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Comment by handsclean | Hacker News Reader

It depends on the company. I’d never dream of reporting a bug to Apple, they don’t care. I think your turnip truck analogy applies there. On the other hand, iA Writer consistently replies thoughtfully and usually fixes the bug.

It’s so important to treat companies individually instead of just according to some blanket impression of the world. Individual treatment means good companies benefit and grow, while blanket treatment actually actively rewards bad behavior: a company that invests in quality will bear the cost while you share the benefit with the competition, while a company that treats you worse will reap the savings while you take out your frustration on the competition, too.

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Then there are the ones who send you a detailed response trying to convince you that it isn't a bug, when it definitely is one. I've switched programs over that, not because the bug itself was that important, but because I don't like running code that I've established to be written by boneheads.

Is this a reference to https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/5644#issuecomment-... ?

Hah lol, I hadn't seen that one. I was thinking of something unrelated, though it has happened to me more than once.

Counter-anecdotally, I reported two WebAuthn issues to Apple in separate instances and both were immediately fixed in the next patch version of iOS/Mac OS. In both cases first line support had little understanding of the issue but were very good at following process, trusting me, calling me back to keep me updated, and escalating to engineering as necessary.

That’s security though, not mere bugs.

I submitted a feature request to Apple to allow silencing the ringer for anyone who isn’t in my Contacts list. A year later with the next major update, the “Silence Unknown Callers” feature came to iOS. It appears it worked, either that or it was just a wild coincidence. Of course many other feature requests I’ve submitted over the years still do not exist, such as a global toggle for explicit vs clean music (when it’s just me I always want the original version, but if there are kids in the car, I want an easy way to clean everything up).

I know someone else who has called Apple’s support line and spoken with engineers on bugs that were uncovered. He then got follow up emails to install the latest macOS update as it contained a fix to the bug he stumbled across.

> I’d never dream of reporting a bug to Apple, they don’t care.

One of the few issues I’ve reported to them was promptly responded to and fixed, but that was probably because it had privacy implications.

I've done the same with Windows, but I had a unique bug with Storage Spaces and did some debugging to identify driver issues to include with the report. I guess the reason it was fixed was because there was similar feedback without the debugging on the Windows Feedback app and because the blast radius was small. It was just one .sys file, but even then Storage Spaces is relatively contained.

Compare that to any GUI-related issue. Almost every surface has some kind of unsupported/unexpected hooking or reliance on unchanging elements because some company has built a tool that integrates. They've then sold this to Fortune 500s who explode if Windows blows up their tool. This makes the startup cost for fixing many things very expensive.

If you report issues related to higher profile/usage functionality then you are less likely to get traction because:

* They know about the issue already, but it's a really hard to fix for some reason which may not be obvious to you. All stakeholders are not equal in the decision process hence compatibility concerns win in some situations.

* Even if they decide to fix it, a huge amount of effort has to go into scheduling the fix in a release. Some authority may agree to go fix it and everyone is excited. That's just the start of a painful process to implement and test the fix.

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