It's the communication, not the software.

The problem with "ecosystems"

There is an inherent problem in building an "ecosystem," as compared to an application.

My Apple TV is currently useless because the sound (routed: Apple TV→HDMI→TV→HDMI→sound bar) is almost half a second out of sync with the video (which has only one hop). Apple has a feature where you can use your phone to synchronize the two, but it's entirely automated. You bring up a configuration screen on the Apple TV, and a dialog is supposed to magically pop up on your phone to serve as a microphone, allowing it to measure the difference. That doesn't happen. No popup. No sync. No happiness.

A dial I could manually adjust on the Apple Device would work fine, as would an actual app on the phone. Still, Apple's insistence on "magic" means that's not an option, and of course, "magic" also means that it's impossible to troubleshoot. Everything's hidden. "Magic" is great until it doesn't work. My AppleTV is now an expensive brick. (I have the same problem with "magic" injection frameworks like Spring, but that's another post.)

The overriding issue, however, is that the existence of an "ecosystem" means that no Apple application or operating system actually stands alone, and bugs are not contained within individual parts of the larger system. Bugs span the entire ecosystem of multiple devices and applications. In other words, Apple actually has only a single device/application, but they sell it in pieces as individual units of hardware and software. In my case, the bug spans the phone and the Apple TV. The buggy feature requires both.

The real issue, however, is that internally, the group that works on iOS is a different group than the ones (plural) that work on the apps, which is different still from the ones that work on tvOS. Many, many groups, and they don't talk to each other. Handling a single bug that spans all of those groups is a nightmare.

So, what we really have here is a communication-and-dependency problem, not a software problem. Given the sheer size of the system as a whole, fixing even a simple bug, not to mention the communication system as a whole, is nontrivial, maybe not possible. AI will not help.