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Users find disturbing bugs, glitches in newly released products from Apple and Google,
No technology launch ever ran completely smoothly.
In the past month, Google launched its Photos product, while Apple rolled out its music-streaming service Monday to more than 100 countries around the world.
There have been some issues this week proving that adage:
Google Photos
It kind of says it all that when you search “Google Photos” in Google’s own search engine, the first autocomplete suggestion adds “gorillas.”
Google Photos was launched at the company’s annual I/O conference at the end of May.
It’s a new, private online hub for all your photos, with software that in- cludes many nice touches, such as organizing photos, building collages and making them easy to share with people you choose.
That software will recognize and auto-tag faces, places and things in pictures and easily group them together.
Unfortunately, this week, Jacky Alciné, an African-American programmer, noticed that the feature kept auto-tagging pictures of him and his girlfriend as “gorillas.”
Alciné posted the result to Twitter, and as it was going viral, Google quickly apologized. While it searched for a fix, it ultimately removed the “gorillas” auto-tag from the product.
According to Google’s chief social architect Yonatan Zunger, the company was aware of the tagging issue with facial recognition of skin tones in different kinds of lighting.
“We used to have a problem with people (of all races) being tagged as dogs,” Zunger told the Verge.
Apple Music
The company’s big move into music streaming Monday came after weeks of negative publicity over negotiations with artists and labels. But now it appears the way it’s been introduced to the world should also have caused people to be wary.
Apple Music arrived on phones with iOS 8.4, an update that inte- grates the existing Music app into the phone. Longtime iOS users know that updates can tend to be buggy and can cause unforeseen problems.
In fact, one of the other aspects in the latest update is a fix for a textmessaging glitch that used a specific string of characters to turn iPhones into unusable bricks, an Apple Watch bug that stopped apps from being reinstalled and a GPS glitch that prevented third-party apps from sharing location data.
Some users have reported issues with iOS 8.4, including shortened battery life, random freezing and song duplication. For the most part, it seems that iOS 8.4 has gone smoothly for most users.
On desktop, it’s another story. Apple Music also required an iTunes update to version 12.2. Many users have reported problems with their music libraries, including songs and playlists being moved around and many artists, albums and songs being mislabelled.
The issue seems to affect people who have previously used iTunes Match, the company’s product that allowed people to access their library through the cloud.
Though Apple Support’s iTunes message board shows a thread of users with problems, Apple itself has yet to confirm there is an issue or what might be causing the problem.