Is it possible to view bugs submitted by others to Apple's bug reporter?

Engineering has determined that your bug report is a duplicate of another issue and will be closed.

This is a message I see quite often these days at http://bugreport.apple.com and it is frustrating for several reasons:

• you submitted a bug for nothing without the possibility to check the database first
• you can't check if it is truly a duplicate
• there is no follow-up on your issue
• you'll never know if they are fixing the bug

I can't believe that these major disadvantages are on purpose.

So: Is it possible to view bugs submitted by others to Apple's bug reporter?

It is not possible. But there is a website called OpenRadar where the community files the same bugs as in Apple's bug reporter.

It's supposed (never confirmed) that Apple analyses all bugs and solves the ones with more duplicates. In that way, people report again and again the same bugs on Apple's Bugreport in order to speed up the process.

So, if you want a bug to be solved asap, file your bug report, duplicate in open radar and then share that radar to as many people as you know.

It is currently impossible. Only Apple employees with special permissions can access the full Radar database. 3rd parties (such as registered developers, integrators, resellers and others) can only access entries they created in the BugReport system.

One specifically annoying consequence is this: Many Apple code samples contain workarounds for old radar bugs with references to those bugs (e.g. CFProxySupportTool sample project contains workarounds for rdar://problem/5530166 and rdar://problem/5533931)

However, when using older sample such as this, It is impossible to know when is it safe to remove those workarounds - because you can't know if the specific bug was resolved in some OS version.