Apple pauses work on iOS 18, macOS 15 to address ‘glitches in the code’

A new report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg says that Apple has paused the development of new features for its next operating systems (iOS 18 and macOS 15) in order to put more effort into fixing bugs and improving performance. The report says that an internal announcement was made last week.

The first major milestone (M1) of “Crystal” (the iOS and iPadOS 18 code name) and “Glow” (the macOS 15 code name) was apparently completed last month. Despite major changes in recent years to the way Apple develops its software in recent years, with a focus on quality and preventing the introduction of new bugs and regressions, this early milestone was not up to its expected standards.

The engineering team has found too many “escapes”—bugs that were missed in testing—and “took the unusual step of halting all new feature development for one week to work on fixing the bugs,” Gurman reports. The pause on new feature development is expected to be lifted this week, so ultimately we’re looking at less than two weeks of the “everybody stop what you’re doing and just fix bugs” drill.

Will iOS 18 and macOS 15 be delayed?

This likely will have no major impact on the release schedule of next year’s operating systems. These sorts of shifts in priority are not uncommon, and the “inside baseball” report of the inner workings of Apple is mostly just unusual in that we know about it.

Fixing bugs and flaws now, instead of continuing development on new features, feels like a delay but it just means less bug-fixing later. It’s a management decision meant to keep the team on track to release a solid product.

The halt in development of new features apparently applies to watchOS 11 as well as the iOS 17.4 update that would be released sometime around March, too.

The worst-case scenario for this pause is that we see a few more iOS 18 and macOS 15 features released as updates rather than in the initial release—a common practice Apple has deployed of late. The best-case scenario is that the concerted effort to tidy up the code now makes development smoother throughout 2024 and we get more features in earlier releases.

Our first look at iOS 18 and macOS 15, and the features and design changes they will bring, will come at WWDC in June.