I once had an interesting experience when visiting Apple. I was telling a DTS engineer about a gnarly bug in the Cocoa text system I had found (certain text editing sequences would silently corrupt the undo stack; user might not notice until they accidentally did a select-all and delete, and then tried to undo to get their novel back).
I never got any feedback on this bug at all (just like always).
But, this Apple guy looked up the bug on their internal radar tool (a native Mac app, not some crappy web interface). There were screens full of discussion, with engineer's names I recognized, and the bug has been elevated to "Show-Stopper" status, which he told me meant the next release wouldn't ship without a fix.
What I took from this is that Apple's internal tools for bug triage, discussion, and prioritization are relatively sophisticated and heavily used, but they have nothing to do with the pathetic, rude, uninformative Radar interface that we peons who pay Apple for the privilege of developing for their platform get to see. It was kind of interesting to get a peek inside from their perspective.
Having said that, though, I almost never file Radar issues anymore, for exactly the same reason that I don't go to Apple's offices and clean their toilets for free.
I find the toilet analogy to be flawed. Sure you don't fix their toilets for free, but you would certainly let someone know if you used one of their facilities and found it to be clogged or otherwise malfunctioning.
As a someone who's filed a few Radar issues over the years, I understand that the lack of feedback is frustrating, but I find it absurd that the way to fix that is to withhold the bug reports that help improve the software we use and develop for daily.
Well no, to be honest, I certainly don't do that. If I am at say, Moscone Center or a Wal-mart or a low-rent casino, and a toilet is clogged with shit, I don't go wandering around to hunt down a maintenance man and report it to him. I just use another stall.
Now, if it was instead the toilet at a restaurant or other venue that I frequent, where I am welcomed and treated with respect, then of course I would alert the staff to their problem.
But a developer's relationship with Apple is much more the former than the latter. (I file really awesome bug reports for other software I use, like OmniGraffle or Arq.)
It's also important to note that I didn't begin with this attitude; I ended up with it after filing dozens of detailed Radar bugs over the years, and evaluating how shitty the response from Apple is.
As others have pointed out, if a developer spends 5+ hours isolating a crippling bug in your shit[1], and filing it with a repro case[2], and you don't even have the courtesy to let them follow changes to the bug when it's marked as a duplicate, then well... you're kind of a rude and arrogant asshole. So developers become less likely to keep performing this service for you... unless they reallyreallyreally want the bug fixed.
I never got any feedback on this bug at all (just like always).
But, this Apple guy looked up the bug on their internal radar tool (a native Mac app, not some crappy web interface). There were screens full of discussion, with engineer's names I recognized, and the bug has been elevated to "Show-Stopper" status, which he told me meant the next release wouldn't ship without a fix.
What I took from this is that Apple's internal tools for bug triage, discussion, and prioritization are relatively sophisticated and heavily used, but they have nothing to do with the pathetic, rude, uninformative Radar interface that we peons who pay Apple for the privilege of developing for their platform get to see. It was kind of interesting to get a peek inside from their perspective.
Having said that, though, I almost never file Radar issues anymore, for exactly the same reason that I don't go to Apple's offices and clean their toilets for free.