I'm organizing a boycott of Apple's Feedback Assistant, starting immediately, and I encourage all Apple developers to join me. Here's how I propose that each of us can effectively participate in the boycott and let Apple know that we're boycotting Feedback Assistant:
Ideally, I think you should make your Feedback from step 1 as unique as possible. The point is to flood Apple with new Feedbacks about the boycott and force Apple to do some work to handle them, to take notice of the boycott, and to recognize that we're serious about it.
Boycotting Feedback Assistant does not preclude talking about your bugs on social media, on your blogs, and on your podcasts. Nor does it preclude filing reports with Apple's other public bug reporting systems, such as those for WebKit and various open source projects on GitHub. Those other bug reporting systems are superior to Feedback Assistant in a number of ways. The primary goal of the boycott is to bring about changes specifically in Feedback Assistant, the most hostile bug reporter I've ever seen.
After consulting with fellow developers, I've composed a list of issues with Feedback Assistant that Apple needs to address in order to end the boycott. I'll number the issues for ease of reference, but the order doesn't necessarily reflect their relative importance.
Below is a screenshot of one of my old reports that epitomizes the absurdity of Apple's bug reporting system. Apple claimed in their response that "much has changed", but to this day, nothing has really changed. I've seen no evidence that Apple sincerely appreciates our input. Apple's Feedback Assistant, formerly known as Radar, has remained unreasonably terrible for a very long time, much too long, so now we're demanding change.
In defense of Apple, some people assert that Apple doesn't have the time to properly respond to Feedbacks. I don't find this argument convincing, because Apple's priorities, schedules, and staffing are determined by Apple itself, via the decisions of the company's leadership. Apple values its own time over the time of external developers and seems to have no guilt over wasting endless amounts of our time. We are not happy, though, to sacrifice ourselves for a corporation worth trillions of dollars. Needless to say, my net worth and income are microscopic in comparison. If Apple can decide that it doesn't have the time to respond to our Feedbacks, then we can decide that we don't have the time to file them; Apple's problems with lack of time are thereby solved. Frankly, as a longtime Apple user, I could do without the relentless annual OS updates, and many of us look back fondly to the era of Mac OS X Snow Leopard when the updates were around two years apart, leaving more time for bug fixes.
This is not a boycott against individual Apple engineers, many of whom also want Feedback Assistant to be improved. Indeed, the improvement of Feedback Assistant would enhance rather than detract from the relationship between Apple engineers and external developers. This is a boycott against the bug reporting system, intended to force Apple leadership to recognize and respond to the persistent problems with the system.
Although I call it a boycott, it could also be termed a labor strike. Apple utilizes developers for vast amounts of unpaid QA labor. Both Apple and developers know the crucial role that developers play in testing and refining Apple's software and products. Apple needs our bug reports, our labor, often hours or even days of labor for a single Feedback. Nonetheless, Apple acts as if it were entitled to our Feedbacks, treating developers kind of like indentured servants. No respect or basic human courtesy is afforded by Apple to developers in the bug reporting system. We've been indoctrinated into believing that it's simply our duty to file Feedbacks, for the sake of the platforms. However, Apple's platforms are not charity cases. To the contrary, they've made Apple the most profitable company in the world. We developers are not Apple employees, and our unpaid labor should not be taken for granted. Henceforth, it will not be taken for granted.
In my view the boycott, or strike, has two goals. First, obviously, is to pressure Apple into improving Feedback Assistant by showing Apple that it needs us to file bug reports and would suffer without them. The second goal is to show ourselves that we don't actually need to file bug reports with Apple. My feeling is that Apple has a lot more to lose here than we do. After all, the majority of bugs that I file never get fixed anyway, and even the fixes usually come later rather than sooner, not in time to avoid the consequences of the bug. Do Apple bugs affect our apps? Yes, of course. But we typically have to ship workarounds for the bugs in our apps, because we can't count on Apple to fix our reported bugs in a timely manner. With a workaround for a bug in place, we no longer need Apple to fix the bug, so reporting the bug becomes more an act of charity than urgency.
This situation is often misunderstood by the public and even by Apple employees. Feedback Assistant does not provide customer service to developers. We developers are the ones who are providing the service to Feedback Assistant, and now we're choosing to withhold our services until the system is improved. I hope that Apple chooses to address the problems with Feedback Assistant, but if Apple happens to choose otherwise, and improvements never arrive, then my intention is to boycott forever. Regardless of whether Apple responds positively, I will consider the boycott to be a success if many developers participate, and we show ourselves that Feedback Assistant is not essential to our work and our livelihood.
The Feedback Assistant boycott now has an official web page, along with an email address, RSS feed, and Mastodon account. I'm also compiling a public list of boycott participants. See the page for more info.