[diminish]

out of curiosity, does apple read stuart's blog or HN? there must be a better way to signal this to ios7 program management when you are signed up for beta...do they have a dev feedback option, which many devs would request the same wish...

[GuiA]

They do have a bug tracker to which any registered developer can submit.

[potatolicious]

It's really more like a black hole to which you can sacrifice words and pray for the best.

[GuiA]

I've only reported a couple bugs in the past few years, but they got responded to in a somewhat speedy fashion. Maybe I just got lucky.

[krichman]

Well, or it could be that the people that don't get responses are louder so we think they are lax and you are lucky. Xcode still sucks, despite all our bug reports, though, so I am inclined to believe they ignore most requests. (Were your bugs security-related?)

[htp]

Yep- send bugs and feature requests to https://bugreport.apple.com/ . Everything gets read, eventually, by a real live person.

There’s more information available about reporting bugs (like which logs are useful, where to find them on your device, and how to get them off your device) at https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/ .

[clarky07]

i suspect Apple is well aware that devs don't want beta users to be able to leave reviews. It has been a think since the app store started. They just don't have much incentive to do the work needed to make the change happen. It likely only effects a small number of people, and not an incredibly huge effect for the most part.

[yojimbo311]

I think you underestimate the impact these particular reviews are having for some, even if it's a minority.

Apple has as much incentive here as they have with any customer complaints. If it's important enough to developers and genuinely impacts their product (aka products Apple benefits from in more ways than one) they know it will effect the relationship they have with Apple. Like with anything however, the problem needs to communicated. The more people who communicate the same issue, the more likely it will get attention. https://bugreport.apple.com/ is the place to start. Not blogs, not HN, not Twitter or anything else.

If you want a problem you're having solved, start with filing a report in as detailed, and polite, a way as possible. Using blogs to bitch and complain about how Apple is ignoring an "obvious" issue, or how stupid they were to do things in such-and-such a way, is essentially counterproductive and being part of the problem rather than the solution. Using them to explain the issue, get a discussion around it going, coming up with solutions that work for you and fellow developers, and get additional reports filed, enhances the ability for Apple to respond with a genuine solution sooner rather than later. Sometimes they see the blogs and articles, but I'm sure it's more often they don't, so the trend I've seen over the last several years of vitriolic blogs being the first and only mention of a problem has, IMHO, really been disservice to the whole community.

It's always taken much longer than I would personally like or understand, but with enough bug reports filed on a given issue I do see traction and changes come later on down the road. They may not always be the changes I explicitly requested or expect, but they do resolve the problems in one way or another.

edit: grammar