There are many brilliant things about iOS 13 and iPadOS 13. But since the software’s release in early September there have been a lot of updates. The most recent one, iOS 13.2.3, arrived on Monday, November 18.



Now, a report by Mark Gurman at Bloomberg suggests that a big change is coming. Nobody likes bugs, and iOS 13 has been hit by quite a few. Check out Forbes contributor Gordon Kelly’s regular “Should You Upgrade?” features to get a sense of them.

 Items included apps closing in the background, come-and-go cellular signal, email issues and more.

According to Gurman, a whole new approach has been started at Apple, with an internal meeting apparently putting in place a system where daily builds of software automatically disable unfinished or buggy features. The software testers can choose to enable those features again in a way that allows them to see what each individual addition does to the software.

 Phones do so much these days they have incredibly sophisticated software to make everything work. It seems that the twin channels of daily and weekly changes left test software in different stages of development, and may have contributed to the issues that arose when software was released.
So, what will all this mean?

 For a start, buggy releases should be minimized and updates to repair the issues fewer. The testing will come into force with next year’s iOS 14 release, it’s believed, and Gurman says some iOS 14 features may already have been held for the 2021 release, doubtless to be called iOS 15.

 Apple has refocused on quality before, in the run-up to last year’s iOS 12 software which had far fewer updates and was considered solid and relatively bug-free. That was at the partial expense of some new features, however.


Still, according to Gurman, those familiar with the company’s plans still think that iOS 14 will boast a wide range of new features and capabilities, as was the case with iOS 13.

 The previous quality focus before iOS 12 apparently gave rise to what were called Tiger Teams, which sound rather exciting, though there’s no evidence actual stripy felines were involved, sadly.

 These teams were tasked with addressing performance issues in particular parts of the software.

 The next big release is expected to be iOS 13 unless a smaller bug-fixing one is needed before then. Either way, as soon as it’s released, you can read about it here on Forbes first