Apple developer Jeff Johnson wants developers to band together and get Apple to notice Feedback’s failures, reports AppleInsider.
In a blog post, he says he’s organizing a boycott of Apple’s Feedback Assistant, starting immediately, and he encourages all Apple developers to join him. Feedback Assistant Here’s how Johnson proposes that developers can effectively participate in the boycott and let Apple know that they’re boycotting Feedback Assistant:
- File a new Feedback about Feedback Assistant (in Developer Tools & Resources) that lists the issues below and states that you’re boycotting Feedback Assistant until the issues are addressed.
- Don’t file any other new Feedbacks unless and until Apple addresses the issues.
- If Apple requests a response to a previously filed Feedback, respond only by saying that you’re boycotting Feedback Assistant, and refer to your Feedback number from step 1.
Johnson says he’s talked with other developers and composed a list of issues with Feedback Assistant that Apple needs to address in order to end the boycott. They are:
- Apple neglects or refuses to say whether or not they can reproduce reported bugs, even when we give them precise steps to reproduce and sample Xcode projects. This is crucial for us to determine whether Apple is taking our Feedbacks seriously or just lazily, bureaucratically stringing us along.
- Apple closes Feedbacks with the status “Investigation complete – Unable to diagnose with current information” without asking us for more information or even notifying us that the Feedback has been closed.
- Apple closes Feedbacks without the agreement of the person who filed the Feedback, and apparently it’s now a “feature” of their bug reporting system that closed Feedbacks cannot be reopened, even by Apple employees. (It wasn’t always this way, I believe.)
- When Apple mistakenly closes a Feedback for a bug that isn’t fixed, Apple demands that we open a new Feedback for the same bug, instead of just opening a new one themselves and giving us the new Feedback number.
- Apple demands that developers “verify” Feedbacks with the latest betas despite the fact that Apple has not fixed the bugs, attempted to fix the bugs, or even attempted to reproduce the bugs with the steps given by us. This is a giant waste of our time. And Apple closes the Feedbacks if we don’t “verify” them.
- Apple doesn’t always notify us of changes to the status of the original Feedback when our Feedbacks are closed as duplicates.
- Apple constantly demands invasive sysdiagnose reports, often unnecessarily, and refuses to look at Feedbacks without them. Many developers work on their own personal devices, and sysdiagnoses are gross violations of our privacy, which Apple claims is a fundamental human right. Apple has avoided or abandoned creating smaller, more targeted and less intrusive methods of collecting information and diagnosing bugs.
- Feedbacks can no longer be filed from the web. Apple now requires that all Feedbacks be filed from the native Feedback Assistant app on macOS or iOS. This is a very recent setback: I’ve been filing Feedbacks via the web app for years, the last one on October 26. Note the passive-aggressive question “Where would you like to start your feedback?” and the “recommendation” to use the native app, as if there were a choice.
- We can’t search Feedback Assistant for bugs. Apple employees can search the database, but I can see only the Feedbacks that I personally filed. Of course we acknowledge that some Feedbacks need to remain secret, especially for products that haven’t yet been announced by Apple, but countless Feedbacks require no such protection, and an opt-in searchable bug database would help external developers immensely, improving the overall quality of the software on Apple’s platforms, to the benefit of Apple, developers, and users alike.
Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today