The Verge:

Let’s recap the week of Apple software problems:

• macOS High Sierra critical flaw with root admin access
• macOS High Sierra update released, but breaks file sharing
• iOS 11 crashing on some iPhones due to a date bug
• macOS High Sierra fix not installing correctly on some systems
• iOS 11.2 released early to fix iPhone crash bug

Apple now has more than 1 billion devices running iOS, and any security flaws or problems impact millions of people on a much larger scale than macOS has ever experienced. Thankfully, Apple is able to patch these devices regularly and provides software updates even to older phones and tablets — something we rarely see on Android devices. Apple is now facing the challenging prospect of auditing its development processes to ensure this kind of messy week never happens again.

Bug tracking in software development at any scale is hard, and when you have a huge number of services and products like Apple with an enormous active userbase, it’s almost impossible to remain bug free.

It does seem that there are more and more bug fix updates creeping into macOS and iOS than before, but I can’t help but wonder if it is related to the added complexity of new and more advanced features on these platforms (well, on iOS at least). The ‘root’ bug, is a bit more worrying from a users perspective. To be fair to Apple they were extremely quick in releasing a patch, but I’m not surprised that they are “auditing” their development process to ensure something like that doesn’t happen again.