5 ms·

I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple. They constantly ask for an example project, even if it's something that is easily demonstrated, simply

I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple. They constantly ask for an example project, even if it's something that is easily demonstrated, simply by running existing Apple software, and creating a project, would be a huge pain. They also ignore reports. Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports, asking me to verify that it was fixed in some release. Otherwise, there's no sign that they ever even read it. I usually end up closing my bug reports and feature requests, after a few months, because I'm tired of looking at them. It's clear that they consider every bug report to be a burden. That's a very strange stance, but then, they are not a typical company. I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars, but that does not make it any less annoying.

deviation 1y ago
Not to hand wave-- but this feels industry standard IMO. I have a dozen PRs sitting unacknowledged and stale across a handful of FAANG (and other) repos, including Apple's. I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.
- dmd 1y ago
  Maybe you can help bump FB13400242, a bug that is _literally_ going to kill people. (The bug is that to make an emergency call, even from lock screen, you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left - the Action button didn't get supported, when that button was added. So now the rule for teaching a small child isn't just "squeeze both sides" it's "oh but not that one!") (Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)
  - RankingMember 1y ago
    Consider hitting up some Apple "watcher" people (e.g. 9to5mac) to see if they can give you a boost on their social media. It's pretty obnoxious that it's come to needing to make a stink like that to get eyeballs on something, but here we are.
    - sgerenser 1y ago
      This definitely works. When I was at Apple I remember a number of issues in their weekly “bug review board” were classified as being high priority because they were going viral on Twitter.
      - sitzkrieg 1y ago
        now this is agile QA
        ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
        Worked for the company I was at. There were certain photographers and publications, that, if they got upset, all hands were on deck, for even the most innocuous bugs.
  - pants2 1y ago
    I think a faster / easier approach is to just press the biggest button repeatedly until it makes an emergency call for you.
    - dmd 1y ago
      A five year old is going to find "just squeeze" easier than doing that.
      - Bud 1y ago
        [dead]
      - jiveturkey 1y ago
        five year olds shouldn't have a phone, and should be supervised. even if they have a phone, they are unlikely to handle it with the care it requires.
        masspro 1y ago
        Thread is talking about kids knowing how to request emergency services with a nearby phone in case something happens to their parent(s). Nothing to do with giving kids their own phones.
        jiveturkey 1y ago
        A nearby phone implies a nearby phone user that would presumably understand how to place an emergency call, especially if they are being asked by a frantic five year old.
        catgirlinspace 1y ago
        if it’s only the kid and the nearby phone user, and the nearby phone user is having an emergency (that’s also preventing them from being able to call themselves) then the kid is able to do it.
        1y ago
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    A bug that has been reported that is down prioritized that then leads to killing people would be a pretty bad case for Apple when it came to court.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I'm decades away from being a small child and I can't remember these gestures. The only time I get screenshots or activate emergency mode on my phone is accidentally. Of course I also don't expect my phone to be able to help me much in an emergency.
    - darkwater 1y ago
      Well, not an Apple fan personally but on this they are just top of class. Even if this story involves an Apple Watch and not an iPhone, my father-in-law some time ago fainted (due to an underlying heart issue we late uncovered), knocked his head on the toilet when he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He lost consciousness for a brief moment and when he regained it, there was already someone from the emergency line speaking through the Apple Watch and he got the ambulance at home faster that without wearing the Apple Watch, and surely helped in saving his life. Btw I wonder if Apple sends some spoken message to the emergency services or some metadata or just connects the phones and that's it. Edit: oh and I forgot: my wife got a loud message (that bypassed DND) telling her that her father maybe felt, because she is one of his emergency contacts.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        My phone is off at night and I don't have a watch. I try not to let these huge companies FUD me into thinking that I appreciably change my odds of surviving an accident by buying their technology, but I get that others see it differently.
        KerrAvon 1y ago
        Maybe you want to rethink that? You're literally responding to a testimonial that it likely saved someone's life. Seconds do matter in some medical emergencies. Also, you may not be aware of Car Crash Detection https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959 https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959
        PaulHoule 1y ago
  - morpheuskafka 1y ago
    > you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left I don't recall there ever being any official language about "squeezing both sides of the phone" to make emergency calls. Doesn't the feature description in Settings explicitly reference which buttons to press?
  - mmmlinux 1y ago
    well you're already starting off assuming that the kid is holding an iPhone. so its already an "oh but not that one" situation.
    - dmd 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - rob_c 1y ago
        [flagged]
        Aeolun 1y ago
        Could be Japan too.
  - vondur 1y ago
    Here's the official Apple Information on how to do this: In case of emergency, use your iPhone to quickly and easily call for help and alert your emergency contacts (provided that cellular service is available). After an emergency call ends, your iPhone alerts your emergency contacts with a text message, unless you choose to cancel. Your iPhone sends your current location (if available) and—for a period of time after you enter SOS mode—your emergency contacts receive updates when your location changes. Note: If you have iPhone 14 or later (any model), you may be able to contact emergency services through satellite if cell service isn’t available. See Use Emergency SOS via satellite on your iPhone. Simultaneously press and hold the side button and either volume button until the sliders appear and the countdown on Emergency SOS ends, then release the buttons. Or you can enable iPhone to start Emergency SOS when you quickly press the side button five times. Go to Settings > Emergency SOS, then turn on Call with 5 Presses.
  - KingLancelot 1y ago
    [dead]
- devmor 1y ago
  If you ever get the chance, maybe you can be the one that improves that process some day. Even if it's standard among tech giants, you could be the one that makes a new standard! Good luck in your new role, btw.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Unless one's title is going to be "VP" or "SVP", the chance that someone joins BigTech and gets to "improve the process" is usually miniscule. You're being hired as cog #21 on team #54 and there is a large backlog of JIRA (well, in this case, Radar) tickets to grind through. There will be people who tell you what the processes are, and to not deviate from them. And you shouldn't get mad at those people, either--they're just the messengers, and were told what the processes are by people above them on the totem pole and so on.
    - devmor 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        It’s not a matter of ambition or lack-of. Nobody is going into a 100k+ company and just changing the entire corporate culture around something as broad as bug fixing. These companies have hundreds of teams, and decades of entrenched culture. Sure, go in and improve what you can in your own lane, but be realistic about your scope and reach.
        devmor 1y ago
        Nobody ever changes anything and new hires should have no aspirations or goals but to be code monkeys. Your outlook on career growth is nihilistic, not realistic.
        saagarjha 1y ago
        Your outlook is not realistic.
- tpurves 1y ago
  Did you take a job at Apple just so you can accept one or more of those PR's that's been bugging you? :) Wasn't there an xkcd about that scenario...
  - ninju 1y ago
    Just gotta be careful... https://xkcd.com/1739/ https://xkcd.com/1739/
- codr7 1y ago
  [flagged]
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  I've only submitted two security reports, both for very blatant bugs, and they've booth been closed as "works as intended". I don't think my bank had intended to make passwords optional, and the third-party administrator of their bug bounty program agreed, when creating the report, but once it made it to the bank, it was up to them to decide if it was or was not a bug.
- inopinatus 1y ago
  Industry baseline is slightly worse again e.g. attempt to report a bug in a Microsoft product that a major government customer is experiencing when they use it with our stuff, but Microsoft won't accept the bug report because we don't ourselves have an enterprise support contract with them, and the customer's own relationship with MS is nigh-impossible to navigate because of public sector nonsense.
lapcat 1y ago
> I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars This was financed by equally massive technical debt.
- imchillyb 1y ago
  How does one finance a project or a company with increased maintenance costs and lower quality production? That’s what technical debt is. It’s the cost for moving forward quickly. I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to state.
  - lapcat 1y ago
    > How does one finance a project or a company with increased maintenance costs You seem to be assuming that the company will eventually pay off the technical debt rather than just continue accumulating it and lowering production quality.
    - shermantanktop 1y ago
      ? This is the system working as designed. The whole game, from startup to fortune 500, is to accumulate market power fast enough to avoid tech debt swallowing you whole. Once you have market power (which means different things for different companies) you can safely feed the tech debt monster just as little as you feel like.
  - dostick 1y ago
    Example of debt caught up with company is latest Meta AR glasses presentation
latexr 1y ago
> I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple. From your description, your experience is quite typical.
- eichin 1y ago
  mmm, it was better than the "closed as duplicate" (of an internal bug that you can't access) path that used to be the big complaint about radar...
asah 1y ago
how is this different from any product with a billion users and 100,000+ live bug reports? I've had pretty good luck reporting bugs to Google (notoriously bad!): 1. provide simple, crystal clear examples that cannot be due to third parties, misconfiguration or user error. 2. show that it's happening to a large number of mainstream users (not niche) 3. show that it breaks critical workflows and has no easy workaround (incl partial workarounds). 4. if you meet #1-3, then wait 6-9 months minimum (more if hard to fix). If not, wait 3-5+ years. --- Favorite example: in the mid-2000s, I caught google maps confusing suite/apt numbers for street numbers. It got flagged as low priority. So, to get the team's attention, I reproduced the bug on a large Google offices. Six month later, bug fixed. After that experience, I report everything to Google that breaks my workflow. Like clockwork, the biggies get fixed a couple of quarters later. --- Want long? Try improving/fixing core issues with the API design of Linux or PostgreSQL: fix times can be measured in decades. Backward compatibility is insufficient - they rightfully worry about libraries and tools adopting the new APIs and then breaking legacy systems that cannot be upgraded even for mission-critical security issues. --- NOTE: OP bug feels P0 and the better strategy is either mass media (incl HN) or networking to someone inside the company. I've hit those too over the years and can usually find someone at the company to send directly.
- ashoeafoot 1y ago
  [dead]
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  I'm amazed at what Google was okay with. For a while there, if you had access to Chrome's files, for a user logged in with Chrome that had a credit card on file with Google, you could initiate a Google Pay payment with no further authorization. They also used to let anyone add any gmail address to a Google Groups group, and send out unfilterable spam as a message from that group.
  - asah 1y ago
    They still do, I use add-anyone all the time. The trick is that they implemented serious anti-spam on groups, which them allows them to keep this feature. It's of course not perfect but good enough.
alsetmusic 1y ago
They asked me for a sysdiagnose when I complained about how crappy their new Finder disk icon looks on macOS 26. See this rant by Jeff Johnson, who called for a boycott on filing bugs with Apple a couple years back (I stuck to the boycott except for two obvious UI design issues in the latest OS because neither required repro steps (so why the sysdiagnose?)). https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html Edit: accidentally called sysdiagnose a spindump.
- jbverschoor 1y ago
  Oh I stored filing bugs years ago. It frustrating as hell and pointless
lukan 1y ago
"Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports" Hm. That is more than I ever got, but I also never bothered to report anything to any company after being ignored the first tries.
encom 1y ago
Unless you get paid by Apple, why would you spend any amount of time doing work for them?
- dymk 1y ago
  Because you want them to fix a bug they might not be aware of, and bug reports are also votes of importance
lunarboy 1y ago
Open radar is a just a landfill. Nothing ever gets picked up for fixing
sylvainkalache 1y ago
Same here. They have a known bugs where entries will vanish from your contacts. Data loss is a big deal (or so I thought). Support asked me to let them know when a contact vanishing did so they could gather logs from me phone. Once I was finally able to see it happen, I reached out. Reported that it had just happened overnight. The customer support said it was too long of a time frame for engineers to investigate because "it generates a lot of logs and that's too much to go through". I could not believe their answer. I just moved my contacts to Gmail and that was the end of it.

deviation 1y ago

Not to hand wave-- but this feels industry standard IMO. I have a dozen PRs sitting unacknowledged and stale across a handful of FAANG (and other) repos, including Apple's. I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.

dmd 1y ago
Maybe you can help bump FB13400242, a bug that is _literally_ going to kill people. (The bug is that to make an emergency call, even from lock screen, you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left - the Action button didn't get supported, when that button was added. So now the rule for teaching a small child isn't just "squeeze both sides" it's "oh but not that one!") (Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)
- RankingMember 1y ago
  Consider hitting up some Apple "watcher" people (e.g. 9to5mac) to see if they can give you a boost on their social media. It's pretty obnoxious that it's come to needing to make a stink like that to get eyeballs on something, but here we are.
  - sgerenser 1y ago
    This definitely works. When I was at Apple I remember a number of issues in their weekly “bug review board” were classified as being high priority because they were going viral on Twitter.
    - sitzkrieg 1y ago
      now this is agile QA
      - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
        Worked for the company I was at. There were certain photographers and publications, that, if they got upset, all hands were on deck, for even the most innocuous bugs.
- pants2 1y ago
  I think a faster / easier approach is to just press the biggest button repeatedly until it makes an emergency call for you.
  - dmd 1y ago
    A five year old is going to find "just squeeze" easier than doing that.
    - Bud 1y ago
      [dead]
    - jiveturkey 1y ago
      five year olds shouldn't have a phone, and should be supervised. even if they have a phone, they are unlikely to handle it with the care it requires.
      - masspro 1y ago
        Thread is talking about kids knowing how to request emergency services with a nearby phone in case something happens to their parent(s). Nothing to do with giving kids their own phones.
        jiveturkey 1y ago
        A nearby phone implies a nearby phone user that would presumably understand how to place an emergency call, especially if they are being asked by a frantic five year old.
        catgirlinspace 1y ago
        if it’s only the kid and the nearby phone user, and the nearby phone user is having an emergency (that’s also preventing them from being able to call themselves) then the kid is able to do it.
      - 1y ago
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  A bug that has been reported that is down prioritized that then leads to killing people would be a pretty bad case for Apple when it came to court.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I'm decades away from being a small child and I can't remember these gestures. The only time I get screenshots or activate emergency mode on my phone is accidentally. Of course I also don't expect my phone to be able to help me much in an emergency.
  - darkwater 1y ago
    Well, not an Apple fan personally but on this they are just top of class. Even if this story involves an Apple Watch and not an iPhone, my father-in-law some time ago fainted (due to an underlying heart issue we late uncovered), knocked his head on the toilet when he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He lost consciousness for a brief moment and when he regained it, there was already someone from the emergency line speaking through the Apple Watch and he got the ambulance at home faster that without wearing the Apple Watch, and surely helped in saving his life. Btw I wonder if Apple sends some spoken message to the emergency services or some metadata or just connects the phones and that's it. Edit: oh and I forgot: my wife got a loud message (that bypassed DND) telling her that her father maybe felt, because she is one of his emergency contacts.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      My phone is off at night and I don't have a watch. I try not to let these huge companies FUD me into thinking that I appreciably change my odds of surviving an accident by buying their technology, but I get that others see it differently.
      - KerrAvon 1y ago
        Maybe you want to rethink that? You're literally responding to a testimonial that it likely saved someone's life. Seconds do matter in some medical emergencies. Also, you may not be aware of Car Crash Detection https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959 https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959
        PaulHoule 1y ago
- morpheuskafka 1y ago
  > you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left I don't recall there ever being any official language about "squeezing both sides of the phone" to make emergency calls. Doesn't the feature description in Settings explicitly reference which buttons to press?
- mmmlinux 1y ago
  well you're already starting off assuming that the kid is holding an iPhone. so its already an "oh but not that one" situation.
  - dmd 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - rob_c 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - Aeolun 1y ago
        Could be Japan too.
- vondur 1y ago
  Here's the official Apple Information on how to do this: In case of emergency, use your iPhone to quickly and easily call for help and alert your emergency contacts (provided that cellular service is available). After an emergency call ends, your iPhone alerts your emergency contacts with a text message, unless you choose to cancel. Your iPhone sends your current location (if available) and—for a period of time after you enter SOS mode—your emergency contacts receive updates when your location changes. Note: If you have iPhone 14 or later (any model), you may be able to contact emergency services through satellite if cell service isn’t available. See Use Emergency SOS via satellite on your iPhone. Simultaneously press and hold the side button and either volume button until the sliders appear and the countdown on Emergency SOS ends, then release the buttons. Or you can enable iPhone to start Emergency SOS when you quickly press the side button five times. Go to Settings > Emergency SOS, then turn on Call with 5 Presses.
- KingLancelot 1y ago
  [dead]
devmor 1y ago
If you ever get the chance, maybe you can be the one that improves that process some day. Even if it's standard among tech giants, you could be the one that makes a new standard! Good luck in your new role, btw.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Unless one's title is going to be "VP" or "SVP", the chance that someone joins BigTech and gets to "improve the process" is usually miniscule. You're being hired as cog #21 on team #54 and there is a large backlog of JIRA (well, in this case, Radar) tickets to grind through. There will be people who tell you what the processes are, and to not deviate from them. And you shouldn't get mad at those people, either--they're just the messengers, and were told what the processes are by people above them on the totem pole and so on.
  - devmor 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      It’s not a matter of ambition or lack-of. Nobody is going into a 100k+ company and just changing the entire corporate culture around something as broad as bug fixing. These companies have hundreds of teams, and decades of entrenched culture. Sure, go in and improve what you can in your own lane, but be realistic about your scope and reach.
      - devmor 1y ago
        Nobody ever changes anything and new hires should have no aspirations or goals but to be code monkeys. Your outlook on career growth is nihilistic, not realistic.
        saagarjha 1y ago
        Your outlook is not realistic.
tpurves 1y ago
Did you take a job at Apple just so you can accept one or more of those PR's that's been bugging you? :) Wasn't there an xkcd about that scenario...
- ninju 1y ago
  Just gotta be careful... https://xkcd.com/1739/ https://xkcd.com/1739/
codr7 1y ago
[flagged]
dlcarrier 1y ago
I've only submitted two security reports, both for very blatant bugs, and they've booth been closed as "works as intended". I don't think my bank had intended to make passwords optional, and the third-party administrator of their bug bounty program agreed, when creating the report, but once it made it to the bank, it was up to them to decide if it was or was not a bug.
inopinatus 1y ago
Industry baseline is slightly worse again e.g. attempt to report a bug in a Microsoft product that a major government customer is experiencing when they use it with our stuff, but Microsoft won't accept the bug report because we don't ourselves have an enterprise support contract with them, and the customer's own relationship with MS is nigh-impossible to navigate because of public sector nonsense.

lapcat 1y ago

> I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars This was financed by equally massive technical debt.

imchillyb 1y ago
How does one finance a project or a company with increased maintenance costs and lower quality production? That’s what technical debt is. It’s the cost for moving forward quickly. I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to state.
- lapcat 1y ago
  > How does one finance a project or a company with increased maintenance costs You seem to be assuming that the company will eventually pay off the technical debt rather than just continue accumulating it and lowering production quality.
  - shermantanktop 1y ago
    ? This is the system working as designed. The whole game, from startup to fortune 500, is to accumulate market power fast enough to avoid tech debt swallowing you whole. Once you have market power (which means different things for different companies) you can safely feed the tech debt monster just as little as you feel like.
- dostick 1y ago
  Example of debt caught up with company is latest Meta AR glasses presentation

latexr 1y ago

> I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple. From your description, your experience is quite typical.

eichin 1y ago
mmm, it was better than the "closed as duplicate" (of an internal bug that you can't access) path that used to be the big complaint about radar...

asah 1y ago

how is this different from any product with a billion users and 100,000+ live bug reports? I've had pretty good luck reporting bugs to Google (notoriously bad!): 1. provide simple, crystal clear examples that cannot be due to third parties, misconfiguration or user error. 2. show that it's happening to a large number of mainstream users (not niche) 3. show that it breaks critical workflows and has no easy workaround (incl partial workarounds). 4. if you meet #1-3, then wait 6-9 months minimum (more if hard to fix). If not, wait 3-5+ years. --- Favorite example: in the mid-2000s, I caught google maps confusing suite/apt numbers for street numbers. It got flagged as low priority. So, to get the team's attention, I reproduced the bug on a large Google offices. Six month later, bug fixed. After that experience, I report everything to Google that breaks my workflow. Like clockwork, the biggies get fixed a couple of quarters later. --- Want long? Try improving/fixing core issues with the API design of Linux or PostgreSQL: fix times can be measured in decades. Backward compatibility is insufficient - they rightfully worry about libraries and tools adopting the new APIs and then breaking legacy systems that cannot be upgraded even for mission-critical security issues. --- NOTE: OP bug feels P0 and the better strategy is either mass media (incl HN) or networking to someone inside the company. I've hit those too over the years and can usually find someone at the company to send directly.

ashoeafoot 1y ago
[dead]
dlcarrier 1y ago
I'm amazed at what Google was okay with. For a while there, if you had access to Chrome's files, for a user logged in with Chrome that had a credit card on file with Google, you could initiate a Google Pay payment with no further authorization. They also used to let anyone add any gmail address to a Google Groups group, and send out unfilterable spam as a message from that group.
- asah 1y ago
  They still do, I use add-anyone all the time. The trick is that they implemented serious anti-spam on groups, which them allows them to keep this feature. It's of course not perfect but good enough.

alsetmusic 1y ago

They asked me for a sysdiagnose when I complained about how crappy their new Finder disk icon looks on macOS 26. See this rant by Jeff Johnson, who called for a boycott on filing bugs with Apple a couple years back (I stuck to the boycott except for two obvious UI design issues in the latest OS because neither required repro steps (so why the sysdiagnose?)). https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html Edit: accidentally called sysdiagnose a spindump.

jbverschoor 1y ago
Oh I stored filing bugs years ago. It frustrating as hell and pointless

lukan 1y ago

"Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports" Hm. That is more than I ever got, but I also never bothered to report anything to any company after being ignored the first tries.

encom 1y ago

Unless you get paid by Apple, why would you spend any amount of time doing work for them?

dymk 1y ago
Because you want them to fix a bug they might not be aware of, and bug reports are also votes of importance

lunarboy 1y ago

Open radar is a just a landfill. Nothing ever gets picked up for fixing

sylvainkalache 1y ago

Same here. They have a known bugs where entries will vanish from your contacts. Data loss is a big deal (or so I thought). Support asked me to let them know when a contact vanishing did so they could gather logs from me phone. Once I was finally able to see it happen, I reached out. Reported that it had just happened overnight. The customer support said it was too long of a time frame for engineers to investigate because "it generates a lot of logs and that's too much to go through". I could not believe their answer. I just moved my contacts to Gmail and that was the end of it.