Software updates are complicated
If you think waiting for Apple to approve a new version of your App is nerve-racking you should listen to Episode 4 of the Code Breaker. It’s an interesting podcast that I recently discovered and season 1 is all about the question “Is it evil?”.
There’s a little segment in which they interview the folks behind Instapaper to talk about software updates in the Apple land.
But the best part is when they talk about the NASA that screwed something up in a software update to the International Space Station. The ISS orbits Earth about every 90 minutes. Can you imagine debugging a crucial problem having just a few minutes to communicate and then wait 90 minutes for the next chance to communicate? That’s nerve-racking! An Xcode crash is nothing compare to that :)
Give it a listen, I found the stories very fascinating.
P.S. Fun fact: the software running on ISS is made of around 4.5M lines of code.