Ex-Apple engineer built an automated Siri-testing app on the side, turning a QA job into an engineering career
jdluk87 · x · 2026-10-11
A former Apple engineer explains how he took matters into his own hands — Apple has no Google-style 20% time, so he used his own:
- First he built a one-tap bug reporting tool that the whole company used daily worldwide
- Then he went further and built an app that tested Siri automatically: waking the device, triggering Siri, injecting audio to test the speech recognition pipeline, waiting for responses, and reading the screen to verify the output
- All of this was before XCTest, before Swift testing — before Swift even existed
His takeaway: "you can just do things." Two weeks of side work turned a QA job into an engineering career.
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