iPhone criticized as buggier than ever

Last week Canadian pop star Justin Bieber shared his frustration on Instagram with his 90 million followers, criticizing the iPhone’s dictation button in the Messages app and saying it disrupts his daily routine.

The issue, which has persisted for years, is that the dictation button is positioned in the same spot as the send message button, causing him to accidentally press it, New York Post reported.

"If I hit this dictation button after sending a text and it beeps and stops my music one more time, I’m gonna find everyone at Apple and put them in a rear-naked chokehold," Bieber wrote."Even if I turn off dictation, I somehow hit the voice note thing. The send button should not have multiple functions in the same spot."

His post went viral quickly, garnering tens of millions of views, with many users echoing his frustrations over the phones’ interface.

The dictation feature has been part of the iPhone for three years, yet Bieber’s rant has sparked ongoing complaints that iOS, used by 1.5 billion people worldwide, is becoming less usable, more complicated, and increasingly prone to bugs and crashes.

The latest iOS 26 update has received widespread criticism, particularly for slow notifications, overheating, app crashes, reduced battery life, and malfunctioning features.

The iPhone 17 Pro Max (left) and iPhone 17 Pro. Photo by VnExpress/Tuan Hung

Since the iPhone was launched 18 years ago, Apple has constantly added new features to iOS. The iOS 26 update brought a design overhaul called Liquid Glass with transparent notifications and controls and introduced Apple Intelligence, a feature aimed at incorporating AI into iPhone apps.

But analysts said adding more features has led to "bloat," making the software more complicated and prone to failures. Josh Cohenzadeh of the San Francisco-based mobile device reliability company Sentry, told The Telegraph that the issue stems from Apple’s development cycle. "When you keep adding new features and making [user interface] changes, it usually comes at the cost of stability and reliability."

Apple has not commented on the increased number of bugs, but analytics companies have noted a rise in errors, especially following major updates. Software testing company Luciq reported that iOS 26 caused apps to restart twice as often as in previous versions.

Kenny Johnston, Luciq’s chief product officer, pointed to the increased complexity of the operating system, including more AI functions, background tasks, and support for aging hardware, which have contributed to the rise in errors.

Ben Wood, an analyst at the U.K. market research firm CCS Insight, said that the growing dependence on smartphones has made users more sensitive to bugs.

Apple has acknowledged the increasing number of iPhone bugs in the past and has advised developers to prioritize performance fixes over adding new features in recent iOS versions. It has also expanded its public beta testing programs, previously restricted to internal users, to gather more feedback before general releases.

It has also "slow rolled" updates to iOS versions, allowing users to continue using older software for longer periods, which U.S. tech site 9to5Mac described as an implicit admission that new updates may introduce unwanted bugs.

Furthermore, some of Apple’s AI efforts caused serious errors, such as the automatic summarization of news misrepresenting a series of headlines from news apps, forcing Apple to suspend the feature for almost a year. It is now available as an optional feature rather than being enabled by default.

The Telegraph noted that recent executive reshuffling, including the departure of key engineers and rumours that CEO Tim Cook may step down in January, has led to a lack of focus on improving the user experience of Apple’s products.

While analysts predict record sales for Apple’s latest iPhone models, maintaining user loyalty will be challenging if the user experience deteriorates.