Feedback Assistant Replaces Bug Reporter
You can now submit developer feedback and file bug reports to Apple using the native Feedback Assistant app for iOS and Mac, or the Feedback Assistant website. When you file a bug, you’ll receive a Feedback ID to track the bug within the app or on the website.
The native app definitely makes submitting easier. And there are more subcategories to classify your bug and fewer text fields that you need to fill in, which I think is good.
But the database migration was a disaster. All my old bugs—I’m assuming because there’s no obvious way to check—are there but were assigned essentially the same date. So there’s no way to sort by when I filed them. They all show up as when they were migrated. This, combined with the poor search, makes it nearly impossible to find anything. I was by no means a prolific Radar filer, and my bug list is upwards of 20 pages long on a 30-inch display.
Partly, this is because the list includes—and shows as Open—some bugs that were marked as closed in the old system. Fortunately, in recent years I have been saving local copies of my bugs in OmniOutliner, so I have a partial local index to help find things.
The bug ID numbers have also all changed, though the old ones are available appended to the titles.
Lastly, the bugs are almost unreadable because it looks like all the line breaks were removed from the Description field.
Wow, RadarWeb is gone. It’s now Feedback Assistant. Unfortunately it’s not showing me my old radars.
I feel like maybe they should have waited until after the big developer conference before doing something that potentially screws with developers’ ability to see old radars.
The new Apple Feedback site is magic. I apparently posted all my bugs on the 23rd of April 2019 at 9.04pm and engineers instantly responded in the same minute.
Feedback Assistant imported all old radars and completely broke the ordering of my radars. They list the creation date as April 15-17, mostly :/
Apple now tells you how and why a radar was closed. Duplicates are now referred to as similar issues, and it will actually tell you if a fix has been shipped
Feedback Assistant fails when I try to submit an issue with backtraces.
[…]
Moral of the story: do not put backtraces in your description. Put them in text files and attach them.
Feedback Assistant is worse than the open source tools we had before.
The friction removed by having a native, always-accessible Radar app in iOS and macOS means it is so easy to submit feedback now — almost as easy as typing them into Notes for later. I think I’ve filed more Radars this past week than in the past year
Update (2019-06-13): Patrick Wardle:
How does one submit a bug report if Apple’s bug reporter itself is (or appears to be) broken? 🤔
1st report resulted in blank “Untitled” event being filed and now, report #2 is just spinning on “Sending feedback to Apple” 😥
…maybe this is why ppl post 0days to Twitter 🤣
Update (2019-06-17): JP Simard:
Well that’s it, I give up. Feedback Assistant is just throwing away all my bug reports.
Update (2019-06-18): Damien Petrilli:
You don’t know if the website is loaded or not, no feedback when you click a button. It doesn’t plain work.
How can this crap been shipped. How can any manager at Apple say “this is ok, go for it”.
Feedbacks website just doesn’t work on the web at all. You get multiple text box to add a comment, none of them works.
Update (2019-06-19): Daniel Jalkut:
With apologies to all the hardworking engineers at Apple, the new Feedback Assistant will result in less collaboration from 3rd party developers in fixing bugs in Apple software. My response to requests to update status on bugs all look something like this now.
Update (2019-06-27): Daniel Jalkut:
One of the changes with Apple’s new Feedback Assistant is engineers at Apple are evidently not able to see who filed a bug.
I got a private message asking me I was behind a specific bug report. It had a tell-tale punkass vibe to it, I guess!
I’ve had such bad luck with Feedback Assistant in the last few weeks, I’m now always writing it in a local editor first until I can confirm successful submission.
So… Feedback Assistant has an inbox with messages that you can’t get rid of?
I guess I won’t make it to inbox zero. 😳
Update (2019-07-23): Peter Steinberger:
Wee, Apple fixed the radar creation date in Feedback Assistant. I can scroll back to my first one in 2010 again :)
Update (2019-07-25): Colin Cornaby:
Getting emails back from Feedback Assistant saying none of my bugs have attachments, even though I can see the attachments in Feedback Assistant.
Feedback Assistant won’t let me download them again so I wonder if it ate them.
Update (2019-08-06): Peter Steinberger:
Was curious why Feedback Assistant feels so slow. Did a Sample with Activity Monitor. The Auto Layout Engine seems to spent a ton of time laying out cells… using the Web View is comparably faster
Update (2019-08-20): Max Seelemann.
Believe it or not, they are blaming me for not being able to re-download a sample project from a feedback I filed 1.5 months ago.
Update (2019-08-22): Daniel Jalkut:
Apple has restored the ability to download the attachments that were submitted with bug reports. They seem to be available via the web interface to Feedback Reporter, hopefully coming to the Catalina app, too.
Also: openradar.appspot.com can't currently handle the new numbers with the letter prefixes. I've informed its maintainer and he's having a look into it.