Apple VP Greg Joswiak:
“We bring a very homogenous customer base to developers where 90% of [devices] are on the current versions of iOS,” says Joswiak. Apple’s customers embrace those changes and updates quickly, he says, and this allows developers to target new features and the full capabilities of the devices more quickly.
That is such an important point for Apple—its customers update hardware and software quickly, which allows developers to take advantage of new APIs and technologies in their apps. That, in turn, leads to more sales for developers and Apple, all while keeping the customers happy and engaged.
If, however, you apply this to macOS, the unfortunate side-effect is that bugs in each OS release are magnified significantly. High Sierra still has USB bugs that actually require some customers to boot into safe mode to work around (to disable built-in drivers that are just broken).
What Apple will also not tell macOS developers is that they will do nothing to help with backwards compatibility. So if your particular customer base doesn’t upgrade as regularly as Apple wants, you’re going to have a heck of a time continuing to build your projects for older OS releases without reverting to multiple Xcode releases on multiple OS versions.
I don’t know what’s happened at Apple particularly WRT macOS, but quality is suffering and has been on the decline for years. When I first read the description of High Sierra, I had high hopes that it would be similar to Snow Leopard in terms of addressing bugs and hardening the OS. Alas, no, the opposite is what we got. More bugs.
Poor quality is already driving some macOS developers away and that trend may very well accelerate if they don’t get a handle on it.