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Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

lapcatsoftware.com

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Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#121

Post by fxtentacle »

tinus_hn wrote: post #114
black_puppydog wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also the stance I take on customer support of Apple products. It got hyped so much about "just working" that I take it as a bit of an insult that they want me to stand in for their CS team. I do make exceptions for close family.

You prefer fixing Windows computers?

No, you just train them to walk to the Apple shop instead of asking you. If you sell products at a premium with the promise of an excellent user experience, then you should also budget for the costs of actually providing that user experience.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#122

Post by kaishin »

wackget wrote: post #60

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.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#123

Post by juliob »

crimsontech wrote: post #67
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.

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 abo…

> 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.

Huh? That sounds very different from Apple. In that instance, the communication is professional, mature, and respectful of your time and effort.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#124

Post by kalleboo »

neodypsis wrote: post #37
plorkyeran wrote: post #27

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 use…

How are you supposed to find a developer inside Apple to fix your issue?

A few are active on Mastodon actually

Before that it would be you'd ambush them at WWDC with your list of bugs

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#125

Post by jbverschoor »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #98
jbverschoor wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Then I have no idea why my consistent kernel panics are not addressed since the last few releases (major and minor).

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#126

Post by stevedekorte »

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.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#127

Post by tinus_hn »

fxtentacle wrote: post #121
tinus_hn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You prefer fixing Windows computers?

No, you just train them to walk to the Apple shop instead of asking you. If you sell products at a premium with the promise of an excellent user experience, then you should also budget for the costs of actually providing that user experience.

Oh so it’s just the old ‘hurr durr Apple bad’ mantra with no alternative.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#128

Post by xign »

nicky0 wrote: post #79
Klonoar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to backchannel to them like any other company. It's just much less... publicly evident, if that makes sense? Also (IIRC) if you post on their dev forums and deal with e.g Quinn, they might ask you to file and provide a radar - but it's been a minute since I've interacted over there.

That guy Quinn "The Eskimo" seems to have been almost singlehandedly manning the developer forums at Apple for over a decade. I hope Apple recognises how valuable he is.

Yeah, he kind of seems like the only guy who cares as someone looking from the outside. There are a lot of technology details where you need to dig up some random Apple Developer forum post from him just because Apple sucks at documenting some of their technology.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#129

Post by xign »

stockboss wrote: post #75
wackget wrote: post #60

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.

while i agree with your sentiment, i think Apple would probably argue that they're actually charging for access to their distribution network.

Yes and no. If you are making a macOS app and want to distribute your own binary (meaning not via the App Store), you are basically doing everything yourself and not using Apple's network. You still have to get a developer account because that's how you 1) get a valid developer signature, and 2) get access to app notarization service. Both 1 and 2 are now mandatory unless you force your users to jump through a lot of security hoops to open your app.

I maintain an open source macOS software and begrudgingly signed up for a developer account since I didn't want my users to have to suffer through the security settings screen. At least I got a donation program up a few years later so at least I'm not paying out of pocket anymore. Some of my peers/competitors (open source text editors) are still not signing their app (since they didn't feel like getting this sorted out) forcing users to have to go through the security settings which I think is a crappy situation.

Re: Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

#130

Post by xign »

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.

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.

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