If Apple is to rely, as it does, on developers and users reporting bugs that should have been fixed before release, then it needs at least to give us

Last Week on My Mac: Why Sonoma 14.4.1 was necessary

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2024-03-31 09:30:05

If Apple is to rely, as it does, on developers and users reporting bugs that should have been fixed before release, then it needs at least to give us clues in release notes as to where to look. Two of the serious bugs fixed in macOS 14.4.1 last week were completely unexpected, and only discovered by chance. Here I’ll explain how one of them came to light, and what had gone wrong. You can read Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro’s account of the other in his article on Oracle’s Java blog.

None of Apple’s release notes for Sonoma 14.4 mention any changes to iCloud Drive, the FileProvider API, or management of macOS file versions:

The only signs of changes that had passed in the absence of documentation are to be found in changed versions found in /System/Library, where I remarked: “There are updates to many Frameworks, including most of the Core… series, and FileProvider to a new version” and “there are extensive changes to iCloud (both CloudKit and iCloud Drive) components”.

It wasn’t until I published my detailed explanation of how iCloud Drive works in Sonoma, on 18 March, 11 days after the release of macOS 14.4, that JK spotted a discrepancy between what I described there and tests they had carried out on their Mac. That arose because the research on which I based my article had been performed in macOS 14.3 and 14.3.1, not in 14.4.