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Comment by jacek | Hacker News Reader

That's not the first story like this. It seems like more and more often the QA is done by users who have not signed up for it. Why can't a multibillion company do a proper QA?

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I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up making them money: people will replace their devices with newer ones. Once the device is sold it no longer has a function for the manufacturer until the next sale happens to the same user. So any update that bricks a percentage of the devices (or makes them effectively unusable) may well extract some more $ from the users.

I make it a point never to buy replacement devices from the same vendor if the product fails in such fashion.

Never reward incompetence with additional revenue.

With only two major vendors of phone software that gets problematic pretty quickly.

Even an unlimited QA budget won't catch everything. Though it is unflattering to have two major issues like this occur so close together.

While true, why would it miss something so glaring?

Minor rant but if trillion dollar companies can't get it right then what hope does anybody else have?

Because most test devices are likely constantly factory reset and aren't given the chance to live with multiple user profiles on them for a long period of time where cruft can build up and people can notice that using using external storage is broken.

Sure, but this is the past half dozen models of the phone made by the same company who makes the OS. You'd think these would be the easiest possible test cases for them to do up front.

I'm sure they test those to some extent.

I assume it's just a fraction of users affected, so it could be something like a service reading third-party app data and crashing due to a bug. The kind of thing that should be caught in code review, because comprehensive testing is next to impossible.

Staffing proper QA teams went out of vogue a couple of years ago.

Turns out that the way incentives are set up at most tech companies today, nobody gets dinged for shipping major software regressions/bugs while everyone is patted on the back for shipping even completely broken features on time.

The fact that they have the ability to roll this out to a handful of users, all of whose devices stopped working, and to detect that and not proceed with the rollout is considered success, by them.

And, indeed, this rollout generally is done after in-house testing.

So something's likely up where folks in the wild have their phones configured in a way Googlers don't.

You can only acquire billions of dollars if you cut corners and cheat as much as possible.

This isn't true, there are a ton of companies that make lots of money while not being pieces of shit

AMD is pretty good at having open source drivers, supporting Linux and Wayland, working with Framework to make an upgradable GPU in laptops.

> This isn't true

Are you misinterpreting the previous comment?

They didn't say you HAVE to cut corners to make billions, only that you CAN.

EDIT: Oops, I missed the "only" in the other comment"

"You can only X if Y" means "In order to X, Y" also "You have to Y in order to X".