[harrall]

Don’t work for Apple but some bugs just take a lot of work to identify.

I work on a well trafficked consumer product and even though I have a full latitude to fix bugs at my job, I will wait weeks for the right report to come in to make it easily reproducible. I will pull the ticket out of backlog and it will take only an hour to fix it rather than frustrating me and wasting an entire day tracing a bug only to fail at reproducing it anyway. It’s constant triage.

[godelski]

  > to make it easily reproducible

What I'm calling "low hanging fruit" I mean "impossible to miss if you use the product." Of course, tracing a bug is much trickier and often hard to actually predict the difficulty of solving. But it's also worth noting that the harder it is to trace a very noticeable bug often correlates with larger issues in the programming, i.e. tech debt.

[achierius]

Tbf a lot of things "just work" on some devices, for some people's workflows -- even if it's happening every day for you, it might not be happening on the machines the engineers are living on. This can be because of different workflows, or habits, or particular combinations of versions/configurations (e.g. iPhone sku <A> with OS version <B>, laptop with SKU <C>, carplay with software version <D>, ...).

[godelski]

The big benefit of Apple is that they control the full stack. So you're suggesting I what, reformat my machine? Are we really at a place where the suggestions are akin to what we'd suggest noobs do on linux 10 years ago?

Give me power to debug. Give me power to write my own solutions.

And we're talking about a notification... We're also talking about a pair of headphones that can't be connected to multiple devices at the same time for some reason. I can't see this as anything but a self-imposed problem. You could connect up to 7 devices at the same time and that would be a great way to provide the seamless experience. It is the same ecosystem, the phone and laptop can easily communicate and be aware that I have spotify open on both and that I'm writing on my laptop. But no, the problem gets harder because of the issues. I play music from my phone because if I walk away from my computer, I can keep playing music through my headphones. Where's the magic? And the only reason I have spotify open on my laptop is so that if I press the god damn play button I don't end up opening Apple Music (a product I have never intentionally used nor even passed the first time use screen), jumping from my workspace.

Users shouldn't need these defensive patterns when you have the capacity for such integration.

[achierius]

I'm not suggesting that, I'm just explaining why these bugs happen despite all the testing that goes into it, on top of everyone at Apple living on Apple devices by default. I don't really have a solution, I work in the browser, not the part of the OS that handles HID &c. What I do wouldn't work for you: I do just reformat my device quite often, but that's because I work with new hardware / custom OS builds & thus often get in a borked state that would never show up on a customer's device -- and it's only possible because I have access to internal development tools and all that.

Is the particular problem what you were saying about headphones not connecting to multiple devices at once? If so, I admit that's a different kind of issue -- rather than the lack of functionality slipping through testing, it was probably just never included as part of the PoR in the first place. I.e. at some point the designers, or the engineers, or whomever, decided that it wasn't worth building. Despite the level of integration that is indeed possible, you still have to make tradeoffs -- security, performance, timelines, etc.

[emchammer]

It's funny that this thread comes up now. I just lost a ton of work in Logic Pro, years of recordings on one particular track, because of what seems to be an interface issue. I thought that it was crystal clear that I was deleting something in the window that was in the foreground with a highlight around it. It turns out that it's something in the background that got deleted because of reasons. There's no file rollback in iCloud.

These kind of things are really frustrating when it seems like they should be caught with human usability tests. It's easy to throw blame around, and I think Apple does a lot of good work, it just seems like for value of the company they could slow down the pace of iPhone and macOS releases and make them more substantive.

[latexr]

> Don’t work for Apple but some bugs just take a lot of work to identify.

On the other hand, I have reported to them security issues which would take literally one line to fix and literal typos and errors/omissions in the documentation which are all still present after years.

[mpalfrey]

I always say if I can reproduce a bug, I can fix it.

Hardest thing is reproducing a bug reliably.