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I hope something changes with the way apple manages bugs. It’s incredibly demoralizing to spend my time reproducing a bug, writing up the bug report I’d want to

by e28eta 3y ago

I hope something changes with the way apple manages bugs. It’s incredibly demoralizing to spend my time reproducing a bug, writing up the bug report I’d want to receive (including a minimal test case), and hearing nothing for years until it’s either closed or receiving a message asking me to do more work to determine if it’s still an issue. Are there companies that do this well, at a scale approaching Apple’s? I can think of lots of reasons why this is a “hard problem”, and how it’d be hard to staff. I also think they’re getting paid to solve this problem, and aren’t.

astrange 3y ago
There's a fundamental problem that the first step is you doing all that work. That means there's no way to tell you the work is wasted; you already did it. I generally think people should do /less/ work when reporting bugs because of this, but you should be careful and clear about what you do put in there.
- e28eta 3y ago
  Some of that work does benefit me: better understanding of the bug, verification that it’s not something I’m doing wrong, maybe some ideas of a workaround. I’ve stopped doing the second phase: packaging it up and submitting it to apple, because that’s shown itself to be an entirely negative experience. If apple’s not going to spend the $$ on internal QA, and they’re not going to spend the $$ on developer relations, I’m not especially interested in donating my time to help them. I know I’ve seen a similar sentiment from other developers for years. I think low quality / low content bug reports are usually worse than none, because they decrease the signal to noise ratio of bugs. Maybe if there was a better channel of communication, and I knew it’d be more interactive it’d be different.
baz00 3y ago
I got so fed up of all the Apple bugs I sold all my Apple stuff and bought a PC. At least I'm greeted with new and interesting bugs no one is going to close.

by e28eta 3y ago

astrange 3y ago

There's a fundamental problem that the first step is you doing all that work. That means there's no way to tell you the work is wasted; you already did it. I generally think people should do /less/ work when reporting bugs because of this, but you should be careful and clear about what you do put in there.

e28eta 3y ago
Some of that work does benefit me: better understanding of the bug, verification that it’s not something I’m doing wrong, maybe some ideas of a workaround. I’ve stopped doing the second phase: packaging it up and submitting it to apple, because that’s shown itself to be an entirely negative experience. If apple’s not going to spend the $$ on internal QA, and they’re not going to spend the $$ on developer relations, I’m not especially interested in donating my time to help them. I know I’ve seen a similar sentiment from other developers for years. I think low quality / low content bug reports are usually worse than none, because they decrease the signal to noise ratio of bugs. Maybe if there was a better channel of communication, and I knew it’d be more interactive it’d be different.

baz00 3y ago

I got so fed up of all the Apple bugs I sold all my Apple stuff and bought a PC. At least I'm greeted with new and interesting bugs no one is going to close.