unitQ Warns Developers of Significant Challenges With iOS 18 Update

BURLINGAME, Calif., Aug. 19, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- unitQ, the leading AI-powered customer feedback platform empowering organizations to take a customer-centric, real-time data-driven approach to craft high quality products, services and experiences, announced today developers should brace for a surge in user-reported issues when Apple releases iOS 18 this September.

unitQ's comprehensive, AI-driven studies of millions of App Store reviews from thousands of top mobile applications reveals a consistent trend: Major iOS updates result in significant disruptions to core app functionality, despite rigorous beta testing.

unitQ's data, drawn from the last three iOS version updates, shows a marked increase in user complaints following these updates. For example, in the wake of iOS 17's release on September 18, 2023, unitQ artificial intelligence recorded a 29% spike in user reported issues across 10 different industries. Problems ranged from generic app crashes and blank screens to industry-specific issues like missing lyrics in music apps, irrelevant search results in shopping apps and overheating and notification problems in social networking apps.

*For more on the user-reported issues associated with the iOS 17 update, read the unitQ study here.

*For more on the user-reported issues associated with the iOS 16 update, read the unitQ study here.

*For more on the user-reported issues associated with the iOS 15 update, read the unitQ study here.

Even with betas, iOS 18 to bring challenges

The destructive quality-of-life or customer-churning issues identified in the unitQ studies occurred despite the advanced release and testing of beta versions — and new betas are now being tested by developers and the public before the expected September release of iOS 18.

This provides even more historical ammunition that the iOS 18 rollout could lead to challenges for end users and, by extension, developers — despite their best efforts. However, the duration these quality issues persist hinges on whether developers and their organizations actively listen to their users' feedback and promptly address the concerns raised.

"Even with betas, developers need to be aware that the rollout of iOS 18 could lead to significant challenges for end users," said Christian Wiklund, unitQ CEO and Co-Founder. "Key to mitigating these issues is active listening and prompt response to user feedback."

Incorporate user feedback into your tech stack

Companies are pouring resources into their technology stacks, integrating systems for everything from auditing and security monitoring to application performance and infrastructure management. CIOs and other corporate leaders are deploying a variety of tools to secure their organization's long-term success. However, one critical data source often remains untapped.

This overlooked data is the "Voice of the Customer." Real-time user feedback offers insights into the performance, features and capabilities of your products and services. What's more, users of applications often uncover as many, but different, issues as machine signals sent from observability platforms. This means that listening to and taking action based on customer feedback are on equal footing with observability platforms.

User reviews on platforms like the App Store and Google Play, customer service interactions in Zendesk, incident reports in Jira, and conversations on social media channels such as Discord, LinkedIn, Reddit, and X, together provide a comprehensive view of customer preferences, challenges and priorities.

Addressing the issues identified through customer feedback, no matter the language, can boost developers' key performance metrics, enhance customer satisfaction, attract new users and open up additional revenue opportunities.

Most importantly, user feedback provides an immediate guide to resolving user-facing issues associated with new software updates, like the upcoming iOS 18 release.

Harness user feedback with unitQ artificial intelligence

Embracing customer feedback is only the first step. The greater challenge is in managing and analyzing this vast amount of data to uncover actionable insights.

Artificial intelligence can streamline the analysis of vast amounts of customer feedback — bringing key themes and sentiment trends to the forefront, predicting product defects, feature requests and identifying potential areas for improvement. unitQ's AI understands the context and subtleties of customer reviews and feedback, enabling a deeper insight into customer perceptions in real time. By harnessing unitQ, organizations can not only meet but surpass quality expectations, staying ahead of the competition and reducing the impact of new iOS and other updates.

About unitQ

As the leading AI-powered Voice-of-the-Customer platform, unitQ empowers companies with actionable insights from user feedback to help them craft high-quality products, services and experiences. unitQ centralizes feedback from all sources and automatically groups it into thousands of granular categories to help organizations discover what matters most to users — all in real time. Category-leading companies like Spotify, Bumble, Pinterest, Udemy, CarGurus, HelloFresh and Zendesk rely on unitQ to drive growth, reduce churn and build brand loyalty.

With unitQ customer feedback software, including unitQ GPT, organizations can discover quality issues at the same time as their users. Know what product launches, releases or evergreen features are causing the most bugs or support tickets. Drill into the root causes of these issues by source, platform, device, customer segment and more.

Want to see how your organization compares to others? Get your free unitQ Score or book a unitQ demo today!

Follow unitQ on LinkedIn and X.

To learn more, contact David Kravets from unitQ at [email protected].

SOURCE unitQ