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Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

lapcatsoftware.com

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Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#91

Post by lapcat »

crazygringo wrote: post #70

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 behav…

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.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#92

Post by ncallaway »

crazygringo wrote: post #70

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 behav…

> 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.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#93

Post by dewey »

jbverschoor wrote: post #84
ladberg wrote: post #8

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.

Which basically mean they’re understaffed with people who enjoy fixing bugs. Fixing bugs, fine tuning, just gardening the code base

Or it's too annoying to triage, find (If app store search is anything to judge by) and replicate bugs because the tooling is too annoying or not collecting the right information if people submit bugs. If that's the case then even if you would in theory have the resources to work on bugs it will not be very efficient.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#94

Post by realusername »

kyriakos wrote: post #33
omnicognate wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stockholm syndrome with a hint of masochism. App developers seem to stick with apple regardless of what they are being subjected to.

It's the same with users as well, the keyboard of my iPhone's wife is freezing randomly during 3s but she still puts up with it and will not say a word against it.

I gave up on mine personally after the app installs were impossible due to some modal error in loops.

I'm not sure how they managed to do it but they are very strong on the marketing side, I'll admit that.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#95

Post by baz00 »

e28eta wrote: post #32

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…

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.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#96

Post by realusername »

AshleysBrain wrote: post #90
realusername wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, we've ended up on the same idea - we make a best effort to keep it working and if we can't we advise to switch to another browser. But tough luck on iOS, as other browser engines are banned...

It's going to be controversial but iPhone users are going to have an inferior web experience no matter what, at some point we have to say it even if it's not popular. The core business of Apple is in the apps.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#97

Post by smoldesu »

latexr wrote: post #66
kyriakos wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stockholm syndrome with a hint of masochism. App developers seem to stick with apple regardless of what they are being subjected to.

> App developers seem to stick with apple regardless of what they are being subjected to. Because the alternatives aren’t preferable. The indies who have been exclusively using and developing for Apple platforms for years know that Windows and Linux aren’t better¹, just a different set of annoying trade offs. Apple platforms aren’t perfect, but they are the least bad option in that context. They also used to be bette…

For my money, the thing that stops me from dailying a Mac again is the amount of trust Apple demands from you nowadays. Older Macs are really cozy, even up through Yosemite in my opinion. After a certain point though, you could feel the focus shift from onboard utility to metered service. iTunes became Apple Music, the black "AppleTV" logo popped up on my dock, and iCloud pitched a tent in my Settings menu to beg for change. None of this really appeals to me; it's engineered to make the common user happy for a nominal fee, but to everyone else it's just annoying. Little UX warts like that popped up all over MacOS, and it really started to evoke those "Windows 8 Armageddon" vibes I felt a while back.

For Apple to correct course, they should ditch the ads and focus on superpowering MacOS and iOS. Right now it's hard for me to trust that Apple is giving me the best of all worlds.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#98

Post by JKCalhoun »

jbverschoor wrote: post #87
JKCalhoun wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it sometimes frustrating as well. But my experience was that it depended on the engineer/team/screener the Radar went to. Obviously if it was a bug I found, I much preferred to talk to the engineer in person who maintained the code in question. There were plenty of teams that were very good about jumping on bug reports and getting right back to me. In fact, a decade or so ago at Apple this was more or less th…

Don’t they autonomously analyze a crash report’s stack trace and group them together? As for feedback.. if someone had a dev account or is linked to it, they should be flagged as more detailed/investigated

Yes, if there's a stack trace attached. That is kind of cool though — they also bucket them by OS release so you can see quickly when a bug first appeared (or, well, a similar stack trace appeared anyway). Also they rank them on frequency so it is easy to find your component's "Top Crasher".

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#99

Post by joenot443 »

speedyapoc wrote: post #24

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.

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 :)

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#100

Post by inferiorhuman »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #57
MichaelZuo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the ideal structure look like in your opinion?

Ideally, daily BRBs (kept to an hour) with engineers attending. If it turns out there are too many Radars to keep the BRBs to an hour then there are issues elsewhere. At the same time, I didn't mention it above, engineers need to be allowed time in the product schedule to fix these bugs. As probably everyone knows, when a bug is kicked down the road once (because of scheduling constraints: hey, we gotta ship the soft…

  I think engineers and users alike would love to see more bug--only
  releases of MacOS and iOS. People still talk about how wonderful Snow
  Leopard was simply because it was a bug-fix only (mostly?) release.
Apple's dot zero OSX releases have always been pretty bad, so yes Snow Leopard and the last iteration of Tiger look great by comparison. As an outsider I don't have fond memories of filing bugs with Apple in that era. The general opacity combined with corporate disinterest discouraged me to the point where it's been years since I've even thought about filing a bug.

I dread new iOS releases. Sure there are usually unwanted changes (e.g. text selection in iOS 13), but the bugs... iOS 16 completely trashed whatever database Siri uses to map text to speech, so using Siri to play a song is usually a miss. Most recently it's decided the name Ben is really the name "Mouse Face". That's left a fair bit of egg on my face as I interact with those two people in two very different contexts. Sure, I could file a bug, but it's just easier to stop using Siri (which was never great in the first place).

With Tiger I was trying to integrate LDAP (AD masquerading as OpenDirectory), and it turned out that OSX would just assign GID 0 to any LDAP backed user. To me that seems pretty fucking straightforward, obviously pretty severe. That bug report went nowhere (not even an acknowledgement) and if memory serves Leopard went out with the same issue.

I also had a polycarbonate MacBook for personal use around the same time. I ended up filling out the RAM slots and discovered that after a certain amount of uptime that playing DVDs would eventually cause a kernel panic. That bug report actually did get a response, but only one. I think the computer itself died before that got fixed.

As someone who went on to dick around with CalDAV and CardDAV, there were plenty of issues to be filed but it was never really worth the effort. But as with everything else, as bad as Apple is they're usually better than the competition. That's how I ended up replacing my recently deceased Intel MBP with a new ARM one.

So long as market share holds I don't think Apple's got much incentive to reform. Although given that Tim Apple seems hell bent on pulling a Gil Amelio (my new MacBook SuperproairMax 15.323456" with the all new M-Centris really truly pro max upper bound superlative CPU sure looks great on the shelf) who knows how much longer that'll hold.

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