What else should they do? Stop releasing any updates until they reproduced any obscure bug report?
How about they keep the bug report open until they attempt and confirm the bug is no longer reproducible?
Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
11–20 of 314 posts
Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
#12My favorite is the Claude Code bugtracker, on GitHub of course: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues There is some bot that will match your issue to some other 3 vaguely related issue, then auto close in 3 days. The other vaguely related issues are auto closed for inactivity. Nothing is ever fixed, which is why they can't keep the thing from messing with your scroll position for years now.
They are also closing issues automatically that has no "activity" in 30 days, so you have to spam those issues.
Sounds like a job for an agentic tool that can produce human like sentences on interval …
Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
#13to be fair this is pretty common spring cleaning in any bugzilla...
I was literally just coming in here to comment "in before someone says this is fine and there's no issue." and the first(!) comment is effectively "this is fine and there's no issue." The sentiment feels like software folks are optimizing for the local optimum. It's the programmer equivalent of "if it's important they'll call back." while completely ignoring the real world first and second-order effects of such a pol…
Considering Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, raking in money, what consequential effects are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about.
As a software developer, I don't have any problem with this. If a bug doesn't bother somebody enough for them to follow up, then spend time fixing bugs for people who will. Apple isn't obligated to fix anybody's bug.
It's not like they were nagging him about it - it's been years, and they had major releases in the mean time. Quite possible it was fixed as a side effect of something else.
Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
#14to be fair this is pretty common spring cleaning in any bugzilla...
I was literally just coming in here to comment "in before someone says this is fine and there's no issue." and the first(!) comment is effectively "this is fine and there's no issue." The sentiment feels like software folks are optimizing for the local optimum. It's the programmer equivalent of "if it's important they'll call back." while completely ignoring the real world first and second-order effects of such a pol…
I've seen this in many teams and it always drives me nuts: "hey this ticket is old and we didn't bother, let's delete it to keep the board clean".
You feeling accomplished by seeing an empty list is not the goal!
Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
#15to be fair this is pretty common spring cleaning in any bugzilla...
It's very common but it's still a poor practice.
Basically every single old bug report I've ever seen is essentially a red-herring that is usually not able to be reproduced anymore after N years and takes away time from focusing on newer and more solvable issues. I don't see the issue with removing that noise if it's no longer being reported, but to each their own I suppose.
Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
#16I recognize that this is annoying from a user perspective, but I do understand it. Not all bugs are easily reproducible (and even if they are 100% reproducible for the user, it's not always so easy for the developers). Also sometimes you make a change to the code that you think might be in a related area, and so sometimes the most "efficient" thing is just to ask the user to re-test.
When I close an old bug that is not actionable, I do feel bad about it. But keeping the bug open when realistically I can't really do anything with it might be worse.
Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was literally just coming in here to comment "in before someone says this is fine and there's no issue." and the first(!) comment is effectively "this is fine and there's no issue." The sentiment feels like software folks are optimizing for the local optimum. It's the programmer equivalent of "if it's important they'll call back." while completely ignoring the real world first and second-order effects of such a pol…
Considering Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, raking in money, what consequential effects are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about. As a software developer, I don't have any problem with this. If a bug doesn't bother somebody enough for them to follow up, then spend time fixing bugs for people who will. Apple isn't obligated…
> It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line
…yet
Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
#18How can a user “verify” that the bug remains unfixed?
So when a user reports a report, the user should check if the bug was solved after each update?
Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
#19Former Apple employee here. This is a deeper quirk of Apple culture than one would guess.
Each and every Radar (Apple's internal issue tracker is called Radar, and each issue is called a Radar) follows a state machine, going from the untriaged state to the done state. One hard-coded state in this is Verify. Each and every bug, once Fixed, cannot move to Closed without passing through the Verify state. It seems like a cool idea on the surface. It means that Apple assumes and demands that everything must be verified as fixed (or feature complete) by someone. Quite the corporate value to hold the line on, and it goes back decades.
I seriously hated the Verify state. It caused many pathologies. Imagine trying to run a burndown of your sprint when zero of the Radars are closed, because they have to be verified in production before being closed, meaning you cannot verify until after the release. Another pathology is that lots (thousands and thousands) of Radars end up stranded in Verify. Many, many engineers finish their fix, check it in, it gets released and then they move on. This led to a pathology that the writer of this post got caught up in: There is lots of "org health" reporting that goes out showing how many Radars are unverified and how long your Radars stay in the unverified state on average. A lot of teams simply close Radars that remain unverified for some amount of time because they are being "graded" on this.
Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was literally just coming in here to comment "in before someone says this is fine and there's no issue." and the first(!) comment is effectively "this is fine and there's no issue." The sentiment feels like software folks are optimizing for the local optimum. It's the programmer equivalent of "if it's important they'll call back." while completely ignoring the real world first and second-order effects of such a pol…
Considering Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, raking in money, what consequential effects are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about. As a software developer, I don't have any problem with this. If a bug doesn't bother somebody enough for them to follow up, then spend time fixing bugs for people who will. Apple isn't obligated…
This is exactly the mindset to which GP and I object.