I know, personally, I have an Android app that gets about 12k new users a month, and I see exceptions reported all the time that I can't reproduce from the buggy as hell WebView, web content control, in Android. Especially when used with AdMob/Google ads, so much so that I use other advertisers instead. I could spend a week copying the source code for WebView into my app and fixing all the bugs if I'm lucky, it may use some private things I preventing it from being copied or something. I know it has threads and databases and all sorts of bizarre stuff. But still that would help like just a tiny, small percentage of the actual users. I'll get far more users working on something that applies to everyone like better graphics or multiplayer play, etc..
I did spend all weekend filing hideously long bug reports with sample code at work, though. So once you are talking about millions of users, it can make more sense, I guess. Which I suppose is where someone from Microsoft is coming from. They are famous for supporting even old bugs in their software for things like SimCity so it wouldn't break across upgrades.
I guess the Simcity example was from years ago. I don't know whether or not culture has changed it that time.
This was also a time when there were comparatively less apps and games available on the PC, or at least ones that were widely used. So it was probably practical for them to test their new OS with just about everything on the market.
Now, however there's no way in hell it's possible from MS to go through and test everything that every ISV produces with Windows 8 for example.
I know, personally, I have an Android app that gets about 12k new users a month, and I see exceptions reported all the time that I can't reproduce from the buggy as hell WebView, web content control, in Android. Especially when used with AdMob/Google ads, so much so that I use other advertisers instead. I could spend a week copying the source code for WebView into my app and fixing all the bugs if I'm lucky, it may use some private things I preventing it from being copied or something. I know it has threads and databases and all sorts of bizarre stuff. But still that would help like just a tiny, small percentage of the actual users. I'll get far more users working on something that applies to everyone like better graphics or multiplayer play, etc..
I did spend all weekend filing hideously long bug reports with sample code at work, though. So once you are talking about millions of users, it can make more sense, I guess. Which I suppose is where someone from Microsoft is coming from. They are famous for supporting even old bugs in their software for things like SimCity so it wouldn't break across upgrades.