https://tidbits.com/2019/10/21/six-reasons-why-ios-13-and-catalina-are-so-buggy/
These are compelling enough for me not to update to either OS.
Personally I have not had any issues since updating to iOS/iPadOS 13, however I am holding off on Catalina until the syncing issues, at least, are resolved.
Those are reasons why Apple software in general is more buggy. Not specific reasons why this years are so buggy.
This years being so buggy is all about the scope of what was intended to go in this year. More bugs because they decided to try to do more stuff.
In the past Apple has pulled features out of new releases when they weren’t up to snuff. But this time - 18 days after the OS was released - it seems more like a surprising failure to properly detect the problems people were seeing. (Hopefully it wasn’t that they expected it and just decided to push it out with the hope that quick revisions would fix everything, which certainly hasn’t happened yet.)
Apple software is more buggy than what?
More buggy than before.
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As a software dev I can simply say that shipping bug free code is impossible, but there are things that can make the experience better or worse.
In the enterprise space we have seen over the last few years the trend towards micro-services (lots of little applications instead of one big one)
iOS has this huge problem where everything is coupled to an operating system release, there is no reason why every app on the phone should not have its own update lifecycle managed through the store rather then the os.
This practice prevents decoupling of feature set updates from large technical updates, the delta of changes to get the app working on the new apis is less then to get it working on the new apis and have cool new feature X that we want to show off.
Android does this, and for all the issues it has with fragmentation, I have never had a buggy experience on a new os version, because all the updates roll out at different times, sure it’s annoying watching as apps slowly adopt dark mode over weeks, but they all work
MacOS was tough this year because they removed a bunch of legacy dependencies, and sure they announced the removal of 32 bit support something like 10 years ago, but in enterprise land it is almost never a worth while cost to actually make a transition like that, to make significant changes to your codebase you will make more money by forcing customers to buy a new product, in many companies it is near impossible to get approval to make non user facing changes that risk regression, no one wants bugs.
Anyway that’s my 2 cents.
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I can see how, from a developer/engineer perspective one might sense that things weren’t as smooth as usual behind the scenes. While this might bother you, for me, as a basic user, I have seen almost none of these bugs/glitches. Everything seems to be syncing properly, my iPad is great, even after spending several weeks in beta.
Caveat: my iPhone, watch and MacBook Air are all new to me.