Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#181

Post by arijun » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:56 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #177

BrenBarn wrote: post #122

All kinds of open source projects do this too. It's really annoying. It's one thing if the authors actually try and fail to verify the bug, but these days it seems like most projects just close "stale" bugs as a matter of course. This is equivalent to assuming that any given bug is automatically fixed after X amount of time, which is pretty absurd.

It's rather unreasonable to be annoyed. The maintainers may have entirely different priorities, which is fine. They're also likely being spammed with low-effort bug reports (not yours necessarily but from others). The great thing about open source projects you can just fix the bug yourself and submit a PR, or fork the whole project if the maintainers won't merge your changes. If you don't have the time or skills your…

> It's rather unreasonable to be annoyed.

I disagree. If you discover that a bug that makes an open source library unusable to you, after spending time on learning and using that library, and the authors close the bug as a wontfix, I think being annoyed is quite reasonable, even expected.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#182

Post by whatever1 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:56 AM UTC

freediddy wrote: post #23

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

I mean if the customer stops complaining, either the bug was fixed, or the bug was not too important to begin with, or they are not a customer anymore and nobody else cares about that niche bug. In all of the above closing the ticket sounds reasonable.

What is not reasonable is that they close issues with thousands of “I have this issue too” with active complains and full repros

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#183

Post by magicalhippo » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 2:57 AM UTC

freediddy wrote: post #23

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

> the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything.

We do this. Because frankly, very often the bug has been reported by others and has been fixed, we just can't connect the dots in our ticketing system.

That's of course less than ideal, but given that a lot of tickets we get are often very poorly described it's hard. It's one aspect I have genuine hope AI can help us with.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#184

Post by deathanatos » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 3:02 AM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #74

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #52

> perhaps praying that the bug had magically disappeared on its own, with no effort from Apple. I suspect that this is a common approach. It maybe even works, often enough, to make it standard practice. For myself, I've stopped submitting bug reports. It's not the being ignored, that bothers me; it's when they pay attention, they basically insist that I become an unpaid systems engineering QC person, and go through e…

> they basically insist that I become an unpaid systems engineering QC person Microsoft support is guilty of this, especially for Azure & 365 issues. Like sorry, but you aren't paying me to debug your software. Here's a report, and here's proof of me reproducing the problem & some logs. That's all I'm going to provide. It's your software, you debug it.

While I'd love to take your tack, unfortunately, I find that if I actually want the fix, I have to become their unpaid engineer.

Which is ridiculous, because at the same time my company is paying a separate support fee, large enough to literally employ a dedicated engineer for my company!

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#185

Post by mannanj » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 3:13 AM UTC

Replit customer service did the same thing to me as a paying customer.

Their customer service threw me around because fixing my locked git processes that their system locks you out of for security reasons was too much work for them. My project service was unusable and they just auto-closed the ticket after never following up on their commitments. That was despite my consistently putting in work for them and doing software engineering debugging and delivering to them why it needed to be manually reset on their end.

After I complained on a twitter post tagging their CEO, someone reached out again finally and expected me to open a brand new fresh ticket because "their system needs this". Ok yeah no thank you, the team avoiding responsibility by auto-closing unresolved tickets expects me to put in more work and open a new ticket because you can't figure out how to re-open one or create one on my behalf. Lazy.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#186

Post by sojournerc » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 3:18 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #177

BrenBarn wrote: post #122

All kinds of open source projects do this too. It's really annoying. It's one thing if the authors actually try and fail to verify the bug, but these days it seems like most projects just close "stale" bugs as a matter of course. This is equivalent to assuming that any given bug is automatically fixed after X amount of time, which is pretty absurd.

It's rather unreasonable to be annoyed. The maintainers may have entirely different priorities, which is fine. They're also likely being spammed with low-effort bug reports (not yours necessarily but from others). The great thing about open source projects you can just fix the bug yourself and submit a PR, or fork the whole project if the maintainers won't merge your changes. If you don't have the time or skills your…

You pay contractors to fix open source bugs? Tell me how that works

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#187

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 3:22 AM UTC

eminence32 wrote: post #171

youarentrightjr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think asking someone if they can still reproduce an issue is valid. Especially if it was trivially reproducible for them, and now it isn't, that seems like a fine resolution, and the bug should be closed. But in the other cases, closing the bug seems to me to be a way to perturb metrics. It might be true that you'll never fix a given bug, but shouldn't there be a record of the "known defects", or "errata" as some c…

> It might be true that you'll never fix a given bug, but shouldn't there be a record of the "known defects", or "errata" as some call them? Yes, fully agreed. But closing a bug doesn't preclude that. A closed bug isn't refutation or denial of a defect. It's just an indication that there is no plan to fix the bug. Not every bug system works like this though. My bug tracker works like this, and I should have more clea…

[deleted]

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#188

Post by phyzome » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 3:29 AM UTC

eminence32 wrote: post #54

youarentrightjr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> keeping the bug open when realistically I can't really do anything with it might be worse I've heard this from others before but I really don't understand the mindset. What's the harm in keeping the bug open?

I used to think that there is no harm in keeping the bug open. I think if you honestly feel that you have the time and resources to go back to the bug and fix it, then by all means keep it open. But I find that sometimes I can tell from experience that the IR is not actionable and that it will never be fixed. Some examples: * There's not enough info to reproduce the issue and the user either can't or won't be able to…

What does it cost you to keep the bug open?

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#189

Post by farhanhubble » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 3:34 AM UTC

freediddy wrote: post #23

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

I wish someone had told me how common this was back when I worked myself to death fixing every UI abnormality that no one except some misincentivized testers used to report at my first job. At the time I thought it was dishonest to say something was irreproducible and it'd be beneath me to patch an issue knowing it'll sprout ten others.

I'm proud of fixing everything properly but I won't repeat it ever unless the company actually has that high a bar across the board.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#190

Post by nradov » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 4:00 AM UTC

sojournerc wrote: post #186

nradov wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rather unreasonable to be annoyed. The maintainers may have entirely different priorities, which is fine. They're also likely being spammed with low-effort bug reports (not yours necessarily but from others). The great thing about open source projects you can just fix the bug yourself and submit a PR, or fork the whole project if the maintainers won't merge your changes. If you don't have the time or skills your…

You pay contractors to fix open source bugs? Tell me how that works

Is that a serious question? It works like any contract programming gig. You give the contractor money and in exchange they give you code (including copyright assignment). You can go through a freelancer site like Upwork if you don't know an appropriate contractor yourself.