Comment on “If You Can’t Stand By a Feature, You Shouldn’t Launch It.” by Daniël

• Instead of major OS releases, I wish Apple would do year-based naming throughout a calendar year and just add OS features as they’re ready and as appropriate for new hardware.*

Android is kind of an interesting case study I guess. Google moved to quarterly releases (QPRs) for Android, the cycle is major -> QPR1 -> QPR2 -> QPR3 -> major (though AOSP only gets major and QPR2). If you look at the latest major release (Android 17) there isn't a large number of changes, presumably because things were already released to a QPR once they were ready. E.g. Android 16 QPR1 contained most Material 3 Expressive changes.

Besides that, they decoupled many of the features from OS releases, but push them out through Play Services, Play System, or app updates. So instead of doing big drops, they can roll out updates continuously when they feel they are ready and do staged rollouts.

Of course, such a cycle requires that you move away from a big keynote event where you announce everything for the year. But to be honest, Apple's keynotes have been pretty dysfunctional over the last few years, where things promised for the major release were pushed back and we had two keynotes (2026 and 2024) that were basically "AI AI AI". Even if customers care about AI, Apple's release cycles are stupid for AI anyway, why would you wait until the next WWDC/iPhone release to get the latest model if the competition are continuously rolling out new models.

[… Apple] decides to do a big feature. The circus comes to town, they build the feature, they launch it, they leave town, and that feature sits there.

As an aside, this also reminded me a lot of Stage Manager. Announced with huge fanfare, never to be heard of or improved after 2022. The only times I hear of Stage Manager is when a family member calls with "my Mac has been acting weird" and it turns out that they have somehow activated Stage Manager.

All these redesigns, half-finished tools, etc. have been such an epic waste of manpower. But I guess someone got a promotion.

I have been running GrapheneOS for a few months now and it has been an absolute bliss. No AI, Cloud subscriptions, and whatnot shoved into your face. Just a clean mobile OS and you can stack on top what you need.