I thought the same, until I added automatic crash reporting to my app. It was a revelation: the app that I thought was very stable actually crashed all the time! But nobody told me about it!!! Customers apparently just restarted the app and ignored the crash, despite me offering free email support!
So, I really think some telemetry is needed to make reliable software. It should be anonymous, of course, and limited to things you need to know (eg. crashes or assertion failures) and not include things that don't help the customer (eg. usage statistics for market research are not ok in my opinion).
But if you collect no data at all, you'll never know of your customers issues.
It’s fine if it’s opt-in. Most developers simply assume consent, however, which has all of the normal problems that come along with assuming consent in any context (ie your assumption being wrong in a significant number of cases and the completely avoidable consent violations that occur thereby).
Apple has had anonymous crash reports for years. Unfortunately, they are close to useless, because you get reports only for a tiny fraction of crashes. I assume it's either because nobody opts in to share analytics with 3rd party developers, or because Apple is just incompetent and their tech doesn't work.
In any case, I received only a handful of crash reports from Apple. I thought everything was okay, except that customers occasionally reported an issue, but I never got a crash report from Apple that could explain the situation. Until I built my own reporting solution, which just sends a stack trace to my server in a signal handler. I started receiving dozens of crash reports per week.
So while on the one hand I applaud Apple for trying to do the right thing, as a developer I can only say that the crash reports they share with developers are so few they are close to useless.
Thank you for the link, this is interesting. It's nice Apple is apparently building support for custom crash reporting into the OS.
From a privacy perspective it sounds like it logs exactly the same info that I currently log with PLCrashReporter, except that it only works on macOS 12.
So, I really think some telemetry is needed to make reliable software. It should be anonymous, of course, and limited to things you need to know (eg. crashes or assertion failures) and not include things that don't help the customer (eg. usage statistics for market research are not ok in my opinion).
But if you collect no data at all, you'll never know of your customers issues.