How to Get Bugs Fixed by Apple
For example, I received an email with a fractional street address, and Mail’s data detector chopped off the whole number portion of the address. Rather than report the bug with steps in Mail, I figured that the data detector itself was broken and made a very small Xcode Playground to demonstrate the problem. It’s time-consuming to create reductive cases, but it also reduces the likelihood of confusion. Consider that the person reading and reproducing your bug needs to see it as simply as possible.
If there’s no action on your bug, the next step is to mail devbugs@apple.com and request status. Note that it can take a while to get a reply. Filing and following up on getting bugs fixed with Apple is a process, as with anything else.
Previously: The Sad State of Logging Bugs for Apple.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
"If you’re not going to fight for your bug, how do you figure anyone at Apple will?"
Hopefully Apple has more riding on the quality of their products than I do.
If you care *that* much more than Apple about a bug, you're skating on thin ice anyways (ie: the affected feature is liable to regress, languish, never be fixed, or wind up deprecated).
The advice to burn one of your $50 TSIs just to get a bug looked at, hoping that the charge will be returned, is infuriating.
*"If you’re not going to fight for your bug, how do you figure anyone at Apple will?"*
The people at Apple are paid to fix bugs. You want me to pay to file them?
Here's my advice, which is strangely missing from this article: if you have a major bug whose report is being ignored by Apple, go public to the media. It's the only avenue that demonstrably works.
" This is an excellent use of the two TSIs included in your Apple Developer Program membership. If you’re not going to fight for your bug, how do you figure anyone at Apple will?"
The real problem is that:
- the initial purpose of those TSIs is not to get bugs fixed or taken into account by Cupertino. it's what BugReporter is for.
- you only have 2 free TSIs. There are millions of bugs in macOS, iOS, whateverOS. And it's not uncommon to be facing more than 2 at a time.
- the 2 TSIs have an expiration limit which is linked to the Developer Membership subscription. So the cost to be able to get bugs possibly taken into account is $99/year.
- it's not uncommon to be told that yes, there is a bug and that's it. And then you have to wait at least the next major OS release to get it fixed. because the DTS person is not the one in charge of the code.
Sometimes, it's a solution that indeed works. But YMMV.
