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Comment by BonesJustice | Hacker News Reader

Does Apple have a halfway decent public issue tracker? I don’t recall ever seeing one, but I’ve never gone out of my way to look for one either.

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I would say it’s exactly “halfway decent”. There’s very little feedback and bugs tend to get closed as duplicates but since it’s not public you can’t monitor the state of the duolicates.

Ask for status updates if you need them. They’re usually prompt and I figure if more people do they’ll start feeling the cost of not automating it.

Having had direct experience with this, this is the reason people don't file bugs with Apple. It is an exercise in futility.

Those people are operating on a flawed understanding of the process though... it’s not futile.

I reported a UX bug with the new iOS feature Screen Time when the first developer beta hit. Through the entire beta releases the only updates I got were “we pushed a new release, can you test again?”.

Needless to say the bug made it to the final release of iOS 12. I’m done filling out bug reports for this reason.

Same here. I have a little "blog" where I collect such things (with workaround if any), and then hope google would redirect people there suffering the same issue.

That being said, filing bug reports that end up being duplicates is not wasted time, because they aggregate information from duplicate reports into the main report tracking that issue.

A year or two ago they started telling you at least the status of the original bug, open, closed or fixed.

For WebKit? Yes https://bugs.webkit.org

No, their bug management is not friendly at all.

Yep it's called radar, it's here: https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/

radar isn't public. You need an Apple ID linked to a developer account to view reports.

...which is free and takes about ten seconds to sign up for. You can only view your own reports, but on the other hand they do fix bugs.

This I did not know. Thanks.

Hmm, they must get so many duplicates...

Yeah they get dupes but they encourage them because they aggregate the information so that new information from one report fleshes out the missing information from other reports.

It is public, it's free to use and sign up for. The account costs zero dollars to sign up for, so I don't get the complaint.

It’s the exact opposite of public. You have to have an account, and even then You can only see bugs you submitted.

Yep, Apple takes privacy seriously.

Bug reports sometimes also contain proprietary code that help Apple pinpoint the bug. If you worked for a company and were working on a brand new software product, would you want your competitors to have the ability to search bug reports for your email address (or all addresses at *@xyz.com), knowing that you are having trouble with a specific API?

BTW, Apple Developer Relations has updated its privacy policy for bug reports where data you submit will be deleted from inactive bug reports after a period of time.

A private bug tracker also means that Apple can use the same bug tracker to collect reports about devices or functionality which isn't available to the public.

This I did not know. Thanks.

For webkit? Bugzilla.webkit.org

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