My Nokia C2-01 purchased in 2013 worked for many years without a single (!) glitch. Of course it didn't pretend to do as many things as iPhone does, but for it was capable of it worked always with 100% quality.

I bought an iPhone13 mini looking forward for "quality", but after few years of usage I realized that the quality is exactly what I have lost:

• Time-to-time when I open a contact, the "Call" button is disabled without any explanation. Surprisingly turning wifi and/or bluetooth and/or mobile data ON and then OFF again results in the "Call" button becoming re-enabled. Is the call function not an essential functionality of the phone to be dependent on such nonsense? Imagine you have an emergency and need to call real quick. • Every time I open the "Notes" app it greets me with "Mobile Data is Turned Off" pop-up. Mobile data just to type some notes? Who do you have to send it to? • DND logic so complicated and buggy that I started using the flight mode to be "sure" that nobody calls through. • "Settings" icon keeps displaying the "1" badge in revenge for my refusal to set up my Face ID.

Well, I thought, at least this thing is a very good camera (which it really is). As if reading my thoughts, it started recording my landscape videos as portrait which I didn't manage to fix, so now I have to rotate the recorded videos on my PC.

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.

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.

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.

The same happens with their developer frameworks. I used to submit tickets (radars, as they call them) for framework bugs clearly reproducible in a few lines of code. They never got fixed over multiple OS releases, so I stopped bothering.

> Autocorrect Won't Take No For An Answer

Oh god. I don't use an iOS device regularly, so when I encountered this issue I had to control myself not to throw the device. Absolutely horrible experience. Worse part is that it autocorrects when pressing "send", not just when adding a space or a period. So the correct word gets corrected wrong and immediately sent.

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!

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.

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.

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".

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.

I think a lot of these are just hard to reproduce. Take the AirDrop one, it's been 5 years probably since I had an issue with it, and I use it quite a bit.

Auto correct? No idea, I switch that off by default anyway since I switch between languages.

Most of the others - I haven't seen that at all. With the exception of a couple, like the macOS 26 resizing. That happened to me once. But I keep trying to reproduce it and I simply can't.

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).

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).

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?

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.

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".

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.

Please add to the list "Launching Apple Music without you wanting to, at the worst possible moment", which is every moment, really.

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.

The organizational analysis is the right framing. These aren't engineering failures - the fixes are likely straightforward. They're prioritization failures. When your org is optimized for shipping features (announcements at WWDC, headlines, stock bumps), fixing old bugs doesn't compete. The bugs that persist are the ones that don't affect demos or first-run experiences.

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

Mail search is a joke. HoudahSpot was the best way to search your mail right up until Apple made that stop working.

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!

This is brilliant and about 50% of the top 10 bugs affect me regularly. Some (eg airdrop, mail search, spotlight search) are absolutely maddening. If this even slightly prods Apple into doing something about it, this would be a net win for humanity.

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.

Spotlight opens the wrong application so many times with some odd heuristic favoring a random vscode.ts file (labeled as an mpeg-2 stream?) when typing "code".

But the best one is typing "ghos" and pressing enter as it highlight "Ghostty", but as your finger presses the key, spotlight swaps ghostty for some other random application (generally mail).

Switch to Linux and take control over your hardware.

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.

Just typing on iOS randomly inserts the wrong characters: https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo

I thought it was just me until someone mentioned this on HN

The AirDrop randomly not working one is really manifesting at the most inconvenient times.

Apple simply won't fix it.

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

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.

It's funny that a trillion dollar company which which was originally built by Steve to be the front-runner of tech and innovation and was supposed to provide the best user experience to end users is actually turning out to be the most annoying or frustrating one in deliver what user ACTUALLY needs.

I think most popular OS's these days have >5000 open bugs and some may get attention if they actually break something serious enough. Others may get plastered over in a new major OS update, which opens another 1000 bugs or so. I have no problem with a rolling number of bugs, but this is a tiny list of age-old bugs. I'd like to be in the room when Apple's people decide what to work on, but I bet I would get depressed instantly since they obviously don't use their products.

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.

Connection-related bugs are the worst. Here I am, wishing that after 15 years of hotspot software and WiFi/BT enhancements I'd get painless hotspot, airdrop and general WiFi connectivity. My bad, still not possible.

But yeah Liquid Ass surely is lickable.

Apple software, especially Mac software, tanked ages ago.

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.

Just yesterday, I encountered a classic frustration.

I wanted to forward an image from one Messages conversation, to another one.

The “target” conversation was one that I’ve been having for a couple of years, with a friend.

In the “Forward” sheet, I select that friend’s Contacts card, and it moves to the ongoing (blue bubble) conversation.

I hit the Send button.

Green bubbles.

I get a failure to send message, saying it’s a bogus number.

Messages used my friend’s work landline, even though we’ve been communicating for years, on his iPhone line, and it put the bogus send into the iPhone conversation.

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.

> 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 macOS login screen is broken since basically forever. Opening a macbook lid and choosing another user than the one already selected is a PITA. I can't even remember it working. And I have the issue on 3 macbooks.

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 :)

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.

Out of these the text selection and the Apple Pay card button bring me the most daily pain.

Even writing this short sentence I’ve accidentally deleted words when I just wanted to move the cursor and it decides, no, you must want to select that whole word

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.

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.

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.

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.

The autocorrect is a real pain, especially when you are using a correct and grammatical word, but Apple decides, F&ck you, you will use this other word instead.

And the text select has been broken for years, as the site points out. I thought it was a mobile thing until I used an Android, and it just worked.

These are minor irritations, but they are adding up so much so I'm thinking about Android...

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.

Last time I made a satirical site I was banned from the registrar (I was "convincing" people that aliens were real apparently)

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.

> $6.4 trillion

Total time value lost to text selection games sounds about right.

When I just selected that figure, I had to select twice because double tapping “trillion” then grabbing a text selection endpoint never works the first time.

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?

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.

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.

Sometimes the bugs are features, I.e, natural scrolling different and inconsistent between mouse and mousepad without third party extensions. Thanks Apple!

IIRC the animation that plays when you use ctrl+arrow keys to swap desktops is tied to the framerate so it's ridiculously slow on high refresh rate monitors.

also the passwords popup on MacOS only sometimes takes keyboard input, so if I want to insert a TOTP pin, I can't reliably use the tab key or worse the search bar to reach it.

Not sure if it is a bug, but not being able to uninstall Developer Tools or Rosetta when you are done with it.

Site looks to be by https://github.com/polymath-ventures/

The page should focus on the bugs, since there's no shortage of them. But clicking on "Change payment method" to change payment method is not a bug, is just bad UI.

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?

This is spot on! I have experienced all these issues at one point or other and my spotlight search is frozen as I type this on a Mac mini.

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?

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.

No podcast app bugs?

Are you even trying?

Podcast app in CarPlay: A episode of a show is playing. It has the episode name, the show name, and a date. None of them hint at being pressable (touchscreen). But one is. Guess which one? The date one. That’s the only one that’s interactive and the only one that takes you to the actual show with its library.

Podcast app on phone. 90% of the time the downloaded episode is not there even if you just downloaded it. Sometimes you have to have another “safe” downloaded episode from another podcast to FORCE downloaded episodes to appear. If you don’t have this safe reserve episode in your downloads, your downloads will be a black hole. Download a safe one, and suddenly the missing ones pop into the folder, or heck, generate the folder at all.

10% of the time the episodes will just fail while downloading without ever resuming.

An issue that frequently annoys me is the keyboard not opening in apps that use a WebView, eg. progressive web apps.

https://kagi.com/search?q=webview+no+keyboard+ios

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.

> The credit card icon doesn't change the credit card

Ha. I thought I was the only one who's cursed this every single time I need to change payment (which is often)

> You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.

Holding the space bar is your friend on this one. I recently learned, holding two fingers will move with selecting.

I feel heard. Auto-correct un-correcting what I corrected three times in a row is maddening.

I’m not sure if it’s a bug, but I find it frustrating that there isn’t a more efficient way to organize the grid of apps on your iOS home screen.

I’m not sure it it’s a bug but I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about it: When you use apple maps and your phone is locked and you want to unlock your phone, for some reason it takes like 5 seconds or something to unlock the phone which feels like forever. The ui feeling insanely unresponsive and weird, you have to swipe further than usual and it takes way longer. It feels like the phone is fighting you! How dare I want to use my phone while navigating! (Even when walking)

I think what’s happening is that face ID doesn’t activate until you stop swiping, where usually it would start when you look at the phone or pick it up? Presumably because you’re going to be looking at the phone a lot when using maps.

God I hate it so much. I didn’t use apple maps for years because of it but then I switched to apple maps because of some egregious privacy violation by google maps that I can no longer remember.

Also applies to other apps that work when your phone is locked like phone calls.

I laughed at “autocorrect will die on this hill.”

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.

What about the "Sign in to iCloud" one?

Phone: I know you probably opened your phone for a reason, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]

Me: Maybe Later.

Phone: Ok, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]

Me: Maybe Later.

Phone: Ok, but would you mind signing in to iCloud? [OK] [Maybe Later]

... repeat infintely until...

Me: Ok. [Then find the little arrow in the top left corner to get back to phoning].

Extra points for immediately locking my AppleID every time I finally break down and type my password in, forcing an email => browser "unlock your appleID" journey.

Some days I go through this whole experience four times in a row before it finally settles down. Then I make the classic blunder of opening one of my iPads and the whole thing starts again on both devices.

I assume it's just their form of blackmail to force me to upgrade to their 2FA thing so that they can finally lock me out of my old devices for good.

All of those would be so much better if there was at least some way to get a proper error message or status message.

Most of these are fully on Apple, but for the Gmail and Google Contacts bugs, I'd say Google is at least partly to blame for positioning the open standards versions of their APIs (IMAP and CardDAV in this case) as secondary to their own proprietary APIs and not implementing them particularly well.

The one about Spotlight not searching for files, I assume that's like Windows Explorer, which also famously has a terrible search.

Why do these large companies reliably struggle with file search but third party software does it instantaneously, including reading the NTFS partition table for speed?

The most egregious bug/s I've encountered in recent years is the utterly cursed tab management in iOS Safari.

A couple of times a year it will just nuke all my open tabs (450-500) and present me with a delightful blank screen. Before that it will mislabel the active tab group on and off before giving up entirely.

Quick action on my part stops the destruction syncing & I usually end up recovering them on my Mac & then save them as a tab group.

But literally just an hour ago, iOS Safari looked like it nuked ALL MY TAB GROUPS. Ugh. They were gone; swiping right led to the "New tab group" screen. Frantic backing up and a restart later, and the tab groups are back, as though the phone was like "just kidding!". FML. So much for that backup plan.

UI bugs are one thing, but how is that level of data loss acceptable in a modern operating system? Boggles the mind.

(And don't get me started on the UI track wreck that is the iOS-inspired/inflicted bookmark management on macOS Safari, where all Mac UI conventions went out the window for some reason.)

Nobody ever gets promoted from fixing bugs, no matter how bad the bugs are. And this is true even in much smaller companies.

You forgot when autocorrect fixes your word the second time, in 50% of cases you hit send too fast and have to send a follow up correction or edit the message

For the autocomplete one: on MacOS you can press ESC and get rid of the proposal.

I can't seem to reproduce the mail search bug.

Is the eternal delay bringing up the MacOS native colour picker in the list? Click on a colour to change it, wait about 10 seconds, eventually it appears. Every. Single. Time.

Idk what’s wrong with me but I’ve never run into any of these!

They really should start using better models for autocorrect and autocomplete. My autocomplete is total bs

That email bug is the worst.

I actually keep the Gmail app installed on my iPhone specifically for searching my mail. It's infuriating.

how can we make sure Apple leadership sees this?

I'm still waiting for apple to fix ringtones on siri generated alarms

The hotspot issue is my absolute pet peeve. It is so bad for me that I just had to accept that I have two options for hotspotting:

1. Go to settings and change my phones name then connect. Every. Damn. Time.

2. Use a cable and hope the MacBook Pro picks it up.

Honestly the quality of iPhones has deteriorated to a point where my next phone will just be something like an oppo or xiomi. I’m done paying £500+ for a phone that doesn’t do what it’s meant to while forcing a load of crap I don’t want down my neck

Apple Screentime. 100 settings. If you crack the code it works. One wrong setting and the childs device is as open as a book.

No no no, please don't try to shame them publicly, because they will rewrite it in SwiftUI and it's going to be even worse!

The Apple Pay one drives me crazy

Bugs Apple loves? It must be all of them, because they hardly ever fix any. And they make more of them with each OS release.

I stopped reading at the very first bug:

> Mail Search Doesn't Work

For me mail search works very very well. Ironically, it's one of the features that convinced me to use Mail as my primary and only email client.

I'm wondering if the author of the rant is using the search input of the single message/thread, instead of the global one, or if they are not aware that the global search is by selected account, so if you want to search in all accounts you have to first select the unified inbox. By the way, this is another awesome feature of Mail, while the search string is in the input, you can switch accounts and see the different results per account.

Before anyone asks: I have 5 email accounts, between them, I have way more than 100.000 messages (might be 5x, I don't have the Mac now to check) and they're all synced on my devices (it's ~24gb of messages)

This is satire, but it is so real that it hurts. I have encountered all of those bugs and more.

The worst part is the delusional Apple fanboys who will pretend it always works for them because they have associated their ego with the ownership of Apple devices.

Google might be bad, but at least it works most of the time. And hilariously, Microsoft, well-known for bugs galore, actually manages to make softwares that are less infuriating in the long run.

This is another level of petty, I love it Maybe it will inspire them to hire more engineers and we can kill two birds with one stone.

Tim Cook is "stepping down" soon. Do you think his replacement will fix these things? I stopped using Apple stuff shortly after Steve Jobs died. Linus is still alive, but I wonder where I'll move once he is gone.

Mine “favorite” bug is the auto-replace of I->O on iOs. O think that’s a real strange one, and really wonder whether anybody ever uses “O think” in English.

> Apple Pay: Card Icon Changes Address

This one is one of my pet peeves even outside of Apple Pay. My personal opinion is that almost all iconography is just reinventing the wheel. We already have a widely-accepted iconographic vocabulary already understood by a billion people: Chinese characters. The fact that English speakers can't read it is immaterial, because English speakers already can't read the icons we're already using. Using Chinese iconography in all languages will dramatically increase the legibility of the icons we use in apps.

(Or, we could just put regular text under the icon...)

This is obvious AI-generated web design style.

I guess it’s about priorities and not prowess, but it is shocking/fascinating the things Apple seems really bad at.

The Mac is funniest of all. I can’t imagine Tahoe drives an upgrade cycle. I buy a Mac for the hardware. Why not refine it? I would love to have a Mac with a better OS. (Don’t troll me about Linux. It’s worse.)

Hm, what’s worse? To be incapable or simply not to care enough?

This is a Claude-coded website that invents metrics and data based on bald-faced lies, ex. the first example makes up that the search in Mail does not work 100% of the time and then calculates fantastical millions of hours wasted.

I can report it works fine, needed it to pull up 13 year old emails for me a couple months ago.

I absolutely abhor Apple’s software QC since 2010 but I don’t think a vibe-coded, vibes-based, fantasy, written by AI, with the sheen of numbers and reality is the way to do it, or a net-positive outlet for my frustration. At least on HN.

I think it's a bit of bullshit. the first bug (Mail search) with millions of people allegedly affected somehow never affected me on 5 Apple devices in 10+ years. what??

No one cares anymore.

Everyone sits on giant balls of mud and those who built those balls are long gone. Fixing any of this would mean wading through and fixing endless legacy code at the risk of introducing new bugs. Some of it has hardware and radio broadcasting quirks involved which probably narrows down the people capable to understand the problem to almost 0.

And of those 0 people, no one gets promoted for fixing the incredibly buggy AirDrop. No one even knows how to replicate those bugs. Some iPhones in the wild sometimes stop being able to be found by other iPhones in the wild. Yikes. How do you even begin? Who's gonna write some debug code for a debug app for an iPhone in a lab and then runs back and forth with 50 other iPhones that also need to run debug code to finally get one in the state where it's unable to find or be found and then check diagnostics the communications hardware returns only to find out you need more diagnostic code.

Sync issues? Yikes again. Who the fuck would want to touch a system where any new bug could mean the destruction of trillions of photos and the wrath of OVER A BILLION of users. Flaky connections, many clients, sync algorithms, space on device limits, quota in the cloud limit, offloading of images. Also, once again, how do you even reliably replicate this issue which sporadically happens and sporadically resolves?

At scale and beyond critical mass, love and care and quality software are not rewarded. They are extra costs, just like human support agents.

Imagine if life was this zero sum

Ah, you can add to that list messages never showing you your attachments

Have a thread going with someone for years? Yeah good luck seeing more than 20% if anything you’ve ever sent each other

All these are so infuriating. It's crazy what a nice metal case and good hardware can make people forgive.

The first one is pretty funny because Gmail search itself has a lot of issues.

iOS user here of a few years, never hit any of the bugs in this article.

Maybe Apple didn’t fix them because the bugs never existed in the first place.