Hello, and welcome to Apple's 2021 summer beta! Whether this is your first year participating, or you're a long-time veteran of our beta programs, we look forward to your feedback on the next major releases of software for our platforms: iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, tvOS 15, and macOS Monterey. As always, feedback from our beta program participants makes a huge difference in improving the quality of our software. We're glad to have you aboard!
In the coming weeks, we'll be checking in periodically with additional newsletters like this one, on a range of feedback-related topics such as:
What exactly is a system diagnostics log? How can I capture just the right information about the new features I am trying? What are configuration profiles and how do they improve my feedback? How do I install (and remove) one? How can I provide more information about feedback that I've already submitted, and how can I find out more about what is happening with it? When my feedback involves more than one of my devices, how can I quickly get log files and other attachments from all of them? For now, we'd like to share with you a few tips on how to make the feedback that you send to us the best that it can be.
When and how to submit feedback
File whenever you encounter a problem. If something you have used in the past doesn't seem to be working now, or a new feature doesn't seem to behave the way you thought it would, or you're finding that apps are quitting unexpectedly ("crashing") or becoming unresponsive ("hanging") or simply running too slow to be useable anymore, that's a problem!
Start your feedback as soon as you can. The Feedback Assistant app collects time-sensitive logging when you start a new feedback, so it can help if you start your feedback report close to when you saw the problem. You can always start and save your draft immediately, then finish and submit later.
Protip: If you can tell us, in your feedback, when the problem happened, it will help us pinpoint, in the log files, what was happening on your device at the time. If you can tell us the date and time it occurred, that's great, but even an estimate of how many minutes or hours before you started writing your feedback will help tremendously.
Give your feedback a clear and specific title. If you had to describe the thing that went wrong in a single sentence, what would it be? You'll have a chance to go into more detail in the description, but a title that quickly tells the story really helps us know what kind of investigation is going to be appropriate.
"Cannot download attachments from Mail messages"
"Safari quits unexpectedly when loading front page of apple.com"
"AirDrop on my iPhone no longer sees my iMac"
Provide as much detail as you can in the description. What were you doing before the problem occurred? What were you expecting would happen, and how did the problem differ from your expectations? Have you seen the problem occur more than once? Are you able to make the problem happen every time? (We call that "reproducing" the problem.) What are the shortest or simplest set of setups you have to go through to make it happen?
Protip: Depending on which area (feature or app) you select while composing your feedback, we may ask a few more questions to get even more specific information about the problem.
Consider screenshots and screen recordings as a way to show as well as tell. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Screenshots and recordings can be very helpful for understanding a bug when there are many different words you could use to describe a symptom you are seeing or set of steps that you are going through. Detailed descriptions of how to capture screenshots and screen recordings are available on our support pages:
Screenshots on iOS and iPadOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT200289
Screen recordings on iOS and iPadOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207935
Screenshots on macOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201361
Screen recordings on macOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721
Screenshots on watchOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204673
Include all of the relevant file information that is needed. Depending on which features of the OS you are sending feedback about, there may be additional, specific logs or files that we ask for. When using Feedback Assistant on iOS or iPadOS, before you hit "Submit", if you see a "Gather" link in the File Uploads section of your feedback, click on it to include additional logs that are relevant to the type of feedback you are reporting. Using Feedback Assistant on macOS, before you hit "Submit", if you see items in red in the File Uploads section of your feedback, click "Previous" to return to the Attach Files page and then, for each greyed-out item that remains, click on the question mark to see how to gather that information.
Make sure the information you want to submit is uploaded. Once you hit "Submit", your feedback and any files or logging you've collected will begin uploading. This can take some time, depending on your network connection and the amount of information, but it should continue with uploading in the background as long as your device is awake and connected to the Internet.
That's it for now! Thank you for participating this summer. We look forward to your feedback.