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This article was published on September 16, 2020

Apple pisses off devs by launching iOS 14 with just a day’s notice


Apple pisses off devs by launching iOS 14 with just a day’s notice

Apple’s September event held virtually yesterday didn’t have too many surprises for customers. Almost everyone new that new Apple Watches, refreshed iPads, and the Apple One bundle is coming.

However, the company announced that its iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 will start rolling out from the very next day. This caught third-party app developers off-guard, as they usually have at least a week’s time to prepare their apps to be compatible with the latest versions of those platforms, after Apple’s marquee event.

After Apple announces its iPhones, it releases Xcode and iOS’ “Golden Master” version (the one that will ship to customers), so that developers can tune their apps for when customers get the latest mobile operating system.

Last year, iOS 13 rolled out almost 10 days after the iPhone event, allowing devs a decent amount of time to get their apps ready. This year, they have a window of hardly a day to test and push out their updated code.

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It’s understandable that creators want to push their apps on the release day of the OS, so they can attract more downloads. But a day’s deadline is very stressful as they would need to work on the final version of their apps and submit them for review.

And even after Xcode was out (it’s been under 12 hours at the time of writing) there were so many anomalies. Developers were not able to build their apps properly and multiple Xcode GM versions released in one night caused a lot of confusion.

Apple squashed some of these problems, but all of these could’ve been avoided if the company gave enough time for developers to prepare.

Developer James Thompson thinks that Apple didn’t want to release the Golden Master version because it might’ve revealed some details about the products company launched yesterday.

This meme sums up the situation well.

Even if this was the case, Apple could’ve delayed the rollout for iOS and iPadOS by a few days to give developers some breathing room. We asked the company to provide details on why it decided to release new OS versions without any notice to developers, and we’ll update the story if we hear back.

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