3 ms·

I'm already fairly well-known in the Apple developer community and received a lot of positive feedback on social media before posting the announcement, but I do

by lapcat 3y ago

I'm already fairly well-known in the Apple developer community and received a lot of positive feedback on social media before posting the announcement, but I do think you're overestimating the amount of effort that I and other developers are willing to put into getting Feedback Assistant improved. This is not a fight for higher income or something of that obvious importance. The beauty of the strike is that steps 1-3 at the beginning are low effort from everyone, which allows everyone to easily join if they choose. As I said at the end of the article, one of the goals of the strike is to prove to ourselves that we don't really need Feedback Assistant, we've got little to lose, it's not essential to us that we participate in the bug reporting system, and we can just walk away. The strike is not a win-at-all-costs, fight-to-the-death scenario. Feedback Assistant, no matter how unrelentingly terrible and annoying, is or at least should be rather low on our list of professional priorities. I think this attitude gives us leverage over Apple. We're only volunteers walking away from a crappy volunteering "opportunity", whereas Apple relies on our free labor for its commercial products and would have to actually hire additional staff and pay them in order to replace our QA work.

saagarjha 3y ago
Might be worth having a public list of people who've "signed" your boycott, though.
- lapcat 3y ago
  I've considered that, but I have some concerns about the idea. I'm worried about personally getting overwhelmed by emails and messages on social media. The more successful the boycott, the more I become swamped. :-) Also, I think many developers have a fear of reprisal, whether that's empirically justified or not. My understanding is that there's now actually some degree of anonymity in Feedback Assistant, after changes were made in recent years for GDPR compliance? In any case, putting your name in public is a bigger step than simply boycotting, and I'm aiming for maximum participation. I've put my own name on this, and some cranks have even speculated that I might get kicked out of the developer program for it, which I doubt, because it would make me a martyr and kill my popular software — not to mention that dropping several 0days on Apple didn't get me kicked out — but I suppose that's always a possibility. In general, I don't think that petitions are particularly useful. I'm more in favor of action (though in this specific case, the boycott is technically inaction).
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    If this gets you kicked out of the developer program, I think everyone would be quite upset, yes.
rendaw 3y ago
I think Apple will individually reply to the feedbacks with a PR message like "we take your concerns seriously, we have a plan to improve our feedback interaction." Because the replies are individual and posted on a private channel, people who joined the boycott will not have any wider visibility, and think "Oh maybe it's okay now" and go back to using it. It might be worth establishing an official public dialog forum and discouraging people from individually communicating until a resolution is confirmed there in public. Right now it's on individuals to confirm that Apple improved things, which can only reasonbly be done by submitting more feedback (i.e. breaking the boycott). I've personally stopped providing feedback via forms on cloud providers' websites due to similar unacknowledgement and general disinterest in improving developer experience, but haven't tried to organize anything about it.

by lapcat 3y ago

saagarjha 3y ago

Might be worth having a public list of people who've "signed" your boycott, though.

lapcat 3y ago
I've considered that, but I have some concerns about the idea. I'm worried about personally getting overwhelmed by emails and messages on social media. The more successful the boycott, the more I become swamped. :-) Also, I think many developers have a fear of reprisal, whether that's empirically justified or not. My understanding is that there's now actually some degree of anonymity in Feedback Assistant, after changes were made in recent years for GDPR compliance? In any case, putting your name in public is a bigger step than simply boycotting, and I'm aiming for maximum participation. I've put my own name on this, and some cranks have even speculated that I might get kicked out of the developer program for it, which I doubt, because it would make me a martyr and kill my popular software — not to mention that dropping several 0days on Apple didn't get me kicked out — but I suppose that's always a possibility. In general, I don't think that petitions are particularly useful. I'm more in favor of action (though in this specific case, the boycott is technically inaction).
- saagarjha 3y ago
  If this gets you kicked out of the developer program, I think everyone would be quite upset, yes.

rendaw 3y ago

I think Apple will individually reply to the feedbacks with a PR message like "we take your concerns seriously, we have a plan to improve our feedback interaction." Because the replies are individual and posted on a private channel, people who joined the boycott will not have any wider visibility, and think "Oh maybe it's okay now" and go back to using it. It might be worth establishing an official public dialog forum and discouraging people from individually communicating until a resolution is confirmed there in public. Right now it's on individuals to confirm that Apple improved things, which can only reasonbly be done by submitting more feedback (i.e. breaking the boycott). I've personally stopped providing feedback via forms on cloud providers' websites due to similar unacknowledgement and general disinterest in improving developer experience, but haven't tried to organize anything about it.