Apple on Friday contacted The Loop with a statement regarding reports that iTunes is deleting music from people’s library without permission.
“In an extremely small number of cases users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission,” Apple said. “We’re taking these reports seriously as we know how important music is to our customers and our teams are focused on identifying the cause. We have not been able to reproduce this issue, however, we’re releasing an update to iTunes early next week which includes additional safeguards. If a user experiences this issue they should contact AppleCare.”
I’m not surprised Apple hasn’t been able to reproduce the issue because it does seem rare. Hopefully they will be able to isolate the problem in the update coming next week.
Additional safeguards sounds interesting. It reads like someone did a core review of the relevant code and said “Wait a minutewaitaminute. Where’s the error checking here?”
It could be just re-writing that abysmal delete dialog.
Or, it could be Apple implying, “We can’t find or reproduce the problem. So we don’t believe there’s a problem. So here’s a placebo. Tell yourself it won’t happen again.”
And, to be fair to them, I’m not convinced it’s a problem. When you have a reporter “right out in front of” something, there’s often a pretty good chance they’re accidentally making something up.
I think that a part of the problem is that Apple just doesn’t test their software enough given the massive user base they have now.
There are so many bugs in almost all their software that persist over OS version updates because Apple literally “doesn’t know it’s a problem yet” because although they may be experienced by thousands of people, none of those people may happen to be developers that tell Apple about the bug.
Text selection in Pages for iOS for instance has been a nightmare since the debut of iOS 9 and yet we just had a Pages update, and it didn’t fix it. I could list dozens of similar situations.
Apple is simply not aware of, and not fixing bugs fast enough given the size of the user base and the number of devices and situations they have to support. It’s almost getting to the point where every second OS release should really just be about bug fixing.
Funny… in this blog post (https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously/) the Apple CSR says the deletion is intended..
“The software is functioning as intended,” said Amber.
“Wait,” I asked, “so it’s supposed to delete my personal files from my internal hard drive without asking my permission?”
“Yes,” she replied.
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With my music collection it didn’t delete much, but it totally screwed with the meta data. After being told by Apple that it was my fault (?!?) I have learnt my lesson – never trust Apple with anything precious. Hence my photos, music and anything else uses iCloud only as a secondary back up service. I can’t trust Apple to do services that match their products.
I feel that way about all my personal data be it photos, music, documents, what have you.
I have two backups and backup to the cloud.
When it comes to my data I consider myself to be the responsible party and in doing so have not lost any data as of yet. Fingers crossed.
That being said, I do need to add an actual offsite backup too.
Itunes also has been deleting songs off my iPhones when the file share they are on is not available when a Sync is performed, what a pain…
I can’t believe that bug can not be reproduced.