If the rumor mill is correct, this year’s WWDC may be a rather more low-key event than usual. All the signs are pointing to few if any hardware announcements, and a limited number of flashy new features in iOS 12 and macOS 10.14.

Apple is said to be concentrating this year on software quality and stability, something observers say is both sorely needed and challenging to achieve …

The WSJ claims that the number of bugs has been higher in iOS 11 than any previous version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

That’s an unreliable analysis for several reasons. First, release notes measure bug fixes, rather than bugs. If Apple doesn’t fix a bug, it wouldn’t be counted in this analysis.

Second, it also measures only those specific bugs Apple considers sufficiently important to list in the release notes. It may be that there were many other smaller fixes the company didn’t mention. In particular, Apple has chosen to issue more detailed release notes of late, which means more disclosure rather than more bugs.

Finally, it doesn’t take into account the severity of bugs. My colleague Benjamin Mayo recalls that iOS 7 was so buggy in early releases that the whole phone would frequently crash. Even if that had been caused by a single bug, that’s obviously a bigger deal than dozens of lesser bugs today.

All the same, the piece does make some valid points. As the number of devices increases, so too does the opportunity for problems.

The price of the iPhone X also raises expectations, suggests one analyst.

There’s also a simple time factor: the more features that are added, the more complex the code and the more opportunities for bugs.

And with more high-end features, including […] new sensors powering facial-recognition technology, Apple’s engineering team is facing more challenging software problems than it did with earlier iPhone models, the people said.

One interesting question is whether Apple decides to make reliability a marketing message.

My guess would be not, as that implicitly admits Apple has fallen down on this in the past, but we’ll see.

I think the big question about this ‘bug fixes and stability’ focus is whether Apple pushes it as a tangible thing in the OS marketing. Is it a keynote slide?

— Benjamin Mayo (@bzamayo) June 4, 2018

While we may not see too many shiny new toys, one feature we are expecting to see is support for cross-platform apps: ones that run on iPhone, iPad and Mac. That raises risks, as I mentioned when it was first rumored.

But done well, this could be an extremely exciting development that ends up making both platforms more powerful, and leads to even tighter integration in the Apple ecosystem. It’s certainly something I’d expect to get a huge focus in today’s keynote if it is slated for this year’s updates.

In short, is this move going to result in the dumbing down of Mac apps to the lowest common denominator of what’s practical on an iPhone?

Benjamin Mayo and Guilherme Rambo contributed to this report. Image: wallpapershome