As someone who used to work on iOS at Apple, what that company honestly needs is a culture not beholden to the whims of their EPMs (project managers). They used to help organize and work with engineering to schedule things across the company’s waterfall style development. However, by the time I left, they essentially took power over engineering. Radar became the driver for the entire company and instead of thinking about a holistic product, everything became a priority number. P0 meant, emergency fix immediately, P4 meant nice to have. You get the idea.
Nothing could be worked on if it wasn’t in Radar with a priority number attached and signed off by the teams’ EPM. No room for a side project or time away from your daily duties because there were always P1s to fix. If you didn’t personally have any left for the day, you’d take one from another engineer who was likely swamped with their own list of P1s.
.. P1 P1 P1, everything is always in crises mode. Also why I and everyone around me felt bad for taking any vacation. If we weren’t constantly thinking about fixing those P1s, we were some how letting our team down.
This is how you get bugs in shipping software. EPMs driven to schedule things and over manage engineers would decide on a whim that something was a P2. That was basically always shelved to a follow-up .1 release.
Ultimately, engineers lost the freedom to decide when a feature was ready to ship. So here I see some “leak” about quality and I think, this is just PR spin for a buggy iOS 11. Unless the company is willing to take power away from the all-mighty EPM org, I just don’t see how engineering will really change.