I am baffled by Apple's incompetence here. In the past years I've seen:

* iTunes/Music app randomly reassign my Album artwork, with different (incorrect) art showing up on different devices!

* Reminders app: shared reminder lists can end up with the name of a different list

* Ghost photos that are deleted from my phone, and come back later.

* Maps, when I say "navigate to $friend" set a route that ended in my own driveway.

To me, these bugs suggest a fundamental design flaw, perhaps they are using a simple Integer as an index rather than a UUID?

Or maybe the database schema are solid, but there's some sort of race condition in their synchronization frameworks and the data is getting scrambled in RAM?

Whatever it is, it's absolutely insane that in 2025 these kinds of bugs are happening.

I completely agree about there being a fundamental design flaw.

I still use Macs because data on a physical disk seems perfectly reliable, but I've been bitten by so many of these bugs in their apps. iCloud files completely disappear, then reappear a day later. Highlight a couple chapters of a PDF in Preview, then reopen the file and they're gone because iCloud thinks the older unhighlighted version is newer or something. Madness. I don't touch any of these Apple services/apps anymore.

There's very clearly a fundamental bug in whatever sync framework they seem to share across everything. It's bad enough to have data disappear entirely or deleted data reappear, but then when data shows up in the completely wrong place, and this has been happening for years and years and still isn't fixed... I don't know what to think.

You're right. There's no other word for it but "insane". They can engineer their A-series and M-series microchips, but it's been over a decade now and their sync is still fundamentally broken.

Apple stole my entire music library. I have had one library going back to the first release of iTunes on Windows (2003?) — thousands of songs, most of them CD rips.

I then subscribed to Apple Music and relied on its matching function. After switching from an Intel Mac to an M2 and redownloading my library from remote, it now believes that each and every song in my library are rented Apple Music copies. Even those it shows as having been added in 2003.

Some songs are missing; some go missing, then inexplicably come back months later. Worse: so far I have found around a dozen which have been replaced by different versions.

It's a real mess.

The thing is, in many cases, these products and teams are very siloed from each other. I suspect, having worked in one of these teams, that some of the issues comes from this siloing. Lessons learned aren't shared, and it can be difficult to build integrations.

Another two examples:

* prompts in settings for adding an account recovery contact that never go away, even after months and months of successfully setting it up multiple times.

* OS account profile picture can barely stay associated with the most recently picked option. Happens for non-iCloud local accounts on Mac, happens when I change profile pictures on iOS for iCloud… weird.

* OS account update screens on iPad, iOS, and watchOS will forget that they are in the middle of updating if you navigate away from the settings screen. Thankfully, today they at least recover from it (it’s probably still happening in the background), but it takes several long seconds of spinning for the settings page to remember that it was doing an update two seconds ago before I navigated away from it.

* similar to your ghost pictures bug, deleting a large media file from a media player app moves it to recently deleted, but you can sometimes end up in situations where you can’t permanently delete the file, or it doesn’t show up anywhere but still takes up space. (Talking about 20GB-80GB file sizes where it makes a big difference on OS storage space)

Some of these bugs have been around for a VERY long time.

But the weird thing is I don’t see them in 3rd party apps.

Finder being unable to show file information and instead showing something that looks like file information but is completely wrong is scary and sad. And it has been like this for months. Like here, none of the data in the General part matches the actual file. More info is correct, Preview is correct, so I know I did in fact click the correct file. http://bn5i3r.s3.amazonaws.com/Screenshot-2025-09-17-at-17-0... Happens randomly so I don't know how to report this (and from experience I know that reporting bugs to Apple is completely useless).

Its probably a good thing in a way if someone learns this lesson in a lesser painful way. You need to manage your own files and backups and content. Data portabillity is the opposite of what they want and try to further abstract away until people dont even know what a file or folder is. Its so easy, you dont even have to lift a finger until you decide you want or need to leave. Thats when you realize its sometimes impossible to take it with you

Yeah, I spend a night on writing some python to disentangle my un-amused father's music collection when he stopped using iTunes. What a mess.

iTunes randomly changing album artwork happened to me too. Only thing that fixed it was wiping the iPhone and resyncing with computer.

The clipboard is no longer reliable.

Not sure when exactly that changed, but it was probably a few OS releases ago?