Follow the rules

  IOS5 has featured prominently in my wife and Is current plans. We both have iPhones and so updated them yesterday. For me so far I've not had any problems and everything is working as it was before or better. My wife is mostly the same with a couple of notable exceptions.

  Firstly it seems a couple of games she is playing did something they were not meant to. This meant that she lost all progress she had made in the game and they were back to their initial state as if you had just gotten and played the game. One of these games it is especially annoying since she had spent real money on getting progress in the game and it is all lost.

  The reason this happened? The programmers of the games did something Apple specifically told them not to. They stored the game save data somewhere which wasn't guaranteed to always be there. Why they did this I don't know but I could guess. However it doesn't change the basic point. They should have followed the rules Apple gave for interacting with their software.

  It is pretty simple in my line of work. You can get a piece of software to work. You can also get it to work while following the rules. If you do something outside those rules and happen to find some behaviour that just happens to work you really shouldn't do it. This situation here demonstrates exactly why because that behind the scenes stuff that just happens to work could change to where it doesn't work. The end result if people get annoyed with your software and stop using it.

  Too many software problems that people run across are not actually the result of programming errors. A lot are I admit but quite a lot are also people taking short cuts with something the basically works. However once you start to prod and poke it and change the assumptions it runs on behind the scenes things break.

  Just a little note to all those IOS programmers out there. Please follow the rules despite what you may think there are pretty much always reasons. If you do and something breaks you can then at least have a foot to stand on when getting Apple to fix their shit as it were.