Apple temporarily halted its efforts on the upcoming iOS 18, macOS 15, watchOS 11, and tvOS 18 updates in a bid to tackle bugs in the forthcoming iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Mac releases, as per insights from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Last week, Apple informed its workforce about a brief development hiatus and directed its engineers to prioritize bug fixes and software performance enhancements.
In recent years, Apple's SVP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, has been committed to addressing software glitches, even if it means delaying certain features. Sources cited by Gurman revealed that the software engineering management team working under Federighi uncovered a significant number of missed bugs during internal testing of the upcoming software updates. Consequently, a week-long sprint was initiated to resolve these issues.
Throughout that one-week period, all work on new features was temporarily halted, allowing engineers to focus exclusively on enhancing existing software. Apple is now resuming its regular development efforts this week, allowing work on new features for iOS 18 and its companion updates to progress.
Notably, Apple had recently completed the initial M1 versions of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 before the pause in development. The pause also affected work on iOS 17.4, which is anticipated to be released in March next year. Given that this break in future software development lasted only a week, there are no expected release delays for next year.
