About a year ago, I decided to give up reporting bugs to Apple. Like many others, I got fed up of them simply being ignored.
At WWDC in in June of 2021, I signed up for a SwiftUI lab, and showed the two Apple engineers a bug that had been annoying me. The bug is small enough to fit in a tweet:
struct ContentView: View {
@State var mode:Int = 0
var body: some View {
HStack(spacing:10) {
Button("Button A") {}
Button("Button B") {}
Picker(selection: $mode, label: EmptyView()) {
Text("1").tag(0)
Text("2").tag(1)
}
.pickerStyle(SegmentedPickerStyle())
}
}
}
That code should produce two buttons and a segmented picker.
However, if you run it on a Mac in Catalyst, without the ‘optimise for Mac’ option, then as soon as you click on Button A – the picker becomes completely unresponsive.
We poked about a bit, confirmed that it really was a bug, and dug into the root cause (the button is leaving a gesture recogniser in an incorrect state)
There was no fix – but the pair told me that I should definitely submit a bug report.
When I explained that I had given up on bug reports – they assured me that their team didn’t ignore reports.
They love simple reproducible cases like this, and I should absolutely submit.
Fool me twice
I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I went back to feedback reporter and found that I had actually reported this bug in December 2020. Nonetheless, I updated it to confirm that it was still broken on the latest OS and actually resubmitted under my company account with some discussion of the conversation I had at the lab.
The bug (FB8925084) includes the relevant code and a sample project.
The re-submission has never had any response at all.
My initial personal submission has the following history:
- 9/Feb – I confirm that it is broken in Monterey beta
- 2/July – Apple report that this is fixed in 11.3.1 (it isn’t)
- 3/July – I confirm it is not fixed. Still broken in 11.4 and latest Monterey beta
- 26/July – I confirm still broken in latest Monterey beta
- 12/Aug – I confirm still broken in Monterey beta 5
What now?
SwiftUI & Catalyst are important platforms. This bug is remarkably simple to trigger.
It feels like the kind of thing that Apple should care about.
I certainly care about it – the underlying problem of bad gesture handling causes a bunch of issues in one of my apps.
Clearly reporting bugs is a waste of time though. I guess we just have to wait until Apple hit this in one of their own apps and have cause to care.
Update 31 Aug
Stil broken in Beta 6 (reported)
Update 4th Sept from Apple:
“Your feedback is important to us”
Update October 2021
It looks like Apple have finally addressed this in a Monterey beta.
I commented earlier:
‘ I guess we just have to wait until Apple hit this in one of their own apps and have cause to care.’
And I suspect that is exactly what happened. The Shortcuts app in Monterey looks like it has been hitting this issue (or a related one).
I certainly don’t think my feedback helped to get things fixed. There has been no update to my report from Apple.