Submit bug reports or not?

Bug reports and the time spent on them are purely for Apple's benefit and maaaaybe in the very long run for our benefit.

I fear you misunderstood the logic for bug reports: we signal an issue to Apple (which may have already been identified by the way). That helps improve products (Xcode notably) which we will benefit later.

But it is not a communication channel to Apple (for instance, you have to close the bug report yourself).

For direct communication, use Contact Us or a DTS ticket.

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So what is your opinion, keep providing bug reports or nah save yer time already.

My opinion is that we should continue sending bug reports, not each time we find an issue (we should first look on forum or SO if someone already met the issue and maybe solved it)

I find that sending bug reports is about as useful as asking questions on this forum. Of my last 10 posts here asking a question, none got useful responses. (The 11th got an answer from Quinn - thanks!)

There are a couple of other things, though. Firstly, the act of writing a (good) bug report or forum question can help you to better understand your problem. Going through the documentation one more time to find the right bit to copy into your post might be enough to find the bit you mis-read previously. Or distilling your code down to something you can share might be enough to reveal your bug. But actually, this works just as well if you're explaining the problem to the invisible rabbit who sits on your shoulder. Maybe write the bug report, but then press "cancel" instead of "submit"?

Secondly, remember that even if Apple fixed bugs as quickly as possible, it would literally be years before those fixes were in the hands of all your customers. So unless you're working on a project that's got very long timescales, fixes don't help. What you need is work-arounds. Bug reports are unlikely to deliver those. The main beneficiaries of your bug reports, therefore, are other developers who try to use the same feature in a few years time. And they may be your competitors. This is a real issue: I have an app that dates from 2009, and it is full of code to work around bugs and missing features in ancient iOS versions. My competitors, whose apps are much newer, don't need any of those work-arounds and should have much cleaner and easier to maintain code as a result.

@Claude31, @endecotp thanks for your perspectives. No I am not expecting Apple to fix my issues or help me through a bandaid when I am submitting bugs. My problem is mostly that, being a small startup developer, I have no time to create elaborate reports in particularly when being asked to write test code by Apple.

Apple is not giving feedback of any kind and can obviously not know how much time and effort I can give to a particular issue. As you said, it is not a bidirectional channel - this makes it very clear for me; I am not in a position to provide bug reports and will stop doing this. Much better to spend time hunting for solutions.