Marco.org

Speaking of Apple’s bug reporter (“Radar”), here’s an open call for campaigning Apple to improve it. Some of its suggestions go too far or aren’t necessary, but this, I think, is the biggest problem:

Radar is also a black hole. We file radars and we’re lucky to hear back about them. The majority of radars are either left untouched or marked as duplicates of other radars we cannot see. … All this makes us feel like our radars make little difference. …

By making radars so hard and painful to file, most developers end up not filing them. For every radar that is filed, there are many more that developers would file but don’t consider it a big enough issue to be worth the time. It may be a small bug or feature request, or it may be a common issue that we figure someone else has already filed so there’s no point wasting our time telling you about it.

I hardly ever file bug reports for this reason.

Despite reassurances from Apple people to the contrary at WWDC, it sure looks to us outsiders that most of our bug reports go unread or skimmed, filed away, and ignored. But it takes a lot of time to file a good bug report, since the filer should take reasonable measures to ensure that it’s truly an Apple bug and not something else in their code.

An Apple engineer once told me that if a bug gets even 10 duplicate reports, that’s considered a lot. Given the scope of the iOS and Mac developer community, that’s pretty low. Clearly, then, filing bugs isn’t a complete waste of time.

But it feels that way. Maybe if it didn’t, more people would take the time to file good bug reports.