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Apple Aiming to Improve Software Quality With iOS 16 by Encouraging Beta Testers to Submit Bugs

Another example of a company externalizing their costs. Apple has the most expensive kit in their respective categories. The consumer's job is now to report bugs so they can spend more time developing new eye candy?

Have you ever walked into a grocery store and they have shuffled the products around so you have to look in every isle to find what you hoped you could buy in 5 minutes and get home? That's how I feel after an update. It's supposed to be a tool that makes our lives easier. Just keep it the same and fix the bugs!
 
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mxrider88 said:
I came here to say exactly this. I reported over 60 bugs over the years and I rarely got a response or a fix.
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Same, though not quite as many. I've been posting bug reports (both before and after Feedback Assistant existed) and although I have gotten an occasional response, it's never been more than 5% and I haven't seen a single response or request for more information since Feedback Assistant became required. This even though I actually have a background and prior experience in doing hardware and software QA for a tech company (IBM, back in the day), and know how to properly fill out a bug report. Crickets.

I do know that getting eyeballs from Apple even on developer-submitted bugs has been a struggle, as for a while Apple's developer relations contact was publicly tweeting about it, but that was several years ago and it seems to have gotten worse. Not sure why anyone thinks that inconsistent bug reports filed by end users (often without actionable information and replicable descriptions) will get more traction than reports filed with not only step-by-step reproduction instructions (and complete diagnostics) but also rule-in/rule-out steps and configurations already reported to narrow down root-cause possibilities. 🤷‍♂️
 
The problem is all this catches is bugs that result in crashes. And Apple is already pretty good in that respect.

Where Apple SUCKS is in bugs involving more subtle functionality For example in a Music.app playlist ("View as Songs") if you type in a field, the field will move to the top of the window. This is moronic and clearly a bug; but reporting it is utterly useless. Apple has ZERO interest in these sorts of bugs – they will be closed as "Behaves correctly".
And god help you trying to report that a particular design choice is dumb and removes previously available functionality...
 
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Beta tester is unpaid volunteers who might have no idea how to do proper testing or reporting issues. You get what you paid for, essentially.

Megacorp cheaping Out actual testers is ridiculous, as they are totally able to afford professional tester that knows how testing works. Homebrew game developers tend to do lots of beta testing themselves. It’s unrealistic for megacorp to totally rely on automated system to do the testing.

Of course, there’s the problem of them ignoring feedback despite bugs that are well documented, could be fixed by community, and prolly doesn’t take much time to actually fix.
 
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exoticSpice said:
You know Google, Microsoft and Console companies like Sony ask their customers who are on a beta to submit bug reports just like Apple...
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and? just because others do it too, doesn't make it any better. it's an unfortunate trend the entire industry has followed.
 
How about they actually read the bug reports? Back in iOS 13 people reported bugs that were still present months after release. None of this matters if Apple doesn’t actually have the proper QA staffing. Or whatever their excuse is.
 
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gsmornot said:
No way even a large group of testers is going to find every scenario that can break the software. Opening, clicking buttons, closing, the basic use of the device will fail at times to reveal that exact combo that triggers an issue. Thats why the beta is available to beta testers. Everyone that downloads the software has signed up to be a larger testing audience with more varied use. If this released to general public after only being tested by those inside it would not go well. Say they have 200 people on testing, that is a far cry from the thousands of beta tester, maybe its millions based on the keynote. No way can an internal group do it alone.
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I find bug scenarios minutes after a major release as does a friend of mine. Every year we joke about it. So if we can find them that quickly why cant apple? If they aren’t incompetent then its a resource (staffing) issue. Or potentially them just not caring issue. The MO of most apple engineers is its a one and done.

Apple bragged about the sidebar support on iPad OS 14. Yet the just now got around to it 2 years later on the podcast app.

The whole reason the car project even exists is because engineers were threatening to leave since they were sick of working on their tenth iPhone. Which is fine. But apples gotta hire some kids or interns And what not. So many apps they make barely get updated or touched for MANY months. We have to wait for massive yearly updates for them to fix some of the bugs. Just update the damn individual apps like podcasts or music or messages AS WE GO THROUGH THE YEAR ….like every other app in the App Store.
 
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ghostface147 said:
Then actually respond and fix the bugs.
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Amen ... can't tell you how many bugs I've submitted in the past that never get any response.

I understand there's likely many duplicates, some can't be reproduced, etc. but pretty much all of the bugs I've submitted in the past go completely unacknowledged. What's the point?
 
I had to email cook and Federighi twice before I got in touch with an engineer to get Continuity to work on a Mac with two user accounts logged in at the same time and it still took almost a year of back and forth.


I am trying for several months now to get fixed the navigation on Apple Watch. If you say take me to the office for example, to the Watch, it starts the navigation but if you go off route it gets stuck on rerouting and you have to stop it and restart.
I use it a ton for work and it’s infuriating me every day knowing I have a $600 device on ny wrist that doesn’t do what I need.
 
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skiguy45 said:
Amen ... can't tell you how many bugs I've submitted in the past that never get any response.

I understand there's likely many duplicates, some can't be reproduced, etc. but pretty much all of the bugs I've submitted in the past go completely unacknowledged. What's the point?
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Do you have any idea how many submissions Apple probably receives from beta testers? What I think others are not taking into consideration (Including you), is how could they possibly respond to every person that might report the same issue, across thousands of beta tester‘s? Like, what do you want them to do for you? Personally message you or something? It doesn’t mean that they aren’t acknowledging or aren’t looking into the issue, it just means that they can’t probably respond to every person that submits a complaint, especially for the same problem over and over again.

I can understand the frustration, but let’s try to be reasonably understanding too.
 
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Apple doesn’t fix bugs. Their software keeps getting more and more bugs in them. It used to be that I would have to restart my windows machine every 3 or 4 days because it would become unstable but my Mac would run for a week or two before I had to restart it. Now a days windows 10 seems to be able to run over a week without having to restart it due to instability but I find I have to restart my Mac every 3 or 4 days. Boy how times have changed.
 
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Rookbird¥ said:
Apple doesn’t fix bugs. Their software keeps getting more and more bugs in them. It used to be that I would have to restart my windows machine every 3 or 4 days because it would become unstable but my Mac would run for a week or two before I had to restart it. Now a days windows 10 seems to be able to run over a week without having to restart it due to instability but I find I have to restart my Mac every 3 or 4 days. Boy how times have changed.
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I've restarted my Mac Studio running Monterey about 3 times since getting it set up in April, and that was due to shutting down because there were thunderstorms.
 
I really don't understand why software companies make is so complicated to report bugs, I have just given up trying. I have successfully reported bugs to VMWare but that's only cause the company I work for pays premium support (and then again the process was anything but smooth).
 
nicolas_s said:
There always has been a Feedback app so they've always been doing it, they're just improving the process
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But it seems they’re advertising it more now… which to me implies they weren’t doing a good job encouraging public beta testers to give feedback.

Hence the eye roll and asking what was the point of public beta if they weren’t encouraging people to give feedback.

At best, they were collecting the logs of users.
 
JM said:
But it seems they’re advertising it more now… which to me implies they weren’t doing a good job encouraging public beta testers to give feedback.

Hence the eye roll and asking what was the point of public beta if they weren’t encouraging people to give feedback.

At best, they were collecting the logs of users.
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What’s the purpose of downloading a beta if you are not going to provide feedback?
 
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Reporting bugs is not worth my time any more. I have bugs that are decades old and still active (not sure they should be), but none the less nothing was ever done and these were critical bugs that failed to deliver the API Apple promised.

I'm sorry, but all bugs for code that fails to deliver the Apple intended result should be fixed whether they have been reported once or 1000's of times. This is where I have a problem, Apple does not seem to care. Either they don't have the knowledge or the resources to properly maintain their software.

I am not talking about preferences on how the code should work, or improvements on how the code could work, but simply Apple delivering their public API as documented.

Don't get me started about how poorly Apple's APIs are documented. We have APIs that were released years ago and still to this date have no (exactly zero) API description.
 
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