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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Please make sure to log this at http://bugreporter.apple.com

Your bug will at least then be triaged and acknowledged.

Apple bug tracker is so frustrating.

They take forever to answer, and ask for things that you have already provided in your original issue. When you try to reproduce the bug on multiple versions, they close your bug if you reproduced it on beta versions, because beta versions are unsupported, even though the bug affects release versions. Sometimes this happens even if they asked you to try the beta version!

The bugs are almost always closed as duplicate of another bug, which, of course, you can't see because the bug tracker is private.

The bugs are never fixed, at least no bug that I have ever reported has been fixed. Years or months later after submitting a bug that happens not to be closed as duplicate of another bug, they get closed because a new version of macOS is released, and you are encouraged to resubmit your report if it still affects the new version, which inevitably it does...

Even if the bug is in some open source component, and you provide a patch, it is ignored and eventually closed as explained above.

It's a total waste of time and a pain in the ass to submit bugs to Apple.

You can’t see other people’s bug reports because they often contain screenshots or telemetry data which is confidential.

And I believe the way Apple works is to look through Radar for important/widespread bugs, mark them for fixing in the next release, fix them and then ask you to retest. They aren’t just going through and fixing Radar’s one by one. Hence you get that frustrating experience where it looks like the bug is being ignored.

I wish that was how it worked, but my experience has been more like the parent poster's: long-standing easily reproducible bugs never fixed despite multiple reports and multiple major releases. I've never once been informed by Apple of a bug I submitted being fixed, or "asked to retest". Not being able to see the duplicate bug when your case is closed and marked as such feels like a slap in the face. I understand that some material could be confidential, but I would bet over 99% aren't. If someone has spent enough time to determine that my report X is a duplicate of Y, they could also determine if Y is confidential and if so, just flag it in the system to show up as redacted.

> You can’t see other people’s bug reports because they often contain screenshots or telemetry data which is confidential.

You know what would be great? If I could mark my bug as “please let everyone be able to find this”. But Apple refusing to add this feature shoes that they still do not fundamentally understand and/or care about how external feedback works.

> Your bug will at least then be triaged and acknowledged.

Lol sure it will.

Can't say for Mail, but in my experience watchOS and SwiftUI reports are frequently acknowledged.

Apple definitely has a history of not acknowledging for a long time major problems that many people can clearly demonstrate. Bend gate, antenna gate, stage light gate, that thing with the coating on the screens...

Bend date, antenna gate were fixed in the next revision of their hardware. Screen coating was fixed I believe even quicker.

There is a limit to how quickly Apple can fix hardware given they have to work with third parties on retooling and retraining.

The screen coating is still an issue. It crops up again every few years. I’ve gotten a few macs replaced for free because of it even when I didn’t mind.

> Bend date, antenna gate were fixed in the next revision of their hardware.

I know they were. But do you not remember there was quite a period of time where Apple didn't acknowledge the problems and ignored users trying to triage them?

> There is a limit to how quickly Apple can fix

What has this got to do with it? We're talking about triage and acknowledgement, not fix.

Flexgate is still a real, profound, and disgraceful defect.

This is the one where your MacBook Pro’s screen stops working because Apple ran a ribbon cable through a hinge or some such stupid shit. Been happening since 2016 and still rendering $4000 laptops useless after 18 months of light use.

Bugreporter is just a front end for Radar.

And I can assure that when I was working at Apple bugs were triaged and acknowledged by a PM. Doesn’t mean they get fixed though.

> I can assure that when I was working at Apple bugs were triaged and acknowledged

As a counterexample, as late as 2018 Apple was publicly denying (so not acknowledging and ignoring attempts at triage) bendgate, but leaked documents show they knew about it in 2014.

https://www.slashgear.com/iphone-6-bendgate-docs-confirm-app...

> Doesn’t mean they get fixed though.

We're not talking about fixing - we're talking about triage and acknowledgement.

"Doesn’t mean they get fixed though." Ok then! I am driven to report it now!

Actually, this is a trouble bugs lots and lots of people for long long time. I browsed countless articles or threads about this with tons of workarounds. Where more than a few are Apple discussions. If it is not reported yet - from outside or inside - then it does not exist. But it does.

Radar’s asinine search functionality also obscures the seriousness of bugs by failing to reveal dupes.

It doesn’t (or at least didn’t) default to searching for all words used in the title; it only searches for the EXACT string you enter. It was a pain in the ass to even find bugs YOU wrote.

I couldn’t believe how goddamned dumb this is, or the Radar team’s response: Oh, you simply use Oracle syntax and wildcards in the title search! No explanation of how we were supposed to know this, or WHY.

> Oh, you simply use Oracle syntax and wildcards in the title search!

TIL

> Bugreporter is just a front end for Radar.

It’s “Feedback Assistant” now and at least one level removed from Radar now. Can’t give third party developers a direct line to engineers!

> And I can assure that when I was working at Apple bugs were triaged and acknowledged by a PM.

They used to, maybe? Not anymore. I think I got two responses in June 2019 and then nobody has looked at my bugs since.

I usually file bug reports but this issue was already well documented in their support forum even by official Apple staff so I'd assume they would at least file the issues if they see something show up there?

Also checked on https://openradar.appspot.com if there's anything but there wasn't.

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