★ Apple Screwed Up the TestFlight App’s Sort Order a Month Ago, and It’s Still Screwed Up, but the More I Think About It, the More Clear It Is They Started Screwing This Up 15 Years Ago
It’s 2026 and an important, much-used app from Apple doesn’t offer basic list sorting controls that would have been a glaring omission 40 years ago. This was a completely solved problem decades ago, when computer RAM was measured in *kilo*bytes.
The TestFlight app, used by Apple developers to test pre-release software, recently experienced a regression in its sort order for the list of registered apps. Starting with version 4.3, the list is now sorted alphabetically instead of by recency, with the most recently updated app at the top and the oldest at the bottom. This change makes it difficult for users to quickly identify new updates, especially when there are many apps registered.
Previously, TestFlight allowed users to sort the list by clicking headers at the top, offering options like name or date, and could sort the list in ascending or descending order. However, the new alphabetical order requires users to scroll through a lengthy list, often over 100 items, to find updates for apps whose names start with certain letters.
The author of this article argues that this sort order change is a regression from the previous state, where the list was ordered by recency, and highlights the lack of basic GUI features like selectable headers for sorting, which were common in other applications across various platforms for decades.
Written by urgent.news from Daring Fireball's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
