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iOS 11 bugs are so common they now appear in Apple ads

iOS 11 bugs are so common they now appear in Apple ads

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Blink and you’ll miss it

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If you blink during Apple’s latest iPhone ad, you might miss a weird little animation bug. It’s right at the end of a slickly produced commercial, where the text from an iMessage escapes the animated bubble it’s supposed to stay inside. It’s a minor issue and easy to brush off, but the fact it’s captured in such a high profile ad just further highlights Apple’s many bugs in iOS 11.

9to5Mac writer Benjamin Mayo spotted the bug in Apple’s latest ad, and he’s clearly surprised “that this was signed off for the commercial,” especially as he highlighted it months ago and has filed a bug report with Apple. It’s just one of many quirks in iOS 11, including strange UI problems in the Music app, regularly misaligned text in the App Store, vanishing docks, and rotation issues.

It’s easy to dismiss all of these small problems because they’re not the types of Apple security bugs that have hit the headlines recently, but they all add up to a frustrating experience at times. Chris Pirillo has been documenting iOS animation bugs for years now, highlighting the many bugs that have sneaked into iOS recently. “iOS has been performing in an inexplicably jarring manner since iOS 7,” says Pirillo in an open letter to Apple’s software engineering chief Craig Federighi. “Iterations don’t seem to help much, major or minor. Frame drops are now par for the course — irritations that we once slammed Android for.”

There are signs that Apple is finally about to focus on reliability and performance in iOS 12 over new features, though. Reports suggest Apple is delaying some major iOS additions, and planning to root out bugs from its software. Hopefully that will mean less of the embarrassing bugs that crash iPhones, but also far less of these weird animation and UI problems that iOS clearly struggles with at times. We’ll probably find out once we hear more about iOS 12 in June.