I have a simple question to pose to you, how easy is it to submit a bug report for an iPhone app?

The correct answer is, of course, near damned impossible and its not just the developers fault. Currently Apple controls 100% of the app process bar the bits that are genuinely vital for a developer such as source control and issue tracking. Sure its easy to submit and sell an app on the store but that is only half the battle, the more important half is the one that follows after a user has purchased an app and it breaks. Sure there are crash reports but they only tell you when your app has crashed, if you have a more subtle bug that doesn’t cause a crash then your out of luck.

Under the current regime there is no official way for the user to directly interact with the developer and tell them that they messed up and something needs fixing. No instead the only way to report a bug for a lot of apps is to leave a bad review. Its bad enough that this has a negative effect on sales but the worst bit is that if the review is in a different App store to the developer, then they are quite honestly nearly impossible to retrieve from the iTunes Connect interface. Realising this I tried to improve on this and added a link to my issue tracker in the product description for And Next.

Hurrah I thought, I’ve now given the user an easier way to give me feedback, all the have to do is click on the link and fill in a new ticket.

But it turns out that the App store doesn’t allow hyperlinks in the product description. So instead of the nice and easy, click and it’ll take the user to the issue tracker, the user has ANOTHER step to complete, who wants to have to copy and paste a URL to do someone else a favour? Honestly as a user myself I’d think to myself “Balls to that”.

So what can be done to make it easier for users to report a bug?

The easiest way for Apple would to simply allow hyperlinks in the product description, a developer could then link their issue tracker of choice. Obviously this has a huge drawback in that it would be thoroughly abused by pretty much everyone.

The a slightly more complex way would be to have another button under “(App name here) Support” titled something like: “Report a bug” which would then be linked the developers issue tracker of choice. A simple enough thing for Apple to do and isn’t really open to that much abuse.

The third and most complex implementation for Apple would be to have the same “Report a bug” button but rather than link you to somewhere have a form for the user to fill out that is then emailed to the user (or added to an Apple issue tracker), the advantage of this is that it is Apple ‘blessed’ and would more likely get more people submitting reports.