CNBC:
Grant Thompson, the 14-year-old who found Apple’s FaceTime flaw, may get a bounty for his discovery.
“I kind of found this one on accident, which is pretty surprising to me that like Apple didn’t get this and a 14-year-old kid found it by accident,” Thompson told CNBC.
And:
[Grant’s mother] said a high-level Apple executive flew to Tucson, Arizona, on Friday afternoon to meet with Grant. The executive, whom she declined to name, “thanked us in person and also asked for our feedback, asked us how they could improve their reporting process.”
“They also indicated that Grant would be eligible for the bug bounty program. And we would hear from their security team the following week in terms of what that meant.
I do hope Apple finds ways to improve their reporting process. Ideally, the new process would help egregious, widely reported bugs quickly find their way to the appropriate team at Apple, perhaps with a more publicly exposed status system that makes it clear the reported bug is valid, with a fix in the works.
The idea of tons of iPhone owners duplicating the work of others by reporting a known bug, all in an attempt to get it to rise to the right team at Apple seems incredibly wasteful to me. No easy fix here, glad Apple is working on this.
No easy fix. The iPhone ain’t easy. Think 911 and dispatchers and how those calls are handled. All are logged but all are not a priority.
Apple really should have their bug reporting process ironed out by now.
Surprised to read their established process was so ineffective on this, considering how long they’ve been dedicated to gathering feedback from user’s devices. Granted, this was not a device reporting a bug, but still, they’ve always demonstrated a proactive initiative on collating issues from users.
And imagine how many of those calls are either bogus or mere melodrama.
I’ve worked in complex environments where bug triage is hard. As a user sitting in the cheap seats it’s easy to throw stones at this one, being on the inside it’s far more complex than I could imagine.
For example, I’m guessing that Apple gets thousands of these per day. Going through the information somebody has to be able decipher the information, replicate the bug, work with multiple teams to figure out who should be involved to prioritize it, and communicate back to the customer. That alone sometimes takes days of effort with multiple teams for a normal bug – and often the solution isn’t a software fix.
And the next bug report would be completely different with different teams.
A one size fits all process is extremely difficult. Companies like Apple and Microsoft that operate at a massive scale experience complexity that we can’t even imagine.
it’s worse than that. Almost no one outside of professional software people (and not even all of them) can write clear bug reports. Go look at the support forums for any software product. IF they have a forum for problems, etc you’ll see a list of useless subject lines “Not working”, “Problem importing my file!” etc. Open a few and you’re very unlikely to see a succinct report, rather you will probably see a mini-essay.
This isn’t unexpected. People aren’t used to writing good bug reports. They’re not trained in it or shown how to do it and it’s something that, individually, they rarely do. But though this is a rare thing for the individual customer, for a company with a lot of customers it means being deluged with reports that are poorly written . Something or someone has to take those, figure out a priority and a severity (NOT the same thing), then route them to the right group which has a set of existing bugs. If the priority or severity are incorrect, a serious bug can get lost.
Apple should absolutely try to do better. But no one who’s dealt with consumer software at scale thinks this is easy or trivial.
“I kind of found this one on accident, which is pretty surprising to me
that like Apple didn’t get this and a 14-year-old kid found it by
accident,” Thompson told CNBC.
Accident seems to be the only way to have found this bug. Nobody would think to add themselves to their own call. Even if you did, you wouldn’t think to do it before the initial call connected. If anything, it shows Apple needs testers who don’t know what they’re doing.
I reported a BIG, fat repeatable bug about a year ago. Called Apple, asked for a Level Two technician, and he had NO interest in what I was saying. Totally blew me off. His attitude was “I work for APPLE, and I have never heard of it, so it doesn’t exist!”
Ah, but I was able to prevail:
When I got the automatic “How was your support experience?” I explained everything again, and included feedback about his snotty attitude.
As a result, the disk-formatting bug in OSX 10.9 through 10.12 FINALLY
went away. You are all welcome.
At least they have a bug-reporting process.
I’m of two minds on this entire affair.
On the one hand it was an egregious bug, albeit in a brand-new functionality. (If we disregard group iChat from what, a decade ago???)
On the other hand there should be a way to get real bugs to the notice of the people in charge of those apps.
ON the gripping hand, the vast majority of end users have no freaking clue how to report a bug, and any communication channel including them is likely to be several orders more noise than signal…
YES. The method that currently exists, doesn’t quite get the job done.
Maybe add a bug app to the Control Panel that makes it easy to share them with Apple. There’s already a screen recording control app, so something that walks the user through the process on the iPhone and captures the bug in action. There’s also a Feedback app for Beta testers, so just take that and make it more intuitive for the ‘average’ user. We all know bugs are a persistent reality and many get overlooked by even the Beta testers.