Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Feedback Feedback

Cesare Forelli:

I want to file a constructive Feedback to Apple about the developer experience with the Feedback process itself (very meta, I know), and I need yours!

5 quick & unbiased questions, please 🙏 answer them now.

Previously:

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Pity you can’t give less than 1 star.


Recently had an experience of requesting Developer Technical Support with a crashing issue with my app which was better than expected, the engineer was a lot more helpful, patient and responsive than I was expecting.

I ended up solving the issue myself but the back and forth with the engineer helped me find the underlying cause.

What was galling though was that in this interrogation of how WebKit works and its memory usage, Apple actually found a memory leak in WKScriptMessageHandler as part of their frameworks due to a test project I provided.

The request was that I then submit a Feedback in Feedback Assistant for this confirmed, Apple originated and discovered bug. You'd think Apple could handle this themselves but they place all the burden for resolving internal quality issues on external developers – the same developers they are already abusing and shaking down via the App Store.

No Apple, I pay you enough already, I'm not also going to do your QA for free.


I'm not sure but I guess the main reason I got feedback from Apple on my Feedbacks was that I only created these Feedbacks on request from AppleDTS while in discussion of Tech Support Incidents.
I had to re-write all the facts I already told DTS in the mail conversation for the Feedback, and usually the answer I got in the Feeback was "we couldn't reproduce your problem in iOS 18ßx". Translation: install the latest beta and check whether the problem was fixed.
If not, make an amendment to the Feedback AND continue the email discussion with DTS because there I got real answers and hints.

So yeah, as Matthew wrote I feel Apple is passing some QA work to us developers - if we pay for a TSI.
Feedbacks I created myself without TSI either get no answer at all, or just "duplicate".

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