I know, it's a provocative title, but I couldn't come up with a title that could better summarise the issue that I want to discuss here.
I have been regularly sending feedback (via the old Bug Reporter and now the new Feedback Assistant) since about 4 years ago. Before that, I maybe opened 1 feedback per week, then at some point I said to myself that I wanted to report everything, even the tiniest detail, that looked or behaved like a bug. (If I don't report everything, why report anything at all?) So I ended up opening from 5 to 20 bug reports every day, for the last 4 years. I still wonder how it's even possible to find that many bugs. They are not all equally important: some of them are serious, some of them are little UI glitches.
I just sent 12 feedback reports in less than 1 hour. It often happens that while waiting for the sysdiagnose to finish gathering or while sending a feedback report I notice other bugs: reporting bugs seems to attract other bugs.
Now, the few Apple engineers that get back to me for some of these issues and the Apple support as well often tell me that Apple really cares about customer feedback. I really want to believe this ... but it's so hard to believe it, if less than 1% of my submitted reports (yes, less than 1%, and it's probably much less) ever gets a response. A response, if it ever comes, can come after 3 months, or after 1 year, or after 3 years; only rarely does it come within 1 month. To some of the feedbacks, after getting a response from the Apple engineers, I responded, among other things, by asking if I'm doing something wrong with the way I submit the feedback reports. Because if I do something wrong, then that could be the reason why only so few of them are considered by the Apple engineers. But I never got any answer to that. I told them that it's frustrating sending so much feedback without ever knowing if it's helpful or not, and never got an answer.
At times Apple seems to mock me by closing reports with messages like these:
I have been regularly sending feedback (via the old Bug Reporter and now the new Feedback Assistant) since about 4 years ago. Before that, I maybe opened 1 feedback per week, then at some point I said to myself that I wanted to report everything, even the tiniest detail, that looked or behaved like a bug. (If I don't report everything, why report anything at all?) So I ended up opening from 5 to 20 bug reports every day, for the last 4 years. I still wonder how it's even possible to find that many bugs. They are not all equally important: some of them are serious, some of them are little UI glitches.
I just sent 12 feedback reports in less than 1 hour. It often happens that while waiting for the sysdiagnose to finish gathering or while sending a feedback report I notice other bugs: reporting bugs seems to attract other bugs.
Now, the few Apple engineers that get back to me for some of these issues and the Apple support as well often tell me that Apple really cares about customer feedback. I really want to believe this ... but it's so hard to believe it, if less than 1% of my submitted reports (yes, less than 1%, and it's probably much less) ever gets a response. A response, if it ever comes, can come after 3 months, or after 1 year, or after 3 years; only rarely does it come within 1 month. To some of the feedbacks, after getting a response from the Apple engineers, I responded, among other things, by asking if I'm doing something wrong with the way I submit the feedback reports. Because if I do something wrong, then that could be the reason why only so few of them are considered by the Apple engineers. But I never got any answer to that. I told them that it's frustrating sending so much feedback without ever knowing if it's helpful or not, and never got an answer.
At times Apple seems to mock me by closing reports with messages like these:
"iTunes has been replaced by the Music app recently: if this issue still happens in the Music app, please file a new report."
"This behaviour in AppKit/Cocoa is intended. Please file a new report to improve the documentation."
"Much time has passed since this report has been opened and there have been many changes to macOS since then. If this issue still happens, please file a new report."