I think part of the issue is it isn't even clear to developers when (or if) the issue is fixed.
It seems that there is firstly no reason or clarification given. Then, it seems the process of reviewing an update can happen out of phase or sync.
That means there's a very weak "compliance oracle" to see if you've correctly identified the right issue or not. And with high latency, likely it will be difficult to find the right issue quickly.
Disabling everything isn't really a good solution in the longer term as a developer - Google needs to learn to communicate with developers via intelligent humans that actually understand what they're doing, and can have a discussion and help get the issue addressed.
The worst problem here is one of PR. Google should at least pay some nice friendly intern to sit down and go through each bug and write a "Thanks for reporting this, we appreciate your time and I'll try and get the right person to look at it" type comment, with periodic, "Sorry there's been no progress on this, we're really busy as you can understand" - totally meaningless, but costs almost nothing and completely changes the feel of the discussion. Obviously they should do much better, but a token PR effort would be a nice minimum.
I mean, you're wrong... it clearly worked out for them so far and it only took seven weeks to fix this issue. It's taken longer to ship completed commits at Google than that.
Google does give a lot of love to developers. AFAIK, they have dedicated developer teams for developer relations; just look at the quality of their API documentations and support. This one looks like a operations issue. Perhaps they do not have a corresponding relations team focused on operations support.
What's really terrible here is that Google are saying they won't fix this until their regularly scheduled January release.
SERIOUSLY..... They won't rush a fix out for this? Not even for this??? Unbelievable.
Can't blame Google if they are trying to be publicly mourful and trying to get mileage out of it. Tow birds in one stone: time to fix those last bugs and also get good press for the delay. Well played.
The support library regresssions, oh god, this +1000000. It appears that the prevailing attitude is release first, then maybe fix based on developer complaints.
Then there is the mess of manufacturer bugs, but that isn't strictly google's fault.
Yep, Google's communication was pretty unclear, but the developer is being repeatedly called out for the same underlying problem which they haven't addressed at all.
Exactly. Even the most trivial of bugs can't be fixed as quickly as Google would need it to be fixed for that to be their go-to strategy. You simply cannot use that as your response to a show-stopping bug if you have stringent up-time requirements.
I don't remember of Google providing a PR response to any moderately controversial mistake they made.
They most likely don't have anyone to speak for the company except on bigger issues. Even their product forums are staffed with "community experts" who no one knows if they're Google, community or a 3rd party service and no one with enough authority and knowledge to properly manage things.
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