I’m a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem but I have to say that there’s a pattern here. Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe from others but a terrible job of keeping it intact. From music libraries with song titles that got switched to long integers to this (and I’m sure more that I’m not remembering atm) they need to do a better job here.
Sure security is important but integrity is too.
I am baffled by Apple's incompetence here. In the past years I've seen:
* iTunes/Music app randomly reassign my Album artwork, with different (incorrect) art showing up on different devices!
* Reminders app: shared reminder lists can end up with the name of a different list
* Ghost photos that are deleted from my phone, and come back later.
* Maps, when I say "navigate to $friend" set a route that ended in my own driveway.
To me, these bugs suggest a fundamental design flaw, perhaps they are using a simple Integer as an index rather than a UUID?
Or maybe the database schema are solid, but there's some sort of race condition in their synchronization frameworks and the data is getting scrambled in RAM?
Whatever it is, it's absolutely insane that in 2025 these kinds of bugs are happening.
I completely agree about there being a fundamental design flaw.
I still use Macs because data on a physical disk seems perfectly reliable, but I've been bitten by so many of these bugs in their apps. iCloud files completely disappear, then reappear a day later. Highlight a couple chapters of a PDF in Preview, then reopen the file and they're gone because iCloud thinks the older unhighlighted version is newer or something. Madness. I don't touch any of these Apple services/apps anymore.
There's very clearly a fundamental bug in whatever sync framework they seem to share across everything. It's bad enough to have data disappear entirely or deleted data reappear, but then when data shows up in the completely wrong place, and this has been happening for years and years and still isn't fixed... I don't know what to think.
You're right. There's no other word for it but "insane". They can engineer their A-series and M-series microchips, but it's been over a decade now and their sync is still fundamentally broken.
> There's no other word for it but "insane". They can engineer their A-series and M-series microchips
There are certainly other words for it. Lazy, anticompetitive, disinterested, any of those are more plausible than all of Apple being insane. They sold you a microchip that you knew you wanted, now they are beholden to little else. For over a decade, Apple didn't even offer the iOS APIs for third-parties to implement cloud storage. They know you need their software services, regardless of how shit they are.
Insanity would be a pretty satisfying explanation. Fickleness fits a lot better with Apple's track record though.
Apple's hardware is top class, but the software has always been lacking. The only time I've seen both in perfect synergy was when the iPod was released (and even then there was iTunes). Not even the iPhone reveal had that.
No ECC, no replaceable parts, software updates stop in a few years.
Apple's hardware is absolutely trash for anything that needs reliability. For shiny disposable entertainment use, it can be great.
Apple stole my entire music library. I have had one library going back to the first release of iTunes on Windows (2003?) — thousands of songs, most of them CD rips.
I then subscribed to Apple Music and relied on its matching function. After switching from an Intel Mac to an M2 and redownloading my library from remote, it now believes that each and every song in my library are rented Apple Music copies. Even those it shows as having been added in 2003.
Some songs are missing; some go missing, then inexplicably come back months later. Worse: so far I have found around a dozen which have been replaced by different versions.
It's a real mess.
The thing is, in many cases, these products and teams are very siloed from each other. I suspect, having worked in one of these teams, that some of the issues comes from this siloing. Lessons learned aren't shared, and it can be difficult to build integrations.
Another two examples:
* prompts in settings for adding an account recovery contact that never go away, even after months and months of successfully setting it up multiple times.
* OS account profile picture can barely stay associated with the most recently picked option. Happens for non-iCloud local accounts on Mac, happens when I change profile pictures on iOS for iCloud… weird.
* OS account update screens on iPad, iOS, and watchOS will forget that they are in the middle of updating if you navigate away from the settings screen. Thankfully, today they at least recover from it (it’s probably still happening in the background), but it takes several long seconds of spinning for the settings page to remember that it was doing an update two seconds ago before I navigated away from it.
* similar to your ghost pictures bug, deleting a large media file from a media player app moves it to recently deleted, but you can sometimes end up in situations where you can’t permanently delete the file, or it doesn’t show up anywhere but still takes up space. (Talking about 20GB-80GB file sizes where it makes a big difference on OS storage space)
Some of these bugs have been around for a VERY long time.
But the weird thing is I don’t see them in 3rd party apps.
Finder being unable to show file information and instead showing something that looks like file information but is completely wrong is scary and sad. And it has been like this for months. Like here, none of the data in the General part matches the actual file. More info is correct, Preview is correct, so I know I did in fact click the correct file. http://bn5i3r.s3.amazonaws.com/Screenshot-2025-09-17-at-17-0... Happens randomly so I don't know how to report this (and from experience I know that reporting bugs to Apple is completely useless).
Its probably a good thing in a way if someone learns this lesson in a lesser painful way. You need to manage your own files and backups and content. Data portabillity is the opposite of what they want and try to further abstract away until people dont even know what a file or folder is. Its so easy, you dont even have to lift a finger until you decide you want or need to leave. Thats when you realize its sometimes impossible to take it with you
Yeah, I spend a night on writing some python to disentangle my un-amused father's music collection when he stopped using iTunes. What a mess.
iTunes randomly changing album artwork happened to me too. Only thing that fixed it was wiping the iPhone and resyncing with computer.
The clipboard is no longer reliable.
Not sure when exactly that changed, but it was probably a few OS releases ago?
Clipboard has been unstable on every OS (especially on Desktop - and I mean Linux, Windows and Mac), and I think part of the culprit is apps like Teams and Discord, if you Ctrl + C by mistake on an empty text box, IT COPIES THE EMPTY TEXT BOX effectively wiping your clipboard. It's the most irritating UX and it took me years to figure out. Always right click copy and right click paste, you'll notice it works 100% of the time as it used to.
Clipboard managers help a lot there.
I just use KDE's default one, Klipper, and I raise the max entry number.
If something bad replaces your copy, you can get the good one back from the history.
There are nice features like QR code generation for your copied text if you want to quickly share something with someone else's phone as well.
That’s a really interesting solution to copy-pasting between devices, which is one of them features Apple has that I rely on a tonne even though it’s horribly unreliable. I wonder if anyone has a similarly clever way to copy from mobile to your computer.
KDE Connect provides some tight integration, including (optional) clipboard sharing, media player controls, features to do presentations, mouse and keyboard.
I use it as a remote control to adjust volume during movies from the phone to the computer playing them for instance.
https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
Copying empty text is a configurable flag in some linux environments, at least, but I'm not sure if that behavior is faithfully preserved in teams / discord / etc as I've never really had it on.
On Linux you can just select the text and simply paste it using middle click. It works everywhere on Xorg, on some environments on Wayland. And it will only copy what you selected... everytime.
I’ve copied with right click out of chatGPT on Firefox and the contents not ending up on my clipboard. Not reliably.
Thats chatgpt doing ott wrapping and breaking web standards in a way chrome accepts but firefox doesnt last i looked
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Could be because of shared clipboard between devices?
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I stopped using apple's notes app with an ipad pen after it lost 20 minutes of my handwritten notes when trying to sync them. (Which fits the theme of apple losing people's stuff.)
I don't really get the syncing situation with apple. And it's really hard to tell when they've resolved bugs in one app or introduced new ones elsewhere.
The Safari reading list can't even sync properly between devices for me. Image Capture ("Keep Originals"??) or AirDrop is a little minimal for such a keystone part of the phone -> computer if you don't want to use Apple ecosystem after.. Let alone the other more complicated issues.
Deleting your data is next level privacy.
> Deleting your data is next level privacy.
Yes, but not before syncing it with (NSA)iCloud. /s
You should’ve put an airtag on them first.
Yes, two or three to make sure.
I'd love to know how they CRDT hand-written notes.
Sounds like they don't.
You presumably would process the pen inputs, not the resulting image produced by the handwriting. No different from how you handle conflicts in online gaming.
> Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe...
How do you know? Why do you believe that they're competent on writing security code but not competent enough to write a general purpose app? Is there a different company culture applied to the latter?
This is a company that is trying to design away the concept of the file completely. Which leaves very little recourse in the way of workarounds or recovery when bad things happen.
I got burned by Apple purposely corrupting my music library. I'm still salty about it.
Purposely? Could you elaborate?
People, including me, had a lot of playlists of ripped cds and downloaded mp3s, all categorized, rated, and with years of play count history.
Then apple fucked everyones libraries up completely in an auto update, destroying the metadata and making them unusable, except for songs bought via apple music that is...
"Purposely" seems strong, though. Is it believed that Apple intended this corruption?
It is believed that the bug was ignored or deemed unimportant or worse because of apples preference for users purchasing music via their store, yes.
Still can't get rid of that U2 album I'm guessing
Oh that's easy, just download this extra piece of software which removes the album for you.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540
Happend to my father as well, his songs were all over the place with the same albums even sharded over multiple folders etc. A big mess. Left him pretty sour indeed, he had spend a lot of time on it.
Btw, it was fine from withing iTunes, just never stop using iTunes I guess...
I think of Apple as blessed and cursed by hubris. The same arrogance that lets them assert a design into the world on the belief that people will adopt it allows them to incapable of changing at the things they are bad or deplorable at.
Well put! But I think there's an interesting exception—APFS seems to be very reliable. It's been quite a few years since the very successful silent auto migration and it’s pretty quiet about it, which is a good thing for filesystems.
> I’m a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem
Is that a necessary qualifier? I used to get that impression, but on the outside it's gradually become a rarely believable pitch. Without having an iPhone and without having an Apple Watch, and without having already had them years ago, it just seems like I've sort of made the right choice with just mac over the years, and with the latest OS that's becoming just a tiny bit more questionable; their decision making with software seems sus.
Like I've never had to qualify my setup of using a mac for work, Android phone for phone, and I guess Audio Technica for headphones. It's not super nerdy, it's not super integrated, but if I wanted it to be super integrated, "what value would I get out of steeping myself into the Apple ecosystem further" is the question that comes to mind. I also have an old iPad that I tried to make useful, and the iPod nano 3rd gen which was actually amazing, but ultimately was hampered by software limitations that they don't seem to have advanced on much in 10 years. I've always found their discrete hardware products to be amazing in terms of industrial design, but they've never really been compelling in terms of their utility.
It's worth saying their magic ability to sync everything across devices has basically ceased to exist at this point as well, and now I wonder if it ever did.
The software engineering standard at Apple has clearly tanked in the last decade, which is sad because the exact opposite appears to have happened to their hardware.
I would love to know if they even invest enough into QA resources. For a company like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon etc... I guess anything that qualifies as FAANG, I would prefer their QA departments be slightly overstaffed and that they do redundant testing than messing up with completely avoidable software issues. Sometimes the production bugs are embarrassingly obvious so much so it screams no QA team was involved.
I used to be in QA at Apple before I became a SWE.
Used to be, these were full software engineers embedded with dev teams, with a mission to destroy, document, and harden the apps and frameworks.
During the 2010s in all the FAANG that I’m aware of (have worked at 3), QA as a high paid American profession was completely offshored to India and responsibility for quality removed from developers concern. It’s a blocking item on the Launch Checklist. Automated testing was expected to fill the gap but has mostly been ignored.
I was at Microsoft when it happened and it felt like a fear response to the newer agile tech companies like Facebook that wrote blog posts about releasing daily. Many teams at Microsoft had a weeks to months long QA process before software went out the door, and many developers had been arguing for years that "QA is the blocker".
The complicated thing is, they were kind of right, and kind of wrong. QA in some orgs were staffed by engineers who weren't "quite as good" as the development teams, and it showed. Horrible QA tools that broke frequently, QA test passes that were fragile and took forever, and just low quality bug reports. Work that should have been automated just wasn't due to a lack of talent. Part of this is because any really good engineers who started off as an SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) ended up moving to the SDE career track after a few promos, because the career trajectory for an SDE was much better (despite the company trying to resolve this repeatedly over the years).
So basically the SDET teams had an ongoing brain drain problem.
That said, the good SDET teams were just as good, if not better, than the development teams. The really high quality test software was incredibly good. And when debugging means going through assembly code in a debugger and figuring out what is wrong, the top engineers come off looking like magicians.
But there was too much rot in the QA orgs for them to ever be agile enough for daily releases. Microsoft went with the cost cutting approach of just laying most of them off and allowing software quality to drop, as did the vast majority of other companies.
Once Microsoft got rid of their SDET career track, it became career suicide to even bother going into QA and the entire field basically died. Microsoft SDETs were on the same pay scale (and same hiring requirements) as SDEs. When i was in college my goal was to be an SDET at Microsoft, I loved the idea of being the last line of defense against bad software, of being the one responsible for protecting users around the world. (Yes I played a lot of Paladins in D&D, how'd you guess?)
I eventually achieved my goal, became an SDET on a compiler team, got to take over maintaining one of the most impressive test systems I've ever seen [1], and spent a lot of time wiping up my own drool as ARM assembly code scrolled while I tried to trace compiler bugs.
SDETs died, I moved to be an SDE. I loved being an SDET, I loved having a job that could be summarized as "be angry for the sake of the customer". I loved that I worked in a company where the most junior of SDETs could stop an entire build from going out by saying they didn't think the build met the quality bar for a release from Microsoft (something I actually did once, emotionally it is a hard thing to do!).
Unfortunately that love and passion for quality is gone from the industry.
[1]https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested...
Thanks for sharing that story! I love that your dream was to be the last line of defense protecting users from bad software. We need more of that, and it's sad that execs at Microsoft and others have made it harder.
I think there was a time when my iCloud name somehow got mixed with people with the same name. My name turned into all uppercase, and IIRC (long time ago) I found someone using that style that had the same name.
Dont cloud storage companies also link multiple owners of the same file (same hash or checksum or file identity) to avoid duplication also?
Funnily, "data security" encompass both protecting it from undesired access (and stealing) but also from loss/corruption.
So they do a terrible job from a data security point of view;)
This is infuriating to me. I manually manage my music library and have for years. I buy the iPhone with the most storage so I can keep my entire library with me locally. This used to work great, but has degraded over the last decade. Now when I drag new music to my phone in iTunes nothing happens for minutes, and then if I get lucky it finally starts transferring, but some times nothing happens at all and I have to retry.
Recently when I load new music onto my phone I find that random unrelated album art has been mangled or switched with other albums from other artists. And some music, which exists on my phone's hard drive, is now greyed out and when clicked says "This item is not currently available in your country or region." I am considering switching back to a iPod with an upgraded drive and giving up on keeping music on my phone completely.
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Odd that you would omit the part of the text you quoted that contradicts the impression your partial quote creates.
> The images were initially believed to have been obtained via a breach of Apple's cloud services suite iCloud, or a security issue in the iCloud API which allowed them to make unlimited attempts at guessing victims' passwords. Apple claimed in a press release that access was gained via spear phishing attacks.
I also found it notable that the source for the above unlimited password guessing password guessing is an Apple press release that states no such thing.
Also interesting was that all sources in that article suggesting anything about unlimited attempts describe to an app or script (unclear which) called iDar, which the only source to actual name iDar claims that it reports success 100% of the time, regardless of its actual success in guessing the password.
I've no love for Apple. Maybe it's true. But the evidence presented in this wiki article is weak.
Either you didn't read the page you linked or are deliberately lying, the API issue is speculation we know now that it was predominantly spearphishing.
All from the same article:
>"Apple claimed in a press release that access was gained via spear phishing attacks."
> "Apple later reported that the victims' iCloud account information was obtained using "a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions", such as phishing and brute-force attack guessing."
>"Court documents from 2014 indicated that one user created a fake email account called "appleprivacysecurity" to ask celebrities for security information."
>"During the investigation, it was found that Collins phished by sending e-mails to the victims that looked like they had been sent by Apple or Google, warning the victims that their accounts might be compromised and asking for their account details. The victims would enter their passwords, and Collins gained access to their accounts, downloading e-mails and iCloud backups."
>"In August 2016, 28-year-old Edward Majerczyk of Chicago, agreed to plead guilty to a similar phishing scheme, although authorities believe he worked independently and he was not accused of selling the images or posting them online."
>"Garofano's attorney said he had been led into the phishing scheme by criminals."
>"Through a phishing expedition[further explanation needed], he hacked more than 200 people"
All of the other methods of compromise are speculation, what has been unambiguously proven in a court of law over and over again was phishing.
It's a little embarrassing that people are still pushing that particular conspiracy theory a decade after it was debunked.
Not only was "Celebgate" the consequence of a standard phishing attack, but we know from court records that a larger number of Google accounts were breached than Apple accounts.
> A Pennsylvania court has sentenced a man to 18 months in jail for hacking into the accounts of celebrities and stealing nude photos and videos.
Collins tricked his victims - including actresses Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Scarlett Johansson, and Kirsten Dunst - by sending emails appearing be from Google or Apple.
Collins accessed at least 50 iCloud accounts and 72 Gmail accounts.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37796986
That was a pretty big screw-up. But, it was more than a decade ago.
That's unfortunate, but your passwords should be such that it would take an attacker millions of years to guess the password through HTTP requests.
That's a little bit Victim Blamey.
Security unfortunately relies on users doing things at least somewhat right.
They were also active participants in prism...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
What they actually do is a moderate effort to keep app developers from accessing user data. Which is definitely good!
Though the reason for this likely more about keeping the customer relationship with apple then actually protecting the privacy of users, but it's a nicely marketable side effect - and that's definitely a good thing for the users, too!
Anybody who was anybody back then was an active participant in PRISM. There are no good guys and bad guys when it comes to that. There are businesses that get to keep doing business by doing what the government tells them to do, there are ones that shut down (Lavabit), and there are ones that don't have enough going on to be on the radar for a project like PRISM.
I think that just makes them all bad guys? Just because everybody was doing it doesn't make it ok, let alone when it's something as bad as prism.
This is like saying there are no good guys or bad guys in the mafia, because the good guys all got taken out early on.
What you are then left with are bad guys.
When China does that they're the bad guys. When the US does that there are no good guys or bad guys.
Also, Qwest Communications.
But at the end of the day, you gotta be able to sleep with yourself and I have no idea what I'd choose if I were a CEO. Everyone lost their jobs. He did wrong outside of PRISM, so it's hard to say. I'm not him and I already don't sleep well at night.