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If Apple spent more than $11 dollars on documentation they also might not be in the situation they're currently in.

So much of what happened in Catalina is just flat out not written down in the Developer Documentation. Apple's documentation has been waning for a while, but it's fallen off a cliff in the last eighteen months.

It's impossible to believe that's not having an impact on external software quality, and it's difficult to believe it isn't having an impact on Apple's own applications too.

I remember doing my first hackintosh, due to an attempt at a startup where we wanted to have a iOS and OSX client.

The documentation blew me away, nicely packaged with XCode, and made it really look like a platform that would care about developers, especially given how niche it was.

That was 10.6 time.

Currently, I have a Mac forced on me by company. I look at docs... and they are the same docs I remember, with bits missing, a "deprecated banner" from 5 years ago. Deprecation notices give no information what APIs one should use in place, or where new documentation is.

This boggles my mind. My flabber is ghasted.

Documentation is of paramount importance! How else will people build an ecosystem around your software if they can't figure out how to use it in a variety of ways?

I really hope this isn't some trend of just abandoning the commons, taking without adding back in.

I think the point is to get the average beginner dev frustrated and not make macos apps. They've been pruning the platform slowly but surely for quite some time now

ipad seems to be their focus for "pro" stuff now. Now that iPad apps can run on macos i think that's a clear sign that if you want to make a macos app - don't bother, make an ipad app

The Catalyst documentation for running iPadOS apps on a Mac is actually the worst offender. It's garbage, and unusable. Anyone who has built a Catalyst app has effectively had to reverse engineer significant parts of the APIs. God only knows if some of them are supposed to be private, and if Apple will suddenly decide they are and reject apps from the store for it.

I don't think there's a deliberate conspiracy here. All this stuff is launching two years before it's ready, and subject to a huge internal war at Apple - it's fairly clear a chunk of the MacOS team doesn't want to do Catalyst fearing it's the death of the Mac, even if the management do.

There are a surprising amount of Catalyst API documents that literally just have the function name and no description of what it does and an empty page.

That sounds an awful lot like a typical project that starts out on the right foot, everyone has a procedure they follow but crunch time approaches and they start to cut corners just to get things done. Documentation and testing are the first I’ve seen to go.

I had the same experience trying to write a plugin for Logic Pro early this year. None of the old documentation or examples were relevant, and I never did find anything from Apple that did work. I finally used someone else's framework as a starting point.

The quality of the original "Inside Macintosh" books was the main reason I started programming on the Mac back in the day, and lost interest in the Amiga.

Definitely put a number on it! And track how close you actually are. I think 10% of revenue will be deemed too much for most organizations.

Usually Support is seen as a distraction to new product development or whatever the strategy is, but often I see management overestimate how much time and money is spent on it. So, just tracking that cost/time will likely increase it and improve customer satisfaction.

Unfortunately, improving Customer Support is not rewarded in organizations as much as cutting costs, creating new products or expanding revenue, so you'll probably need the CEO to care a lot about it to improve matters. And CEOs can't really put a number on improving customer support, so it is optimized to cost less over the near term, not deliver a better service.

I also see the worrying tendency to keep only Customer Service or equivalent responsible, as if they can fix the bugs and improve the design.

Just a not that there is a way to get a bug report filed - call support, get the issue escalated because its not fixed, if they cant fix it it will go to engineering.

I have personally witnessed hundreds of support cases go through this various process, in some cases taking months of work (for communication mostly from eng to customer) of T2 support reps.

Now - is their current spend sufficient? Probably not, but Apple consistently ranks among the highest customer service ratings - so they probably think spending more here is a waste of time.

While this is true, it is a solution for people dedicated to getting a problem fixed. Calling up a support line is a huge barrier, and companies lose out when people cannot file bugs or express their frustration with little issues with ease.

Absolutely - and out of the first year of purchase you gotta pay - people LOVE paying! But that last part matters - if a company already wins the customer service metrics - how do you convince management the money is worth it?

> If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing bugs

Just to be clear, you're suggesting they dedicate $25B/year to bug fixing? Seems high, given their total R&D budget for 2018 was only ~56% of that.

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/05/apple-2018-form-10-k-hi...

Sure, why not? It's not like they're doing anything else with the money. It doesn't have to be only software fixes either. There's plenty of hardware issues like the keyboard.

The spending doesn't have to be instant either. Just start increasing the spending and measure user satisfaction and bug report counts. Once you've arrived deep into diminishing returns you can stop increasing the spending.

> Once you've arrived deep into diminishing returns you can stop increasing the spending.

How do you know they're not there now? It's hard to believe they're not thinking very carefully about these sorts of things, given how successful they've been establishing a place in the market.

> How do you know they're not there now?

I don't know for a fact but I have more respect towards Apple than to think that the current state is the best they could do.

> I have more respect towards Apple than to think that the current state is the best they could do.

$265B in Revenue and and $59B in profit seems to indicate they're already doing pretty well. Maybe your definition of 'best' isn't in perfect alignment with the rest of the marketplace?

I get that there are things about their products you can point at and wish were done better, or at least differently. I use Apple products myself, so I have a list of these things myself. But, the thing is, this isn't unique to Apple. Have you ever been completely satisfied with a product or service? I can't really say that I have. About the best that I've ever been able to achieve is something that's a close enough approximation to my 'requirements' that I can adapt what I'm doing to make it a solution.

Point is - you're never going to find something perfect. There will always be a gap and hopefully effort on both sides to close that gap. Those financial numbers aren't a perfect indication by any means, but they do signal that Apple's doing a reasonably good job of closing that gap for a reasonably large number of people willing to part with their earnings to buy Apple's products.

The number doesn't matter. It's the precedent being set that Apple takes bug reports, and investigations into them, seriously through a percentage of revenue. It could be 10% of something more in-line with Mac OS X - like 10% of revenue from OS X app store sales. Either way the point is that Apple should be concerned about quality of software far more than it is. I submitted a bug to Apple about how the Apple login page was rejecting requests from browser headers from Linux machines. Apple rejected the ticket as a problem on my end even though I gave them clear instructions on how to repro. I did the same on Twitter - even linking them to a Browserling instance showing them, again, exactly how to repro. I gave up talking to the wall. Apple didn't care until it got mainstream press. That's a horrible user experience and frustrating that you need to traverse multiple avenues and hope your issue bubbles up to a consensus of users to get the appropriate attention. How many bugs like that go unaddressed even though someone has spent the time and effort documenting and submitting it? Sure, wrangling that isn't easy - but Apple has the resources to do it.

> Either way the point is that Apple should be concerned about quality of software far more than it is. I submitted a bug to Apple about how the Apple login page was rejecting requests from browser headers from Linux machines. ... Apple didn't care until it got mainstream press.

Can you provide a link? I'd be interested to read how it played out. My gut reaction is that number of people logging into Apple's site from Linux is a tiny fraction of their market. At first glance, it doesn't seem surprising to me that they'd prioritize other things.

> How many bugs like that go unaddressed even though someone has spent the time and effort documenting and submitting it?

I'm not sure I agree with the implicit assumption you seem to be making that spending time and effort documenting a bug entitles you to a call on a development organization's resources, time, and prioritization.

Yes bug fixing the frigging keyboard should take at least 1 Billion. At least they would have something that types properly

That would be a serious cut into their stock buybacks!

Using revenue is a bit silly. Speaking in terms of the dev budget would make more sense.

That's around 100,000 engineers worth of salary. Good luck (:

No kidding... it would be hard to find that number of engineers at the level Apple needs, much less organize them all, so they're pulling in the same general direction.

Yeah I have a bug where the disk storage calculations show Messages as using a negative amount of disk space. Nothing I could have done as a user could have caused that, but they've ingored the bug report I sent.

You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable.

I used to work on a product at a big company, we took users input very seriously, not only from bug reports but also by analyzing telemetrics data and simple users "star" feedback.

At the end of the day it's simply impossible to both fix everything and still go forward when the product is big and complex. To this day the product has terrible reputation as buggy and unfriendly.

Even the simple task of finding what the problem is, fixing it and then closing related problem reports is very complex since many bugs manifest themselves in different ways.

Does the Chrome team go over every bug report? It seems like it to me, though I've only filed a few.

They also ignore bugs for a decade or more.

> You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable.

I often hear this repeated, and I keep wondering: why? Why is it not scalable?

Apple had 265 billion dollars of revenue in 2018. I'm spending 10% of my budget on QA. So, in the case of Apple, if you had a 26 billion dollar budget (give or take a few billion) for your QA department, why couldn't you go over every bug report?

It's definitely possible, it's just that companies are making a different tradeoff, assuming that bugs will not influence buying decisions that much. And to a certain extent they are right.

Because software is just not something you can just throw more money and people at and expect it to get better. In fact, that is the surest way to make a piece of software worse.

Software, despite all the attempts to come up with ways to commoditize its production, does not scale.

But we are talking about reading bug reports, not writing software. Also, I would argue that finding and fixing bugs actually does scale, as opposed to designing and writing new systems.

You need the small subset of people who actually understand how the software works to fix the bugs, lest you just end up playing whack-a-mole and introducing new bugs.

Ideally, it wouldn't be like this, but we don't live in an ideal world, and there's always some unintended consquence when you start pulling the string on anything nontrivial. And there's never sufficient automated testing, especially for the things that haven't been a problem yet.

Fixing the bugs is one thing, but identifying that user reported bugs are in fact bugs is an entirely separate issue. The latter takes a ton of time, requires no developers, and is what everyone above you in this thread is talking about.

The GP comment that spawned this thread said this:

> If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing bugs,

"fixing bugs."

So, fixing bugs is 100% part of the discussion here.

But, let's ignore that for a second.

Let's say Apple triages all its bugs, but then doesn't fix them.

How is that an improvement? How is triaging the bugs but not fixing them at all an improvement?

How do you recognize 100,000 reports of the same bug but different manifestation ? What if it's an architectural issue (and many bugs are)? What if you are already working on a total re-write that's going to be released in 2 releases ? What do you do with bugs found internally ?

Also remember that many bugs requires much more then changing a couple of lines of code, they require cross module changes and re-testing which can lead to more bugs.

Automotive companies do, though.

maybe in the safety critical parts, but do they fix entertainment system bugs ?

That's quickly becoming the main point of differentiation in most reviews since cars in a certain class have become more or less the same performance wise.

Speaking from the perspective of just wrapping up the car buying process. All of the reviews had just as many, if not more words devoted to the infotainment experience as to the driving experience.

Here I am thinking Bluetooth is peak feature so I can play my music while carving canyons and reviewers are taking off points because the touch screen isn't colorful enough or something.

But as I've been saying for a few years now, most people don't want to drive. They'd much rather be driven so they can mess with their phones.

I want to be driven because it's safer and usually more relaxing, even though I like to drive.

And I want my Bluetooth connection to work flawlessly but it never does.

Or the Bluetooth connection works, but does random things you can't change. The last rental car I had, upon connection, forced Spotify to re-open and start playing the last playlist. Even if Spotify was closed.

Some entertaining solutions I found online include a playlist that includes only silent tracks and switching to that playlist before you turn off the car, or canceling Spotify Premium so you can no longer download/cache songs, giving you enough time to mute before Spotify's cloud can stream the song to the car.

I want to drive. Just not to work (or the shops, or anywhere else on a daily basis).

> To this day the product has terrible reputation as buggy and unfriendly.

In what way is that an argument against paying attention to bug reports? Are you saying that the continuing existence of this product means it does not matter? Arguably that strategy will work, up to the point when something better comes along, and by then you will be too deep in bugs to pivot.

We did fix customers bugs, I don't know that exact investment made but it was not trivial at all- and still bugs were found and not all of them fixed.

This specific product grew to be an abomination which in part is responsible for the many complaints it gets.

It's basically why Windows 10 is also so much buggier than previous versions: Nadella cut a good portion of Microsoft's Q&A team.

If this your anecdote, or are their studies around this?

I ask because anecdotally everyone I know finds Windows 10 to be the most stable Windows they've ever used.

Did they not use 2000? Or XP? Or even 7 for that matter?

I've used Windows on and off since 3.11, and have used 98, xp, 7 and 10 a lot.

As much fun as it is to hate on Windows, if I'm honest with myself 10 has been the most stable experience I've had with Windows, with the possible exception of 3.11 (though that was a long time ago).

This seems pretty far removed from most other people's experiences.

Which is why I was asking if there was any kind of quality study / survey / anything better than opinions around this, because as you say the anecdotes in my anecdote arsenal seem to be quite a bit different from other folk (or at least other highly verbal folk) on the internet.

I agree with you SCdF. Win 10 has been the most reliable Windows for me since 3.11, except maybe late-stage XP when all the worst bugs had worked out. I think it’s always the case that people that have bad experiences are going to be vocal, because you don’t go around talking about “oh hey, everything worked normally today.”

The deletion bug WAS pretty bad, but it also affected a VERY tiny group within the subset of users that had opted in to experimental/advanced-preview updates.

All previous versions of Windows stabilized because they were more or less feature complete. The problem with W10 is that it’s continuously in motion. 1809 becomes stable, but before you know it you’re on 1903 and the trouble starts all over again.

Win 10 is fine for me.

Windows 10 is fine for me too, altho UWP apps seem really laggy. I understand the logic of callback style coding, but it seems like you click a button, and then the system graciously responds. Whereas in non-callback style coding, the system begins to do something and you feel like it's definitely on the job. It would be nice to have some kind of feedback constantly linking the button press to the response that happens.

Who uses UWP apps? At my workplace we have managed desktops that lock out the Windows Store and I don't miss it at all.

I've used Windows since 3.11 as well and I still use Windows 7 and Windows 10 every day. The rate of significant issues has been higher with Windows 10 than with Windows 7. Although they're mostly related to the UWP parts. For example on Windows 10 the UWP UI stuff sometimes stops working so I can't even open the start menu. That has never happened to me on Windows 7, although it did happen on XP and earlier. To be clear, I'm talking about the start menu specifically not the whole explorer.exe freezing, which happens on every Windows including 10, but can be restarted without a whole PC reboot.

It’s not like there was anything to do in Win3.11 other than Word, mspaint, Solitaire, and writing funny messages in the marquee screensaver

There was a big data deletion bug from an update that happened around a year ago, I don't think there was anything that bad in Windows 7