I’m looking at you, Photos sync.
EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right (https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losi...)
I literally just experienced this with RCS failing to activate. No failure message, dug into logs, says userinteractionrequired. Front page of HN, nobody knows, apple corp response, 'thats interesting no you cant talk to engineering'.
Read the RCS spec definition document to fall asleep to after the board swap and the call saying they won't work on it since issue resolved, answers exactly what that meant, Apple never implemented handling for it, my followup post: https://wt.gd/working-rcs-messaging
The list didn’t show the god damn GoPro app, which was taking up 20GB of space from downloaded videos. I guessed it was the problem because it showed up in the device storage list, but literally not reported when you look at the list of data to backup.
iMessage is another great example of a failure. I changed my iMessage email and didn’t receive messages in a family group chat until I noticed — I had to text the chat before stuff started coning through. Previously sent messages were never delivered. And they all have my phone number, which has been my primary iMessage for LITERALLY over a decade. iMessage’s identity system is seriously messed up on a fundamental level. (I’ve had numerous other issues with it, but I’ll digress.)
Knowing that a company had competent product designers that made a good product, but then shitcanned the working product for a bunch of amateur output from people that don't understand dry very basics of UI, from the one company that made good UI its primary feature for decades... well it just felt like full on betrayal. The same thing happened with absolutely shitty Apple Music, which I never, ever use, because it's so painful to remember what could have been with iTunes...
I remember advising many photographs friends on using Aperture for photo library management. Now I feel so bad for ever recommending that. I mean Lightroom now has a stupid subscription, but using Apple software was kind of the point: avoiding the risk of software becoming too expensive or bad because the hardware premium funds the development of good software.
Now you get to pay more for the hardware but you have to deal with shitty or expensive software as well. Makes no sense.
I don't know why it bugs me so much, but I'm at the point of moving my library into a self-hosted Navidrome instance so I can stop using Music.
Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.
