> I never understood those annual release cycles anyway. Too artificial, too forced. Great for marketing hype, accumulating bugs, and missing out on documentation. Bad for quality.

False! A foundational concept in Constraint Theory is that "Large Batch Sizes Increase Lead Time".

Apple should figure out how to release smaller batches more often to improve quality. They should figure out how to release the first day of the quarter, every quarter. And work backward on what needs to happen to make that happen. Then release first of the month, every month. Once again, work backward on how to make that happen.

For example, we release to the iOS App Store and Google Play Store first thing on Monday, every Monday. And we worked backwards to figure out what we needed to do to make that happen.

When something goes wrong, the batch size is small enough that we can quickly figure out what happened. Also, the release train is reliable enough that engineers can push back on PMs. "You are not getting this feature this Monday. You'll get it next Monday".

Large batch sizes and long release cycles are terrible for quality!