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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Technology
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The article does a shit job of explaining why certain apps are a problem.
These are apps that have not been updated to play nice with iOS 17. And in the case of the biggest offender, Instagram, there are people in Apple forums reporting overheating issues with iOS 17 Instagram for 5 months.
Meta was incompetent. This bug is easy AF to reproduce. I find it hard to believe that no one at IG was running a dev beta or public beta. Every other phone in the valley is running these damn betas. Somehow they did not prioritize compatibility work for the latest yearly major release.
These betas and SDKs are provided 5-6 months before major OS releases. WWDC betas and the final release drop around the same time every year. This is like meta being surprised that Christmas came around at the end of December.
What exactly are these apps doing that can cause the phone to overheat?
Good question. Hopefully we’ll get some insight in update release notes for these apps. Although, Instagram’s patch release notes today were “bug fixes and performance improvements.” Five words. No more details.
We can never know exactly. For me I always think about the (incidental) complexity of these huge apps like Instagram.
Somebody mentioned the phone overheating when watching Reels - those short videos. Here's a made-up example (but I've written some software for video streaming services)...
Those videos are pretty short, and some people skip the clip even after less than 1 second. Instagram want that next video to be playing instantly (gotta get that dopamine hit ASAP!). A strategy you could take is have the app load the next, say, 5 possible videos in the background before you've even seen them. When the user swipes, that video is already playing. To make this even faster we could execute some recommendation decisions on-device rather than on some servers (over a relatively much slower 4G connection).
With all this complexity comes greater chance of some unexpected behaviour. Instead of loading 5 videos, maybe we accidentally load 100 and never clean up the old ones. Maybe after an OS update we need to change the way we mark a task as low priority.
I can imagine it's a collection of bugs where it's sorta the OS' problem but sorta the application's problem. It probably reached a stalemate. Nobody really wanted to spend the extra engineering effort; maybe it would all have to be undone then rewritten again to get something out in time.
Maybe. As a developer I’ve found Apple reasonably accessible and cooperative if you find issues with new flagship products or features they’re developing.
If it’s really important, and you have a nice app or something prominent in a category, it’s not hard to get on calls with them, or get a meeting at their campus to talk shop on a solution. I’ve been able to, and the apps that I have in the store are by no means Instagram-level popular.
I only ever received pushback and scepticism when uploading or updating my apps. Even with detailed instructions and clear explanations they always found some arbitrary way to deny the release or update. Only to walk it back later in the appeal process after you corrected them on the reasons they gave.
Even personal appeal over email/ phone was a mess, that were so secretive about the app reviewers that I can't imagine strolling over to the campus and collaborating with them.
I’ve definitely received my fair share of bullshit from stupid reviewers. That said, when your company size or ranking in the App Store reaches a certain point, or your app is using some new parts of the SDK that they want to show off, then they AppStore marketing managers take your calls. The marketing folks can then help to coordinate meetings with their engineers.
The apps I work on are not as popular as Instagram, but I do work for a fortune 50 company, so they respond to my emails or iMessages. And if they respond to my janky ass, Meta can DEFINITELY get them on the horn.
Cool insight - thanks! All points even more to bad planning by the Instagram team as you said originally.
I guess I wouldn't be particularly surprised. Apple put shitloads of R&D into power-efficiency. Can't imagine the culture at Instagram/Meta is like that.
Hey, that’s some cool insight! Thanks!