Fed up with widgets on homescreen and the constant mess it was turning into every time I tried to add another to the smart one I was using. Apps get shuffled, moved to next page, even though there’s plenty of room on the main one. There has to be a better way.

@maique I think it's buggy rather than a flawed design. Hopefully the next update will fix it, although I think even 14.2 won't be far behind so at least they've put in plenty of work to mop up the mess.

@maique I've found that certain parts of editing the homescreen have improved vs. the last version of 13 but have also run into the problems you described. The consensus amongst critics is that their inner workings (schedules, quality control, etc) are not aligned such that stability gets the proper focus it deserves, and situations like this certainly reflect that theory.

@simonwoods Thank you for the follow up. That theory would help explain it, yes. I’ve been on the beta train, as a lot others, and more than happy to cut them some slack while that lasts. However I would expect stability to be their top priority, as it’s probably what I (and others ?) expect from software when it launches. I do love a new feature, as much as the next one, but what good are those if I can’t trust the whole thing to work as, or as close to, expected ?

Maybe my memory is already fading, but I seem to remember blindly updating in the old days, without checking what people were talking about before doing so. The number of people inquiring about stability these days before committing to an update makes me think that maybe they should get their priorities straight.

Sorry for the long rant, and I have no idea what I'm talking about, I have no clue what goes into getting something this big working, I'm just a regular user of their products who feels the quality control has been neglected for a while now.

@maique No, you've pretty much got it right, or at least as much as we can tell since much of their inner workings are kept secret. To some degree this was inevitable, between the devices getting significantly more complicated, and Apple itself becoming a much bigger company and therefore needing to do some growing up pretty quickly.

Even with that in mind the technical side of things could be much worse, as other companies have proven in the past but I think it is worrisome because it is difficult to imagine that any single group of people could successfully fend off the downsides of operating a monolithic entity; especially within the context of our current socio-economic imbalances. Quality pretty much always suffers.