Bugs Apple loves

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1mb4lod/is_anyone_else...

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'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.

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".

Two other bugs I haven't seen mentioned yet:

- The notes field in the Contacts app on iOS is completely broken. If you start typing a contact note the page jumps around randomly. And if you have a longer note it won't autoscroll to the cursor so you're typing blind. Became even worse in iOS 26...

- Stage Manager on macOS feels very buggy due to inconsistent behavior across apps and windows. Could be great in theory, but in practice frustrating to use.

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).

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.

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?

- 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).

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.

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".

This has been driving me nuts. The old design was perfect. Who could possibly think this made sense?

Apple simply won't fix it.

Taken to an extreme, I expect that Apple will evolve to have only one product, with minimal surface area. A button you press that gives money to apple, in response you receive some sort of lovely bauble with no actual functionality. The cost to apple to maintain this would be quite small (they could probably survive with 10 engineers focused mainly on site reliability) and given the historical pattern of Apple customers (I am one), would be highly profitable.

But even now, I acknowledge the latest macOS release is dreadful. Just absolutely dreadful.

And the fix is easy - hire new young talent. Hire kids out of college. Bring in fresh faces who are going to speak the truth, who are hungry to make it better. Listen to them and do what they say.

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 Apple Pay Card icon that changes addresses always gets me. It's not what I would expect it to do.

But it’s extremely annoying to open a 300+ unread messages chat when I didn’t want to!

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...

You'll know it's going to happen before it happens as well, if the lossless icon doesn't appear within 1-2 seconds after playing a track.

I promise I'm not crazy, it's not just me. Just search for "15 seconds" in Apple Community: https://discussions.apple.com/search?q=15+seconds

I'm sure this is likely already fixed in the latest version of iOS and macOS, but I use Apple Music for Windows: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pfhdd62mxs1

I switched from Spotify to Apple Music mainly for lossless audio. The Apple One Family subscription helped sell it. However, now I can't play non-downloaded tracks without waiting 5-30 minutes for the music to start playing.

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

Create an HTML email signature in TextEdit or some other rich text editor on macOS, copy it and paste it on iOS using Continuity Clipboard into the signature text field in iOS’ Settings -> Apps -> Mail -> Signature text field, and pray that it works.

When it does work, it ignores text size. Want your email signature to be in a smaller font size? Too bad.

The only workaround I’ve found is to copy an email signature from another email account that miraculously did copy over successfully, copy it on iOS and paste that in to another’s email signature field, and manually rewrite the whole thing.

Of course, the HTML links aren’t editable, and the Signature text fields don’t enable the “Add Link” item to the hover tools menu when selecting text.

Worst of all, even when the email signature is finally perfect, the Signature text field doesn’t preview it properly. If text is pasted in at a smaller text size, the preview still shows it at the default size. The only way to accurately preview an email signature is to draft a new email and hope the email signature displays like it did originally in TextEdit.

In short, never create a new HTML email signature on iOS. Create in on a Mac (source), copy it over the network with Continuity Clipboard, hope it works, and treat the iOS email signature fields (destination) as a never- or rarely-editable workspace.

At least 6 years old.

https://superuser.com/questions/1516621/macbook-sound-balanc...

Still around as of 2025: https://www.techradar.com/computing/mac-os/its-2025-and-appl...

There’s a dedicated applet to fix this…

But, the keyboard never activates in any field.

If you use that to charge your phone (so the external screen is off), you can’t talk to people since the phone really don’t want you to have a keyboard at all as long as your connected.

I also had to type over reindex 3 times to get it to stick :)

Apple frameworks for exif editing do strange thing, and exif is altered even if you never touch it.

In particular for me, the gps location cannot be written at the full accuracy allowed, and overwrites accurate data.

For the location, exif allows 3 rationals, for degrees, minutes and seconds, but apple ignores the seconds.

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.

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.

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.

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).

But yeah Liquid Ass surely is lickable.

Apple software, especially Mac software, tanked ages ago.

* 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.

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.

Yes it is the same in all other software company. But we expect better from Apple.

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?

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

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

Why can't we adjust the order of photos in a Shared Photos album?

1. Open a file using Preview, but it is behind all other windows. 2. If you connect to your own personal hotspot (iphone) on mac, you can't forget it and connect to someone else's hotspot.

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.

I did not intentionally look it up. I have an extension installed that tells me domain age whenever I visit a site.

I selected a different credit card on Apple Pay and my skis were shipped to my ex-wife's house instead of mine, because it quietly changed the address!

Good thing we're in the same town...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

Meanwhile on Windows we could talk about unreliable updates causing major bugs (explorer crashes, audio failures, slow performance, taskbar issues), poor quality assurance leading to regressions, bloatware. not to mention the hardware is in a different league.

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

> 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)

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?

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...)

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?

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.

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.

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

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