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I estimate that around 10% of my Feedback Assistant reports ever receive a reply or acknowledgement.

These are for reproducible bugs in iOS, for which I've provided an isolated sample project with a 100% reproduction rate. It takes time to create a thoughtful and detailed bug report and the lack of replies are beyond frustrating. I'm glad to see this post and couldn't agree more.

Fully agree. I work in security and sent Apple a bypass for child restriction policies on iOS, they told me to send it to feedback.

Testing, reproducing, writing it up all takes time and effort. I didn’t want anything from them other than for it to be fixed, I have kids with iPhones.

It’s no different than other companies though, I sent a remote code execution to Cisco and they just replied that they already knew about it but the product was approaching end of life so they wouldn’t fix it.

I’ve stumbled across so many vulnerabilities over the years and I tend to just ignore them unless I’m being paid to find them. It’s not worth the frustration.

Respectfully, why file them at all if that's the case? The cynic in me can't help but see that as free high-quality engineering labor for what's already the world's most valuable company. They don't need more help :)
Wow, I'm impressed by your numbers. Because mine is 0%… :(

It's really disheartening when you try to file proper bug reports, with proper reproduction steps, my own investigative work and more details of it, etc. Then… silent. As if the app just outputs the bug to /dev/null or something.

Same here. TBH I’m starting to get fed up by a lot of Apple things lately
Boycotts/strikes* only work if most or nearly all people participate, because you'll only participate if you're pretty sure nearly everyone else is too. While if this blogpost merely gets 0.1% of developers to strike... Apple couldn't care less.

I think this developer strike is a great idea, but launching it as a single person's call to action (Jeff Johnson's) is not generally going to be effective in changing behavior.

What an organizer needs to do is to first personally contact somewhere between 50-200 other major, known, respected developers and get them to co-sign a joint letter which then gets published, so everyone can see this is a serious strike by people who know what they're doing -- not just one person's wish. It needs to get covered in all the major tech publications, so both Apple and all developers see it as well.

And then the letter needes to not lay out a list of all of the complaints, but rather the specific, verifiable actions Apple needs to take in order to end the strike, so this isn't some open-ended thing. And they need to be realistic actions as well, not wishful thinking -- signs of progress with dates and milestones, not fix-all-the-things-immediately.

If you're going to do a strike, you need to actually organize it. Writing a blog post that merely "encourage[s] all Apple developers to join me" is not the same as organizing. And generally speaking, writing a blog post claiming that you're striking isn't going to get anybody else to magically organize it for you.

* As the author indicates lower in the article, it's more of a strike than a boycott since it's stopping providing free labor rather than stopping purchases, so I'll refer to it as a strike

I'm already fairly well-known in the Apple developer community and received a lot of positive feedback on social media before posting the announcement, but I do think you're overestimating the amount of effort that I and other developers are willing to put into getting Feedback Assistant improved. This is not a fight for higher income or something of that obvious importance. The beauty of the strike is that steps 1-3 at the beginning are low effort from everyone, which allows everyone to easily join if they choose. As I said at the end of the article, one of the goals of the strike is to prove to ourselves that we don't really need Feedback Assistant, we've got little to lose, it's not essential to us that we participate in the bug reporting system, and we can just walk away. The strike is not a win-at-all-costs, fight-to-the-death scenario. Feedback Assistant, no matter how unrelentingly terrible and annoying, is or at least should be rather low on our list of professional priorities.

I think this attitude gives us leverage over Apple. We're only volunteers walking away from a crappy volunteering "opportunity", whereas Apple relies on our free labor for its commercial products and would have to actually hire additional staff and pay them in order to replace our QA work.

> because you'll only participate if you're pretty sure nearly everyone else is too.

Definitely true for traditional paid labor, but this isn’t that.

Nobody is leaving their paycheck behind if they stop using Feedback Assistant. Since the costs to participating in this strike are very low (for most people, participating in the strike is probably a lower cost than not participating in it), I could see a path to building up to an impactful strike over time, in a way that’s not possible in a traditional labor dispute.

Fundamentally, such a strike assumes Apple cares about the free reports they get from their developers. I'm not sure that's true. And even if it is, it's not like they don't have enough other reports or features to work on, so the loss of all outside bug reporting probably wouldn't affect them at all.
Sure Apple could be indifferent to a small percentage of people boycotting their process, but the Public Relations (PR) and Comms group is extremely averse to negative commentary. I'd imagine there are some emails flying around right now...
I hope something changes with the way apple manages bugs. It’s incredibly demoralizing to spend my time reproducing a bug, writing up the bug report I’d want to receive (including a minimal test case), and hearing nothing for years until it’s either closed or receiving a message asking me to do more work to determine if it’s still an issue.

Are there companies that do this well, at a scale approaching Apple’s?

I can think of lots of reasons why this is a “hard problem”, and how it’d be hard to staff. I also think they’re getting paid to solve this problem, and aren’t.

There's a fundamental problem that the first step is you doing all that work. That means there's no way to tell you the work is wasted; you already did it.

I generally think people should do /less/ work when reporting bugs because of this, but you should be careful and clear about what you do put in there.

I got so fed up of all the Apple bugs I sold all my Apple stuff and bought a PC. At least I'm greeted with new and interesting bugs no one is going to close.
I sympathize: even filing radars internally at Apple gets much of the same treatment, albeit with the ability to see the state of the radar.
Yeah he's lamenting how poorly the external developers are being treated but seems like they are largely being treated the same as Apple treats its own employees
Which basically mean they’re understaffed with people who enjoy fixing bugs. Fixing bugs, fine tuning, just gardening the code base
Actions speak louder than words - Apple is letting it's developers know what it thinks of them. You're going to have to raise quite the ruckus to get them to change their behavior. There's really no impetus for them to change when they're sitting on a mountain of cash.
I never thought I'd wistfully look back on Steve Ballmer yelling DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!!!

Apple seem to view external developers as a kind of infestation. The systems and processes they subject them to seem designed to actively discourage them.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3947903

(I feel incredibly old right now.)

Edited to add: Finally found the full form letter [1]. (I filed a copy back then and it still shows up languishing in Feedback Assistant even now!)

[1]: https://gist.github.com/mysteriouspants/1989061

Reporting bugs via feedback assistant is sometimes required when you've successfully found a developer inside Apple who has agreed to fix your bug and they just need the feedback number for internal work reporting purposes. Submitting unsolicited bug reports are just a pointless waste of time. I wouldn't say I'm specifically "boycotting" Feedback Assistant; I just stopped using it because it wasn't doing anything useful.
How are you supposed to find a developer inside Apple to fix your issue?
As a developer, I flatly refuse to engage with Apple in any way because of their $100 annual fee.

I feel especially vindicated when stuff like this surfaces.

Imagine being the richest company in the world and having the audacity to charge people for the privilege of being able to contribute to your platform.

It is absolutely insane, and nothing will convince me otherwise.

One reason they are charging is to weed out bad actors or people not serious enough about publishing apps on their stores. That said they could do this as a one off like Google, and make it cheaper too.
while i agree with your sentiment, i think Apple would probably argue that they're actually charging for access to their distribution network.
Wait, you can’t file feedback from the web anymore? That’s incredibly stupid. Their feedback app itself breaks half the time, so I guess they wouldn’t be getting my reports then even if they wanted them.
I'm not sure what that is about, https://feedbackassistant.apple.com
I previously blogged about how Apple treat web developers with negligence when it comes to Safari [1]. This makes it looks like Apple treat other developers with negligence as well, which is unsurprising, frankly.

[1] https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2/safari-rel...

I solved this by basically treating the browser as legacy and "best effort", similarly as IE11 in its days.

They have a very large number of basic features broken regularly, it's not only about cutting edge stuff. I suspect their testing practices are less than stellar.

I stopped filing Apple bugs ("rdar") ten years ago.

It was pitching a lot of work into a hole: totally opaque.

The recent macOS dialog "Allow app to access folder [OK] [Cancel]" supports button cycling by Shift+Tab (previous), but not Tab (next). The Wi-Fi signal strength indication changes when clicking it. So yeah, at least they need to admit things are very bad over there.
Whenever I see or hear about keyboard shortcuts being weird or not working, for some reason I can only think of Catalyst or Electron, both bringing frustratingly poor user experiences. Apple’s own Catalyst based apps (Reminders, as an example) have been terrible over the last few years. I can’t imagine a macOS dialog being either one of these abominations though, which makes me wonder how the issue you describe was introduced.
these arent the heavy HN apple blinders these threads usually get!

but yea its pretty bad. i cant go 1 day without a blatant ui bug lightly using apple products at work

I'm in. Apple Feedback Assistant is absolutely useless.
[pirate voice] all right, all right, you talkd me into it (parrot squawk)
Someone please set up a website that can compose an email to Craig Federighi with these issues and let developers email him directly. Apple may not act on or respond to this collective Feedback Assistant feedbacks, since the system may probably be broken to the extent that Apple’s teams don’t even see or get these feedback reports.
My experience talking to brick walls has been more productive.
What would happen if some Apple developers moved their collective feedback to a Github repo where their bug reports were licensed as CC-BY-4.0, i.e. a license that would allow Apple to migrate content from the public repo to their internal radar? This would allow developers to have a public database of de-duped and triaged bugs, and it would allow Apple to either respond publicly (same as Webkit?) or maintain status quo.
Apple’s customer support as a whole is atrocious. Here in the uk their milton keynes apple store is essentially a cesspit of cockiness and upselling rudeness. Filed a complaint against an employee and have yet to receive any feedback two months later. The only apple product in my life is now an iphone, but that will be phased out too. Good riddance. Open source all the way.
I'm not sure I understand this. Wouldn't developers who need code-level assistance (i.e. have more than simple "feedback") submit a Technical Support Incident (https://developer.apple.com/support/technical/)?
Also their feedback assistant is buggy as hell.

If you managed to create draft in old version (before random code change).

But it does not match with new version your feedback assistant crashes to blank screen. (JSON parse syntax error)

That means it is impossible to file new bugs...

1 second web page works but after that it is blank screen and nothing to do.

I am sick of everybody asking for feedback everywhere, and nobody wants to spend any human effort looking at the feedback.

And the worst of it is the "Do you love our app?" dark pattern.

I've run into many of the problems mentioned with Apple Feedback and gave up on using them many years ago. It's pretty disheartening when you spend a bunch of time getting an OS crashing bug to reproduce in a small amount of code to submit in a bug report for them to neither confirm that they can repeat it, or consider it worth fixing.
Some minor product manager in Cupertino, two quarters from now: "As we can see in this graph, thanks to the improvements to Feedback Assistant over the past couple years, we've reduced our products' bug rate to nearly zero percent!"
I like when HN holds the fire to these kinds of issues/companies. Its almost like us nerds have some kind of fancy communication system/technology or something [dunno shrug]
Let’s see if there will be Bug as a Service. Pay for bug fix in addition of $99/year
IMO it's optimistic to assume Apple can fix this
I suppose Feedback Assistant is like Windows' Feedback Hub. Users fill it to the top with shit making it impossible for Apple or Microsoft to do anything useful with the feedback.
It's not clear from reading this if "Apple developers" are developers who work for Apple, or developers who write software for Apple systems.