me. It only worked after I remember Apple is a dick to the web platform, then I managed to create one from the popup in the App Store.
BY FAR #3 is the most annoying UX on iOS 26 - I fall for it every single time when trying to change payment method. Not only does it undo years of muscle memory, it's so unbelievably unintuitive to have the first button change address instead of payment method
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1mb4lod/is_anyone_else...
Trying to type this comment on an iPhone and that very last issue, text selection, is so so real. It’s probably the single biggest thing I hate about this phone that makes me consider switching back to Android (I was on Android for 12 years before trying out an iPhone for 3 years atm, and in general, on average, I can’t tell the difference… they both have strengths and flaws. Text selection is a pretty massive flaw on iPhone.)
This is missing the most annoying one for me: when I type a search term into safari and it randomly interprets it as an address that it can’t resolve. E.g. “how to bake cookies” gets resolved to how%20to%20bake%20cookies (which safari tries to resolve via DNS or whatever instead of piping it to the search provider). Even better, it’s entirely nondeterministic, though it does seem to be due to some race condition with whatever determines whether it’s a search or a url, and is more likely to happen when typing quickly.
I’d say it happens about 10% of the time I type anything in the search bar. It’s incredibly annoying. Without getting into too much detail, but I confirmed they’re tracking it internally too for close to a decade and are intentionally choosing not to prioritize.
Its been a 4 years since I had to target a website for Safari, but last time I did it still had serious difficulties parsing 8061 compliant dates. If you Google safari/webkit iso date parse bug looks like its still on going lol.
I bought the latest Intel MacBook Air and after few months they released M1 MacBook Air. Then they release an update, I did as I should, and it broke my laptop! I lost all my data! They fixed it for me in a couple of weeks without providing me a substitute! And they were arrogant enough to behave like they did a favor to not charge me for the repair! It was 2020! My MacBook Air never became like before, and it died a couple of times in a year, which it recovered by itself. And some months ago it died, and it didn't recover! I lost lots of data I spent thousands of hours and I trusted that I can have them even if my laptop dies. Now, I have no way to recover my data!
that Contacts one hits hard, no idea how many hours I wasted trying to figure out what the hell it’s doing.
Just today was looking at Activity Monitor Disk tab, for an unrelated reason - sorted by Bytes Read, lo and behold ‘contactsd’ - the Contacts daemon, is in 2nd spot at ~400 _gigabytes_ read, right after mediaanalysisd. I don’t even remember last time I opened the Contacts app on my Mac. It felt like it’s gonna be another time sink with no solution, so I didn’t even bother to investigate more.
It took me 4hrs or more to register an account for my child on ipad. It was spread across several days...
When got my work macbook I had to register an account on apple to download some app from the store, and it wouldn't send me sms to activate. I had to do it the next day.
I wonder what happens there, but it seems like a very unprofessional web development or a lousy A B testing
I used to love Apple because they were so far ahead of the game in terms of UX and hardware. They have dropped the ball so much recently with all these UX mishaps from Apple Glass to most of the bugs in the post that affect me. I am more than willing to switch to Android or some other device regardless of price, but haven't found one that is close to equivalent yet. I worry it'll be a few years before something comes close to the battery life + screen quality + camera quality + decent software/security of iOS.
Text selection peaked with Force Touch, where holding the space button, moving to start point, pressing down even harder to start selection en lifting finger at the end was sooo ergonomic.
I've got one.
When iPhone alarm goes off, the screen doesn't wake up, so I press the power button. Which snoozes the alarm. Not only did I not want to snooze the alarm, I hoped that the alarm would wake the phone up so I can click 'stop'.
I assume that's a bug rather than a holding-it-wrong?
Yeah, these are funny.
There's a strange logic (that I understand is not just at Apple) where if you ship a known bug, it becomes harder next release to fix it… because we already shipped the bug once (twice, etc.).
Apple engineers care though. If they were allowed to (given time, priority), they would love to knock out some of their oldest and most annoying bugs. And I understand that from time to time a bug-fix-only OS release is planned… but things always come up. New hardware, "AI"… who knows.
Maybe someday we'll get another Snow Leopard (bug-fix-only OS release).
It's really staggering how much impact one engineer can have when working on a product used by billions of people. Fixing just one of these issues would instantly be the most valuable thing that person ever does in their life by orders of magnitude. We have incredible leverage in the software world.
The emoji search box's search bar sometimes will just stop working, usually after a {input, erase input, new input} sequence. No idea why. Dismiss picker, try again.
Sometimes the picker just refuses to be summoned.
Bluetooth is a mess. File transfers will fail, who knows why? Certainly not macOS. Often I'll just punt to GoogleDrive-TP.
Really random screen wakes.
Left macOS alone for 5s? All your windows have decided to start playing a game of musical desktop, and need 10s to re-arrange themselves back into place, also while sometimes displaying their contents at 2x.
Slack has any number of these; e.g., emoji inside codeblocks are simply corrupted. A number of odd corner cases in URLs will corrupt, and each edit of the message will further corrupt it.
So much of the web is plagued by some framework that, upon any JS exception, will destroy the entire DOM (idk maybe defunct page > no page at all?) and leave you only with "ApplicationError: …".
At this point I'd add "is a motorcycle a car? Is a pedestrian signal a stop light?!" CAPTCHAKCAS to this list, but those are a "feature".
This list is frustrating to read because it reminds me of all the time I've spent dealing with these bugs. Not all of them thankfully but more than half steal my time at least once on a weekly basis. They're all bad but I think the auto correct actively fighting me and the ios cursor thing are perhaps the most annoying of the bunch for me. Trying to communicate well on a mobile platform is bad enough but when it's actively sabotaging you it's just so much worse.
Now do Google. A few that immediately come to mind:
* Accounts: Can't use a GSuite address for Youtube, Nest, or any other Alphabet offering. Never explained. 15 years of this.
* Sheets: Hide the sum option in the menu bar. After digging, you find the Summa character and click on it. Oh, it's a menu of functions, not sum.
* Search.
Some of these bugs are more well known but for some like AirDrop not working or hotspot not connecting I always thought “well it’s probably because some power setting / DNS config / ad blocker / whatever” that I accidentally changed from the default years ago.
Nostalgia is real but I do remember a not so distant past (around iPhone 4S or so) where AirDrop worked, autocorrect worked, text selection was flawed but predictable, WiFi connected and stayed connected etc.
What happened?
With the latest Google Gemini deal to be the backend for Apple’s AI, I wish Apple could also do a deal for search (even though Google seems to be struggling more as time passes). Apple’s search being broken in Settings on iOS, macOS and iPadOS seem intentional — it can’t search in a relatively small and fixed list of items! Is it any wonder that Mail search doesn’t work with external data?
The AirDrop and Hotspot issues described are spot on. The success rate for these is like 40% to 65% (the latter if you’re lucky). These features require doing a dance of airplane mode, disconnect from WiFi, go to Settings and fiddle with the toggles, etc. When it works, it’s like magic. At other times, it’s a big joke on “it just works”.
Text selection and the trials to just move the cursor quickly and accurately: it’s like Apple has no senior management that cares enough (looking at you, Craig Federighi), no QA (this is obvious truth to every user) and no money to spend on making things better (don’t let the stock prices fool you). FWIW, I know of slower and fiddly ways to move the cursor somewhat (press space, hold and move or place finger on the text, hold and move).
All these issues persist for years or decades because senior management does not care. I can’t think of any other rational explanation.
I have a fun one: my iPhone (12 Pro) refuses to acknowledge that it has eSIM functionality, even though the hardware exists.
I'm fairly sure I know what the problem is! It was restored from a backup taken on an iPhone X that had two physical SIM slots (Chinese version). The new phone now seems to think it has two physical SIM slots: it shows an IMEI2 in About, but any attempt to use the eSIM functionality just fails (scanning a code does "nothing"; no "add" button is visible, etc.).
If this was an Android phone, I'd root it and just fix the offending network configuration file. I believe it's possible to tamper with a backup of the phone to fix the issue, but this would mean a full backup+restore cycle and some specialized tooling to go mucking with the backup.
I filed a Radar on it ages ago, but I'm assuming nobody ever picked it up.
Spotlight search is infinitely more useful than the Windows 10+ start menu. 99% of the time I'm just using it to open an app or a recent document/download.
In Windows, if I hit [Win], type "fusion" (to open Fusion 360, an app in the "Start Menu" folder, for what that's worth nowadays), there's a 70% chance it will do a Bing search for "fusion".
Something I’ve noticed recently is that I press notifications by accident a lot more frequently. They just always pop in right when I’m trying to do something else. I suspect it’s because of the smart widget UI at the top of the screen that shows now playing, sports scores, direction etc. We didn’t used to interact with anything up there!
But it’s extremely annoying to open a 300+ unread messages chat when I didn’t want to!
Is anyone else annoyed by Finder's terrible search box? Everytime I try to search something, it seems to insert random results in the list that have nothing to do with the term. I have to always explicitly click Filename so it only searches for files with that name.
Solid list. I’d like to add the following:
- All: Contact syncing with Office 365 results in stored birthdays getting moved forward by one day. - macOS: Bluetooth audio stuttering when going in and out of full screen view in a given app such as PowerPoint. - macOS: Unlock using Apple Watch will randomly stop working - macOS: Safari suddenly going out to lunch and taking 30+ seconds to load a page (fixed by force quitting the entire browser).
What about that text selection bug all OSes have had for 20+ years. I'm dragging to select text, and if I drag one pixel too far, it inverts the selection.
I was given an iPad at work and had to make an Apple account to use it. Every time, the form on the website errored out with "Your account can currently not be created" without any further information. By trial and error, I figured out that creating an account with the exact same information on the iPad worked. Not the best first impressions of the "it just works" company.
Please add to the list "Launching Apple Music without you wanting to, at the worst possible moment", which is every moment, really.
Syncing on Apple devices across the board is pretty bad. A great example is the Notes app. It took me a year to convince my wife to migrate our grocery list away from the Notes app. So many arguments about missed grocery items that never synced.
The time lost estimates here are comically implausible--if Apple bugs were wasting 32m person-years per year, with around 1.5b Apple product users total, this would imply that the average Apple product user loses 32m/1.5b ~= 2% of their life, or about 11 16-hour days, to Apple bugs. If that were happening to you you'd, uh, notice :)
All this s#it was already expected, because this is what happened when companies get big enough without competition or any kind of regulation.
This already happened in other markets and lots of people have warned this would happened again but nobody cared.
Now it doesn't matter anymore because Apple is so big that no matter what kind of s#it they do, nothing will hurt their sales, because people are trapped, depend on their stuff and don't have any other options.
The AirDrop randomly not working one is really manifesting at the most inconvenient times.
Apple simply won't fix it.
I’ve encountered several of these, but (at least on iOS 26.2), I can’t reproduce the typo one.
> Autocorrect Won't Take No For An Answer. You fixed it. It unfixed it. You fixed it again. It unfixed it again.
My experience is after the system makes the first autocorrection, the word is underlined, allowing me to revert to the original spelling. Then subsequent instances of the word aren't autocorrected.
It’s true though that if I leave the context and enter the same unrecognized term elsewhere, it’s the same grind. The only fix for this is to spotlight search for “Text Replacement” settings page to essentially add it to the iPhone’s dictionary. Clunky, but personally only have had to do this twice.
I own an Android phone. The first time I tried to send a text from my wife's iPhone, I sent the wrong text 3 times in a row because autocorrect was convinced that it knew the word I wanted and I swear that the word was corrected only after I had committed to pressing the send button. At the time the autocorrect on Android was very mild; it's gotten more aggressive since, but still nothing like Apple's
Wow, the first three "bugs" on this are so spot on.
The Apple Pay Card icon that changes addresses always gets me. It's not what I would expect it to do.
This rightfully deserves its #1 spot on Hacker News. I've experienced most of these bugs for longer than I can remember (and my memory goes back to the Apple II days. Maybe this will help shame Apple into fixing these problems.
Several of these I don’t have any problems with myself, but the one that I get affected by all the time that I haven’t seen here, at least from as far down as I scrolled, is the bizarre typo that the voice dictation randomly inserts a capitalized word in middle of sentences. I’ve never understood that one. It’s like I can technically be hands-free most of the time except I have to go back and correct capitalized words for no reason.
> Apple Pay: Card Icon Changes Address
This has been driving me nuts. The old design was perfect. Who could possibly think this made sense?
The simple answer is that fixing any of these doesn't get those Software engineers promoted. And that has been the case for as long as Crag Federighi has been in charge of software. Yet he is extremely popular on HN and everywhere on the internet.
Yes it is the same in all other software company. But we expect better from Apple.
To add to the list: on iOS, if your music library is mp3s transfered on the phone with itunes, iOS randomizes the artwork of the mp3s, so a song will show a completely different artwork. Have experienced that for years, on multiple devices and across versions of iOS.
Last time I made a satirical site I was banned from the registrar (I was "convincing" people that aliens were real apparently)
Had a similar thought today while marking up pdfs with my iPad. Half of the time I'm fighting with Files' ability to persist my changes after it frequently crashes. Why market it as an iPad if marking up pdfs is so scuffed? this has been happening for years, it's like Apple's desire to add new features tops the desire to fix long lived bugs.
Sometimes the bugs are features, I.e, natural scrolling different and inconsistent between mouse and mousepad without third party extensions. Thanks Apple!
A bug that’s persisted for 10 years at least is in the Music app. When you lose Wi-Fi the app will skip to the next song over and over and eventually freeze up.
How about a Screen Time Parental Controls literally do not work, at all, just completely unusable and broken?
How about I can’t connect my AirPods to my watch to play music because my watch insists on acting as a remote control for my phone Music app, and support hasn’t been able to fix it for 5 years, over several watches and AirPods?
All of those would be so much better if there was at least some way to get a proper error message or status message.
I have a lot of pet Apple bugs. Top of mind at the moment:
Why can't we adjust the order of photos in a Shared Photos album?
Good list.
WTF happened to iOS text selection? It's a shitshow now. First Apple decided that the cursor shouldn't snap to the space between characters. WHY? Why would I want to start a selection in the middle of a character? Oh yeah: I never would, and can't anyway. So why does the cursor go there?
Then there's the fact that if you press and hold and release, the "select all" option (and others) doesn't appear anymore. Try again. Try again. And then after the fifth? Seventh? try, suddenly you get the floating menu.
And then there's the now-often-useless magnifying glass, which frequently appears offscreen or behind the stupid notch.
And the window resizing. Ugh. It wasn't until what, the mid-2000s that you could resize an Apple window by anything other than THE LOWER-RIGHT CORNER. No other corners, and no edges. The sheer stupidity of this was galling.
When Apple finally "fixed" that, they did so in typical Apple fashion: grudgingly. They refuse to put frames on windows, so there's no clear area in which the cursor should become the resizing cursor. Is it any wonder that the resizing behavior is flaky as hell? And now it's even worse.
This is cute and I hate stubborn Apple bugs as much as anyone. But these $100 billion figures should be weighed against the hypothetical trillions that Apple has contributed to humanity.
A domain name registered one day ago. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a domain on its first/second day, other than my own domains.
I did not intentionally look it up. I have an extension installed that tells me domain age whenever I visit a site.
Clicking on folders that you have put in Finders sidebar - It will not display the folder with the view settings set for that folder, but instead the last folder you clicked in the sidebar. It seems to happen clicking from top to bottom vs bottom to top. You just cant make this sh*t up it's so bad.
Example sidebar:
Applications - Always shows as icons
Documents - Shows as icons if you last clicked on Applications. Shows as details if last you clicked on Downloads
Downloads - Always shows as details
Finder is the absolute worst we could write a book about it. Once a year or so all my sidebar folders randomly vanish and I have to re-add them.
Also The most annoying "it's a feature, not a bug" - That instant drop down of the title bar in full screen if the mouse cursor hits the top edge of the screen. So obnoxious with remote desktop sessions. No delay, no way to disable it, no way to change anything about it.