Apple to change in-house testing process for iOS 14 development

It’s no secret that iOS 13 was riddled with bugs when it was released last month. Even worse, every patch and update has introduced new quirks and issues. This debacle has prompted Apple to overhaul its internal testing and development processes starting with iOS 14.

This is according to insiders cited by Bloomberg. The move was announced by Craig Federighi, Apple’s chief of software, at a company meeting. The new process will change how new features are introduced into daily builds of unreleased software. Currently, it seems that all features in development are included and activated by default in each daily build. Under the new mandate, these features will be disabled by default; developers and testers will have to proactively turn them on. 

By disabling the new features, testers should be able to better tell what works and what doesn’t. Under the older system, testers could go days without a working daily build of a new OS. This, in turn, would prevent accurate reports of which features were not working, as all new features were included in the daily build. By disabling all new features and turning them on one by one, testers should be able to better tell what works and what software causes issues.

The new processes are in place for the development of iOS 14, as well as the upcoming versions of watchOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS.