Apple's feedback mechanism is broken
caseyliss.com
caseyliss.com
View it from their point of view: a spigot will deliver 20,000 important, believable problems to everyones desk like a mailman opening the letter-to-santa sack in December. Every desk: Which one(s) do you look at first? Note, all of them are from people of good intent, not fools. The fools are railing on bulletin boards.
BTW I have met Apple engineers who write things. Important things, like the TCP/IP stack for the iPhone. There are two of them. They can't write amazing code, and triage 20,000 bug/improvement inputs at the same time. Sometimes, they're at standards meeting handling fools like me.
Sure, there are ass-hats, but the vast bulk of the time Apple is drowning in good input, and has to triage. The example listed here probably affects 1,000 to 2,000 developers, and a critical bug probably has to affect 150,000 people to get traction.
or you can spend $99 and prioritize your problem.
I had this problem with Microsoft and X509 about 15-20 years ago, (selection of which client certificate to identify a user when there is a certificate subjectName collision) -There was precisely one expert able to fix it, I was ringfenced from them, talking to a consultant and I had the great joy of hearing how much it would cost him to even TRY to get their attention on this problem, which btw, affects the US Government, so its not like it doesn't have "scale" behind it.
This is a problem you get, if you have hundreds of millions of customers.
I often wonder how Apple can keep posting these quarterly results of a gazillion dollars and still not reply to my Feedbacks for months or years - of things that are very clearly broken!
As a dev, I‘m paying them ca 2k per year in hardware costs. Sure sounds like the incentives to really fix this would be there.
Apple often claim they are among the most innovative companies. They don’t seem particularly innovative in this space. Eg. the Feedback app looks like it’s been made by a single person over the span of a week.
Apple is very focussed on profit. There often is very little profit in this space and the more time it sucks to decide #WONTFIX the more it cost you. In that model, which is not a good model, but in that model, doing less engagement pays back better if you make really really good product with low overall bug/problems.
For more normal people making normal things, its suicidally bad. Ignore your customers at your peril.
I mean, you said it yourself:
> I‘m paying them ca 2k per year in hardware costs.
Despite the fact Apple hasn't responded in years, you still pay them 2k a year. Companies exist to make a profit, and Apple has seemingly correctly identified that they can skimp on this area and people will still send them money.
Most of the customers who file Feedbacks are app developers, so yes, they would notice, because the App Store would suddenly be empty.
Apple has ~154k employees.
It's a completely intractable problem. No single person or developer matters in the smallest way. Any complaint or bug that doesn't break at least 5 digit numbers is invisible unless you're paying for Apple's engineering time. It's a function of the numbers in play.
You'll be paying 2k per year in hardware wether Apple invests more in support or not so I'm not sure it works as an incentive. Your option would be to drop out of iOS development and move to windows or linux, but that's probably not a statistically relevant portion of devs from Apple's perspective.
Then qualified engineering time (having people able to write that reply about the extra parameter) really doesn't scale, so price-gatekeeping the service also seems logical from a business perspective.
Apple will have a never ending list of legitimate bugs and improvements to work on, so it comes down to wether you really care about the issue you’re facing or you’re fine to leave it to the odds to get solved or not.
1. From your perspective you’ve filed an issue that perfectly describes the problem. 90% of the time the engineer doesn’t actually have enough information and needs follow up. 90% of that time the bug just isn’t actionable because it’s somehow reliant on the user’s configuration OR requires extra logging to be enabled that wasn’t.
2. There’s so many communication layers between you and where the ticket needs to get to to answer your question. That routing takes time. Apple has a big enough challenge managing this just from internal bug tickets.
3. Organizationally Apple is in a no win state. One engineer having a bad day and responding poorly on a ticket impacts their image and generates a news cycle. So now every response needs to be filtered through someone who’s only job is to manage public engineer comms. This is a low value spend for Apple.
4. Some responses might be something like “this will be fixed next release “. Culturally that kind of response would be an anathema at Apple because of the secrecy.
5. Point 4 interacts with point 1 - they don’t want engineers talking in random environments to customers (WWDC is a very controlled environment, the engineers get some training, and it happens just after they’ve announced most things for the year so the opportunity for accidental leaks is smaller).
6. Engineers have a fuckton of responsibilities already. You have to screen a bunch of bugs, develop new software on insane timelines, manage tech debt, keep up with internal trainings, etc.
Could they do a better job? Are there cultural things at Apple that inhibit these things? Yes. I’m sure Apple is trying to fix some of them. But some of these things are trade offs between how Apple chooses to run their business and there aren’t easy answers (if there were these problems wouldn’t exist).
On a personal note, as someone who’s managing a fraction of the volume some of their products get and trying to stay very involved with the community, it’s extremely distracting and demoralizing at times (some users can be very entitled to the point that they’re a distraction and taking away value from the community outreach that’s happening).
I think so. I believe it's being good at something that makes a company grow, not the other way around.
Just looking for an answer to all those comments asking if the problem is tractable.
Whenever I talk to an Apple employee on Twitter about a bug I’ve found, they tell me to file a Feedback. At WWDC, we are also often told to file any unexpected behavior and feature requests as Feedbacks.
I see you’ve bought into their marketing!
Doesn't the iPhone, like other Apple products use the FreeBSD networking stack?
I know these guys were insanely busy.
You are not limited to 2 technical support incidents per year. You can purchase more. I think it’s pretty fair.
Seems like you save a few pennies per incident with two packs unless you really need an odd number.
Raising the entry price slightly perhaps also makes people think a little harder about whether they really need to use a TSI or whether other support channels (Stack Overflow? Reddit?) might be more appropriate.
> Additional TSIs are available for purchase in either a 2-pack for 99 USD or 5-Pack for 249 USD (or in local currency where available) in the Code-Level Support section of your account. TSIs purchased separately expire one year from the date of activation.
By then I had swapped out said hardware with more recent stuff I was doing development on.
How many people were impacted by that bug in the meantime? No clue, but I guess it didn't hit Apple's bottom line hard enough to warrant anyone on the owning team even bothering to follow my repro steps themselves.
Microsoft's dev support framework, while not directly interacting with MS engineers (usually), the community of MVPs, Regional Directors, and even now the occasional Dev note in the opensource work MS is doing on github, has lead to a great ecosystem of support. This trickles down to Stackoverflow, the old Alt.Net crowd (and the associated .NET user groups that still persist), and the MS dev blog'o'sphere mean this type of issue is much rarer.
*edit: oh and I forgot the UserVoice pages, where the community can vote on issues, and they'll get assessed by the product teams.
I think it's pretty lousy that they set up a page to solicit feedback (especially accessibility feedback) and don't pay attention to it. It causes people to waste time describing issues, asking for help, and voting on other suggestions. A year or two ago they got rid of the UserVoice page, and they now tell people to use Twitter to make suggestions.
Even if you could filter the noise; there's still a non-zero chance it won't get prioritized. I imagine in Apple's case you could have very real bug reports that only affect 500,000 people and they can't allocate time to fix this. I think there's a tendency to anthropomorphize companies (and OSS projects) as an all knowing person who can fix every problem and has infinite time. In reality there might be 10 people (or in OSS, just 1 person) in the company uniquely capable of triaging your issue in under an hour. The rest would be just as lost as you would be in a new code base and they have to weigh fixing your bug report vs the other opportunities they have (and I'm sure at Apple, closing Radar tickets wont get you promoted).
At least in OSS you can dive in yourself.
Can't reproduce it? Well... you can of course still report it but "I'm not an idiot" is a pretty weak signal. Everyone gets lost in the weeds, and debugging a problem only for it to be an issue in some unstated part of the project is very exhausting.
What is the point of me providing an example case if the ones that know the internals of their code don't try to reproduce my bug?
Yeah, I know OSS devs do not have time/are unpaid. My point is however complete your bug report is, nothing guarantees it won't go stale without anyone having taken a real look at it. In my experience 90% of bug reports, on OSS or commercial products, die this way.
I don't think the system is perfect by any stretch. But it definitely has improved, and Apple does read them. The catch is that for esoteric issues -- especially ones that say "Recent similar reports: none", publicizing them and asking people to submit feedback if they can reproduce the issue will likely help prioritize it.
Esoteric crashes /are/ harder to diagnose. Minority issues are also lower on the totem pole for any org. I don't want to excuse Apple here -- it does suck, and it does need to keep improving, but last beta round was seriously an improvement over the past.
Can't recall what exactly was the issue but after macOS update, some bundled software stopped being so friendly and required more actions to achieve a goal. Some built-in functionality stopped being more useful than 3rd party products.
I've opened a case to try to tell Apple in what way their update has broken my productivity, pointed out what was needed to get results before the update and how more labor user had to do after the update.
Got the most Apple answer possible: "this works as intended".
Just another example of Cook's hostility towards users to make Apple more attractive to investors.
It is frustrating but hardly newsworthy or a surprise.. if you feel all feedback requests should be personally investigated by devs/PMs and replied to, maybe talk to the support teams and get a sense of the volume of these reports? It really is impossible.
6 bugs filed
4 of those were fixed or went away. 2 were marked as closed, 2 are marked open but were fixed anyways.
1 is a bug that still affects me occasionally.
1 was a one-off bug in a rare case that i haven't seen since.
So my experience is pretty far from it being /dev/null.
26 filed.
12 open and still relevant
1 that became irrelevant without ever being fixed (an iOS 7 specific problem).
5 fixed bugs in vim bindings in Xcode.
4 clang/libc++ bugs fixed upstream which eventually got pulled into the Xcode version.
4 other bug fixed
Reporting vim binding issues during the Xcode 13 beta was a good use of time, but outside of those I'm 4/21 for reporting something to feedback assistant/radar doing anything.
Their docs are dire, their feedback system is terrible and they’ve made essentially zero improvements in the 7 years since I shipped my first app.
Web dev has its own frustrations but at least you can find an answer (or ten) quite quickly when you get stuck.
As a side note I had a play with the WeatherKit REST API for fun during WWDC this year and got totally stuck. Had a labs session with two engineers (who were great) and it turned out it was an issue with missing docs and seemingly none standard JWT signing process. Their docs (at the time) made no reference to any of this. So things really haven’t changed.
(I don't know if that bug still exists because now for some reasons apple won't let me access Feedback Assistant unless I give them the CVC from my credit card and my phone number to "verify my account"
- Apple engineers are literally drowning in Radars.
- Your F.A. Radar will arrive so late to an engineer (after being filtered by QA) that the engineer is working on new features and marks F.A. bugs as low priority.
- The iOS Simulator is a second class citizen.
These deadlines basically preclude late breaking or low priority bugs to ever make an engineer's schedule. The only way is if an exec pushes on the bug or if it turns out to have higher impact than originally thought.
Before Feedback Assistant bugs could come in from AppleCare support or developer relations. These could be some of the worst bugs to get assigned because they would be filled with extraneous details but not a crash or spin trace that would actually be useful.
I heard numerous cases when FB support completely ignored cases. There is even a post on Reddit of a guy, who managed to resolve his case by buying an Oculus gadget. Just today I heard a case with Upwork. I am trying to understand here, what is this? A corporate policy? A resource shortage? When you buy a car and it is broken, you can go to court and seek resolution there, but when you have a social account with a large user base or an Upwork account that brings money, where do you go?
Shouldn’t companies have a standard flows to support people? Would you as EU impose some rules?
There are somewhat serious/annoying issues that have been there for multiple years but are mostly relevant for power users, or issues that do not contribute to the bottom line, and thus will never be fixed.
Even if their own apps do not work together nicely, tough luck.
Hope that your issues will be fixed in the next major OS release.
I think that it is a problem with their mode of operating and the fact that fixing the majority of bugs will take longer than pushing out a v1 of a new product or service.
Also, fixing these bugs will probably mean that teams have to talk to each other, and I really have no idea if that is a reality at Apple. Given the last few software releases it doesn't seem that way.
I have a bunch of issues with Monterey that, while some are VERY annoying, do not prevent me from being productive. I also have zero expectation they will be fixed.
Fun fact: 3 major releases of TvOS have functioned such that if you navigate to App Store/search and hit siri “Xyz app” Siri (global) appears and tries to take you to said app.
If you want to use dictation, you must swipe down and select the text input field. You know, because navigation to search wasn’t enough context.
Also, take a look at their user forums: They are full of bug reports with hundreds of users having the same problems - and nothing happens. I really wish they would react much better with official acknowledgments, references to open bugs, workarounds, etc. It is depressing how much collective time is wasted.
I filed a feedback on the Contacts API that you can't add a piece of information to a contact card. Literally. You can only read the entire card, set stuff on it (not ALL the stuff, just some random subset!) and then write it. What happens to all the data you can't set and can't read?
REMOVED
This means their Contacts API, if used to add any information, leads to data loss.
The reply? "Works as designed". I explained to them that this is catastrophic data loss and that how it was designed isn't really relevant. Still got "works as designed".
I can’t reproduce what you’re describing.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/ryjones/3e9a851e92794d67b5e37197608a...
It's the only time I've seen consistent change/response.
Wouldn't that be nice!
I recently moved from Swift/SwiftUI to Dart/Flutter in my professional life.
My hobby times I spend in Rust.
Of the three only Rust documentation has code snippets with the standard library documentation.
Apple, Google: Bigger than big, why not even try?
The ones that were accompanied with a TSI received attention in 1-3 weeks which seems pretty quick.
I see no reason to take his guidance on one point and not the other.