“Big news today from Apple: the company is opening its OS X Beta Seed Program to its customers,” Jim Dalrymple reports for The Loop. “In the past, you needed to be a developer to access beta builds of OS X, but as of OS X 10.9.3, released earlier today, customers can also apply for access.”
“‘Join the OS X Beta Seed Program and help make OS X even better. Install the latest pre-release software, try it out, and submit your feedback,’ reads Apple’s OS X Mavericks Beta page,” Dalrymple reports.
More info and link in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Just a reminder that beta software should not go on production machines. Install betas on testing Macs only.
[Attribution: 9to5Mac. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Bill” for the heads up.]
Wow! However, I bet this is only for dot releases and not major updates.
Why? They give away the OS now, it’s not like they need to be concerned about losing profits because people won’t by the finished release.
Uh, there’s the little issue of reputation. Developers understand what it’s like to be running beta software and tracking bugs through a quality assurance program. It is often the antithesis of “it just works.” So what Apple is really saying is that in the modern 10.9 sandboxed world they are confident that bugs are isolated and few. If you’ve done the update you have probably noticed a feedback app in the dock. This isn’t so much about reporting bugs as it is about gaining insight into what you like and don’t like, what features are missing, etc.
Do the public beta testers have to sign a Confidentiality Agreement?
Essentially, yes
no problem here, what happens on my mac stays on my mac, regardless if it is booted up in Vegas !-)
In the past, you needed to be a developer to access beta builds of OS X
WRONG. I’m not a developer and have been part of the ‘AppleSeed’ program for years.
Oddly: I got FED UP with the AppleSeed program recently, specifically because Apple does NOT pay adequate attention to beta tester feedback. I literally caught Apple NOT reading what I had written in an extremely critical bug report about two versions of 10.9.3 beta, both of which were IMPOSSIBLE to boot after installation. Apple sat on my reports for well over a month. Meanwhile, two more versions of 10.9.3 beta had been released which did NOT have the bug. THEN Apple writes me and asks for more information. Idiotic, and I told them so.
IOW: To hell with that garbage. If Apple doesn’t care, I’m not going to put in the extraordinary efforts of caring myself. Therefore, I’ve dropped out of AppleSeed. I suspect A LOT of people have dropped out of AppleSeed and this ‘open beta’ is Apple’s attempt to lure in someone, anyone, to do free testing for them. I can only hope this also means Apple has cleaned up their act and intend to actually care about beta feedback. That would be great.
Meanwhile: I’ve been bludgeoned into having zero interest beta testing for Apple.
It’s comments like that which make me think having the beta program open to non-developers is a very bad idea.
Of course, there are two ways to take your comment. From my point of view, I find it depressing putting a lot of time into beta testing then discovering my reports don’t matter.
Well as someone who’s been a developer off and on for many years here’s what I meant…
Now keep in mind this is based solely on what you wrote, without any knowledge of what you did not write.
“Apple does NOT pay adequate attention to beta tester feedback”
You say this, but 1) they fixed the bug you reported and 2) they responded back to you. Really, the point of bug reports and beta testing is to alert the developers on where bugs reside and what’s popping up. This is why you’ll often see bug report forms that state something along the lines that you should not expect to hear anything back. They’re not there for support or customer service, just the flow of information to developers.
Even in cases where bug tracking IDs are given back to the submitter, what the developers are working on and what they already know about submitted bugs isn’t pushed back through the system as a priority.
I literally caught Apple NOT reading what I had written in an extremely critical bug report about two versions of 10.9.3 beta, both of which were IMPOSSIBLE to boot after installation.
I can’t speak to whether or not what you reported was in fact an extremely critical bug since you provided no information about it. But you also provided no information that shows that Apple didn’t read your report.
Apple sat on my reports for well over a month.
How exactly do you know this? I thought you said they didn’t read them? How do you know there weren’t dozens of reports that mirrored yours and the developers were working on it? How do you know that your report wasn’t processed and the developers had been working through an assigned list for a month before getting to yours?
Meanwhile, two more versions of 10.9.3 beta had been released which did NOT have the bug.
So they fixed the bug? That’s what they’re supposed to do. This may have had nothing to do with your report. They may have had others report the same bug, or without any report had already been reworking the components where the bug was located.
THEN Apple writes me and asks for more information. Idiotic, and I told them so.
That’s the type of feedback I’m sure they love to get!
Here’s a very common situation…
An update is about to take place involving several key areas. One area FooComponent is due to be re-worked. The developers dedicated to FooComponent first have to work on some other areas. An early beta ships that has a bug in FooComponent because during the in-house testing FooComponent hadn’t been scheduled for testing since work on it hadn’t begun. A bunch of beta testers report issues on FooComponent, all with the same bug, but with the reports written in numerous different ways such that it’s impossible to the admin to see that they should be classified as the same bug.
The developers eventually finish their other obligations, and get to work on FooComponent. They may wait to get to the bug reports until they’ve reworked the area since they know things will be updated anyway. A couple of releases go by, and they then start working off the bug reports, for which your report comes in.
Your report has issues that for one reason or another are unique, and maybe the developers aren’t 100% sure that it’s been resolved, so the admin replies to you asking for more information.
“I find it depressing putting a lot of time into beta testing then discovering my reports don’t matter.”
Most developers realize that submitting reports often doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a duplicate submission. It doesn’t matter if the developers are aware of the bug. It may not matter if the developers haven’t begun work on the area or still have work to finish.
TL;DR: When you have beta testers who know what it’s like to develop, you’re narrowing down the field to people who can better understand the process and not get feedback of “you’re idiots”; have a lowered opinion of the company; or badmouth the company in online communities.
blahblahblah
No Apple did NOT fix the bug I reported. They ignored the bug I reported, then after it had been overcome by some method that had nothing to do with my reporting, they start asking me for more information about what I’d experienced, pointing out that they had not even read what I reported.
I’m done with this subject. You can go rant to yourself now. I’m sufficiently upset already without your crap.
“No Apple did NOT fix the bug I reported”
You just wrote in your previous comment, “Meanwhile, two more versions of 10.9.3 beta had been released which did NOT have the bug.”
You even write it again in the next sentence, “it had been overcome by some method that had nothing to do with my reporting”
So what are you complaining about? The bug you reported was fixed (or not fixed depending upon which sentence of yours one reads).
“They ignored the bug I reported”
How do you know this?
They wrote you back for more information. Fixed or not, when they wrote you back, they’re doing the opposite of ignoring the bug you reported.
You see, this is exactly the downside to open betas. People like you. Receiving contradictory statements, name calling, etc… is all counter productive to the entire process. And worse, it bleeds out into the consumer space and affects the overall brand.
I’m done with this subject.
And one minute later, you replied again to this thread.
you LITERALLY just posted that they fixed the bug.
Which of course is why they wrote me to ask for me to gather MORE information about the bug. They had not-a-clue.
Worthless posts galore folks. Ask yourselves why.
you LITERALLY just posted that they did NOT fix the bug.
I have had similar experiences with another software company, reporting a bug, writing the code that would fix it (SQL) and still nothing from them. Most frustrating to see it, report it and nothing happening.
I’ve performed as a beta tester for years, for both system and application software. I regard it as a form of community service. There was a Mac OS X 10.0.0 public beta, I vaguely remember, that I participated in. That was bug city, and I never got acknowledgment from Apple for my reports, but it did not bother me. Third party App developers loved my reports, though. I always follow the love. 🙂
What bothers me is that they made it clear they didn’t even care to read what I wrote. They lost my interest.
While an employee I filed a lot of bug reports. Many were fixed in later releases, many were never fixed. Just because you or I take time to write up a bug report doesn’t mean Apple has to fix it. There are innumerable issues at play that neither you nor I are privy to. Quite often a bug in a framework is rather irrelevant to Apple because that framework is being replaced in the next major release, and Apple is certainly not going to say so publicly (because the plan may even change or get delayed!).
You may not be aware of it, but there is an organized legal wall between developer relations (who receives outside bug reports) and software engineering. There simply has to be this wall out of fairness to all involved, since Apple is itself a software development house of retail products. Developer technical support has to be very careful to be neutral, lest the entire company get accused of bias, either towards its own developers or towards specific third-party developers.
It would be far more satisfying if Apple could acknowledge your bug report. Mine, too. But until they’ve investigated and actually have a fix, they can’t because of fear mongering, competitive response, misinformation, etc. In a tort-happy society, they have to remain quiet.
The single most effective way to promote the resolution to a bug you find is, sadly, to do their job for them: Find the most simplistic and fool-proof way to reproduce the bug and report those steps. The life of a quality assurance engineer is full of bug reports like “I was typing and it crashed.” In other words, bug reports that any sensible person knows do not describe steps required to reproduce the bug, and so the bug (naturally) goes back on the heap in favor of actionable ones. I make no judgement about what you reported. Yours may have been crystal clear and 100% reproducible. Nonetheless, if the affected section of code were under review or being replaced, your painstaking report was, to be brutally honest, irrelevant.
The second most effective thing everyone can do to help improve the solidity of OS X is to get everyone you know who uses OS X to let OS X file crash reports. The “Ignore” button is there for privacy advocates, not people who want to see their OS of choice improve. The result of hitting that “Report…” button is that Apple is made aware of real customers being impacted by a crashing bug. There are thresholds, to be sure, but impact matters. And numbers (quantity of bug reports) are an aspect of impact.
As a developer now I still file bug reports knowing/hoping that they’ll get fixed and considering it a Milton-Bradley “Life” Bank-Error-In-Your-Favor Chance card event when a general OS bug I reported gets fixed. It’s worth a sip of beer in celebration, and a self-indulged moment of “I (even though it was thousands) who reported that!” What else are we to do?
OMG am I sick of this subject.
PEOPLE: Read what I write. These blether fest responses are not even relevant to my experience. Sheesh. Really annoying.
Wow Derek, you’re way out of line here. jt016 wrote a very excellent response as someone who knows what they’re talking about.
If you feel it’s not relevant to what your experience was, maybe it’s because what you wrote about it here was not exactly clear… actually far from it… how many different ways can you say both that the bug was fixed and not fixed at the same time? How can you say you were ignored but then complain about how they did respond to you?
jy016’s gives some very good and helpful advice that you’d rather insult than take. Ok, but again, this points out why you’re exactly the type of person who should be filtered out of any beta program.
And you aren’t reading the responses. So you’re doing exactly what you are accusing Apple of doing. Bug reports go directly to engineering teams after a short stop in developer relations. Just because they don’t send a lot of back and forth communictaino to you doesn’t mean they aren’t reading them. If they asked you for something you already gave, they likely made a mistake. They probably process tens of thousands of reports a day. Developer bugs are treated every bit the same as someone reporting a bug who works on the engineering team itself.
Worthless posts galore folks. Ask yourself why.
A side observation: Self-destructive people turn their destructive behavior outward at others. By far, the favorite way to abuse others is in GANG behavior. Find someone to abuse, find one person abusing them, then GANG UP in a mass orgy of abuse.
THAT is why you should ask yourself about your behavior. The above is the story of this thread. It doesn’t matter what I think of you, as you don’t care. But how to YOU feel about you, having perpetrated this thread?
Now move along and find someone else to abuse kiddies. I’m done with you.
So now you feel like you’re being abused? Look at the comments people have written. There’s no name calling or anything other than fairly calm and rational debate. You’re the one calling people idiots/kiddies. The comments from others are coming from at least two of us who’ve worked in development/beta programs trying to simply explain our perspective on what you wrote.
You made disparaging remarks against Apple, but you have yet to back anything up. You claimed they ignored your report, but yet they responded. You claim they didn’t read your report, but show no example of this. You claim they fixed the bug, but did not fix the bug, but fixed the bug, but did not fix the bug….
Again, if your comments here are any indication of what your feedback was in the beta program, you’re a great example of who should be filtered out.
But how to YOU feel about you, having perpetrated this thread?
How do you feel, having participated every step of the way? Look again at pluckytree’s comment and your replies. Which one offered constructive insight and which one was just emotional “abusive” ranting?
Forums like this can be frustrating, you can say something and since a+b=c when you say you reported a bug and later it was not there, people will assume they took it out. That is not a scientific line of reasoning. Correlation does not equal causation. Don’t get worked up about this though 🙂
PS: How about this: The tick box “notify…” is below the “post..” button. Been bugging me for a while now….
Thanks for your thoughts wpivar.
I’d comment further about Apple’s disconnect regarding this issue, but I think I’d only add confusion and inflammation in certain people’s minds. The summary is that we all would like at least some comprehension of the work we do for others for free.