I was surprised to see that Music fixes were rolled into the new MacOS 10.15.2 release that came out this week. While I’m pleased to see that they’re iterating on the “new” app and taking customer feedback into consideration, I’m wondering why Apple isn’t shipping releases like these incrementally. Frankly, the same could be said for a lot of their applications.

With the fairly well-documented iOS 13 and Catalina update quality issues still fresh in mind, the company really needs to both focus on the quality of their overall platforms and the way in which they release software. One arrow in their quiver could be shipping updates to the core OS separate from apps unless required by new hardware changes. Does it add additional QA burden to test multiple permutations of software/OS combos? Yeah, it does. But when OS releases are tied to hardware releases at times it can be helpful to approach the rest of their software rollouts incrementally rather than shipping everything at once.

There’s no good reason that Music on MacOS or iOS can’t ship with smaller UX enhancements separate from an OS release. Same goes for Mail, Safari, etc.