Apple’s software quality is declining.

I’m not just talking about the most recent releases of everything, or the last couple of months — I’ve noticed this trend for about 2–3 years.

This is a conversation that my wife and I have about once a week. “I’d like to write a blog post, but mostly I’m stuck waiting for iPhoto.”

There’s no denying that Apple’s software has been going downhill and has been for quite some time. It’s as if the company’s focus on new and improved iOS hardware has led them to forget that they still have to produce first-class software.

iTunes is bloatware. iPhoto is hilariously slow. iCloud seems to choke on relatively simple tasks like bookmark syncing. iOS’s notification center is a bad clone of Android’s own bad implementation of a feature that deserved more attention from both vendors. Mail.app on iOS fails to update unread message counts on push-enabled accounts across my various devices. And iMessage is downright unusable for some people (even those not using the beta).

I’m very much hoping that WWDC brings a renewed focus on software.