File A Bug

My friend Marco Arment laments that of the 15 bugs he’s filed since 2009, eight have been marked as duplicates, and seven have received no significant response.

Since 2009, I’ve reported 161 bugs. It’s much harder for me to do a stone-cold analysis of the results of my efforts. Yes, I’ve “wasted some time,” but often in the process of doing so I have also gained a deeper understanding of the problems I was reporting.

Having filed 161 bugs over six years, I can guarantee you that I’ve had far more bugs ignored or filed as duplicate than Marco has. I’ve had my share of bugs for which I’ve had to send back a sternly worded note to the bug screeners, implying in as polite a language as I could muster that they were not doing their jobs well.

I’ve also burdened Apple with a good number of false alarms: bug reports that I filed hastily only to discover were actually my own problem. Sometimes these were reported with confident, dismissive words that I later felt like eating. Sometimes I am not a great bug reporter.

And sometimes I am a great bug reporter. I’ve received notes of personal thanks on Twitter, via email, and in person at conferences such as WWDC. Engineers at Apple have said things such as “I wish all bug reports were as good as yours,” and “your bug report spelled out exactly how to fix the bug, so that’s exactly what we did.” I can’t remember a major OS X release when at least one of my reported bugs was not addressed during the beta release period, before the software ever saw the light of day. If we stretch the timeline back to 2008, I’ve even had the unexpected honor of being credited in a security update for what I thought was a simple networking bug.

I’ve had my share of frustrations with Apple’s bug reporting system, but I’m a developer. I can take it. I’m used to rejection. 9 times out of 10 when we developers press Cmd-R in Xcode to “Build and Run” our projects, they don’t even make it past the compile phase. But we keep trying. Why? Because we know how great it feels when we finally get something to work. We don’t need to be constantly reassured that we’re great, that our input matters, or that our concerns have been heard. Would it be nice? Sure. But so would Objective-C namespaces and a pony.

If we developers want Apple’s platforms to work as well as they can, the sad and short truth of the matter is we have to report bugs. If you’ve only reported 15 bugs over 6 years, as Marco has, I’m afraid to say that you haven’t done enough. To stand a statistical chance of either helping the cause or of being gratified by a personalized response, you’ll have to step it up, grin and bear the frustration and continue to press “Build and Run” on the Apple Bug Reporter and see what comes out the other end.