Apple and the threat of sacrificing user experience

Apple is not a hardware company. Neither it is a software company. And most definitely it is not a services company. Apple is the combination of all these. Apple is a user experience company — and the best in the world at that. Everything Apple makes and focuses on — starting with retail experience and packaging, through the joy of using a product, to support and longevity — is about the user experience. Apple controls the whole widget, and this is the primary reason Apple is such a behemoth these days. Most of Apple’s competitors are just not positioned well enough to compete, as they do not have skills, resources and customer loyalty to match the customer satisfaction rates Apple’s products command — which means if there is a company that can threaten Apple’s market dominance, that company would be Apple itself. There will be problems for the Cupertino company only if it stops focusing 100 percent of its attention on the user experience and on controlling the user, chasing the profits and market share instead.

And that is why the recent trends and changes in Apple’s approach to its products over the last couple of years — particularly the year 2015 — is very alarming to me. And it seems that I’m not the only one who is worried.

The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, who has become somewhat unfairly critical towards Apple over the last months, wrapped up the last year with a very reasonable article about Apple that has spent the year 2015 in beta — in a sense that many products the company released last year felt if not rushed to the market, then definitely unfinished. Apple Watch was launched with a somewhat clunky watchOS 1.0 and lackluster apps support (one even might ask if Apple needed to launch the Watch with half-baked apps support at all instead of focusing on polished and easy-to-use minimally viable product); iPad Pro severely lacked broader hardware keyboard support and a lot of productivity-focused features; Apple TV did not ship with a proper tool to easily sign in to multiple apps and services (and for some time it worked with no support from iOS Remote Control app which made the whole experience very depressing); and iOS 9 was widely criticized for some rough performance and numerous bugs.

Ben Thomspon, in his post summarizing the year for the biggest five tech companies, particularly focused on Apple and marked two biggest worrying factors for Apple going forward:

• Apple’s products are not working well enough in too many instances, which is clearly a negative trend;
• The future success of the product categories Apple operates in (including smartphones, tablets, and especially wearables) increasingly and critically depends on cloud and Internet services which have not been historically Apple’s strength.

If you think about both of these points (and I completely agree with Ben on both of these), they are about Apple slowly but steadily losing their grip and control of the user experience — which is the absolute core of Apple’s business and leverage over customers and partners.

Degrading quality of Apple’s products

The tune of Apple losing its functional high ground has been playing for quite some time now (and some long-time observers have been quite vocal in stating that there were people complaining about Apple products, particularly software, for decades now, which is true), but even considering the rapid distribution of the Internet and thus the increasing number of people who complain, the numerous anecdotal evidence I have — including my own experience — point to the fact that Apple’s software has definitely and undeniably taken several hits over the last couple of major releases. I live in Russia and use Cyrillic keyboard on my iPhone, as all of my peers, and it has taken Apple a few months to fix the horrendous caps lock bug that made typing on iPhone a frustratingly irritating experience — and everyone, from regular customers to local music stars to politicians using iPhones, did not miss their chance to mock iPhone for this bug on social networks in Russia, resulting in some quite bad PR for the product. Stories of iOS 9 crashing devices or behaving weirdly all the time flooded the Internet — and particularly in Russia, where a lot of people are still using older iPhone models which are particularly struggling with clearly half-baked iOS 9 support.

There have been lots of other instances as well. One of OS X El Capitan point releases broke my Finder directories links to a point of it being barely usable until I reboot my Mac; and even the default Preview app now fails to open PDFs half of the time. Stock Apple apps behave weirdly from time to time, and I can’t remember the last time my iPod touch properly synced its reminders with iCloud before I forced syncing by adding and removing placeholder bits of info into it.

But perhaps the most glaring example of Apple’s piece of software not being up to company’s own high standards this year was Apple Music. Loyal Apple blogger Jim Dalrymple was so furious, he wrote a devastatingly critical article about it, and still keeps mocking Apple Music in his Twitter feed almost on a daily basis. Another long-time Apple’s supporter John Gruber was very vocal about iOS 9 just not being cooked well enough for iPad Pro release — particularly when it comes to keyboard shortcut support. These are not random people complaining — these are the respected, widely-quoted people who understand Apple and are the most loyal to Apple.

Some of these examples show that Apple has clearly spread itself too thin and just didn’t have enough resources to polish and test the products well enough — which is mind blowing in itself given that user experience, reliability and stability — at least in my mind — should be Apple’s top priority, not shipping software on a long-ago decided date no matter how rough it might be. But sometimes, it almost feels like Apple deliberately wishes to raise a lot of eyebrows and trolls customers — just take a look at the new Magic Mouse 2 that requires to be put upside down on the back to be charged. Apple Pencil that needs to be awkwardly sticking off the iPad Pro while charging is also a questionable aesthetic design choice at best, and the recent iPhone Smart Battery Case, that looks somewhat ugly, also generated a lot of well-deserved negativity. Did Apple really put these products through the regular thought process (remember, “there is a hundred nos for every yes”) that it takes pride in?

To be fair, there are million reasons why this happens. Apple currently competes in a world where there is so much going on, it is almost impossible to focus on making just a few things — unless the company wants to get irrelevant too soon. The smartphones are still ruling the world, but there is the whole broader aspect of mobile computing and penetrating the professional segment and enterprise; the TV is about to be revolutionized with new content delivery mechanisms and distribution models; the wearables are gaining traction; the personal transportation is ripe for disruption and total rethinking; the Internet of things is the next big thing in tech; and there is the whole content widget (music, TV, news) that needs to be controlled. Apple needs to compete in all of these markets, and more, to stay ahead of the pack — compare this to just 10 or 15 years ago when all Apple did was Mac and iPod hardware and software. No wonder Apple is spreading focus — they have a limited number of people working on so many things now, and they would have been clearly doomed if they hadn’t! Considering the number of products (both hardware and software) and services Apple launched or maintained just this last year, the fact that the overall quality of them has just slightly decreased, in all fairness, should be praised, not negatively nit-picked.

But still, the problem remains. Regular Apple customer can’t be bothered with all these explanations and excuses mentioned above. For a regular customer, every time when his or her iPhone or iPad fails to call up a keyboard in Pages when there is a text to be edited, is a frustration that didn’t exist just a couple of iOS versions ago. When iPhone 6s Plus behaves weirdly when one wants to rotate the screen from landscape to portrait, this is an irritation. And nothing can harm the user experience more then if a customer can’t log into iCloud when activating a new iPhone, or back up his or her data due to some software bug.

For many years, customers preferred Mac, iPhone and iPad over Windows and Android products because they were significantly more reliable, stable and easy to use. Over the last few years, Apple’s products have lost a lot of that appeal, and the competitors have almost caught up. In a war for premium user experience, Apple starts to lose ground.

The future is services — and probably not Apple’s

The Internet and cloud services is arguably even more important problem for Apple, than the degrading products quality — after all, the quality can be increased if Apple keeps ramping up the headcount, will invest even more in QA and would not be afraid to sacrifice the software release deadlines in favor of polishing stuff. The services, however, is the much bigger problem that can’t be easily solved — it is based on Apple historically being aligned and built around creating hardware and software products released one at a time, not a constant iteration, embracing cross-platform and overall openness culture that is required for any service maker to be truly successful.

I have described (in Russian) in detail why the services future is so challenging for Apple — the whole nature of a good service is that as many customers as possible use it across different platforms — not only because only in this setup a service has a chance to become a de-facto default solution for people communicating with peers using products on different platforms, but also because the more customers a cloud service has, the more user data it has to analyze, and thus, the better it will become over time. Apple’s services have none of these advantages. Instead (with the exception of Apple Music), Apple’s services are explicitly tied to Apple’s platforms, which makes them second-class citizens to cross-platform analogues, made by key competitors (Safari is not an option for people using iPhone with Windows PCs — those people use Chrome instead; iMessage has little meaning for people whose friends and family use Android smartphones — WhatsApp is a much better option; and fewer people use iCloud syncing and data sharing capabilities because Google services and Dropbox are better cross-platform solutions). That wouldn’t have been a big problem, however, if Apple’s services (just like Apple’s software) were clearly better than the cross-platform competitors — but they are not. iMessage is still a syncing mess, iCloud Drive is half-baked and got even worse on El Capitan and iOS 9, and Apple Photos occasionally corrupts images or has trouble syncing them across devices. There are few reasons why one would choose Apple’s Internet services over Google’s or Microsoft’s even if one uses Apple’s hardware products exclusively — to me, this should ring a huge alarm bell.

But what is even more alarming, it seems that instead of Apple acknowledging the issue and working tirelessly to catch up, executives in Cupertino are further locking themselves off the cloud future by taking an aggressive stance against data mining and machine learning — which Google, Microsoft and Facebook are embracing like crazy. It almost sounds like Apple appreciates that it can’t do cloud services well, and tries to find the reasons why it should not — but who will benefit?

We are increasingly living in the world where user experience is defined not by the hardware product one uses, or the operating system, but by the set of apps and services — and if Apple doesn’t want to be the key player in this space, offering the better products, how exactly does it want to keep controlling said user experience? And to be super-clear, I absolutely believe that software and services just can’t be smart enough and surprise and delight customers if they do not study users and mine their data. Exactly because of this data research and machine learning capabilities, Google Photos can smartly search content in a way Apple Photos can’t. Just imagine how the gap will widen in a year or two; and it will widen not only in photos, but in the entire stack of services and software products — from smart calendars and reminders to the devices being really useful virtual assistants, predicting your wishes and making meaningful suggestions. Siri has not exactly vastly improved in this area, unlike Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana and Facebook M — and I can’t see how it will if Apple doesn’t change its data collection policies soon and would not fully embrace the cloud. (Let’s assume Apple can do it despite cultural alignments and restrictions mentioned above, even if it wants to.)

Ask yourself a simple question. If, a couple of years from now, you are choosing a smartphone, and the two options would be a) an iPhone with very limited cloud services support, but with a 3D Touch feature; and b) an Android phone with no 3D Touch, but massively powerful and smart Google Now that can recommend you the best places your friends enjoy to dine in, the best route to take to work tomorrow to make sure you meet your pal on your way, and would automatically recognize the people and objects on your photos — which device would you pick? I’m quite confident that in a world where user experience is defined by services, Apple’s devices would offer less and less “magic” and productivity, and people would be choosing alternatives, barely paying attention to privacy concerns. (Whether this is a bad thing for privacy and the world in general, is a matter of a separate discussion.)

Sure, Google services are available for iPhone users, so why exactly is that future a concern for Apple? For several reasons. First, if Apple keeps limiting software capabilities due to privacy issues, most of Google’s services’ key features based on data mining would be limited or unavailable for iPhone users — thus Apple’s customers would have to deal with crippled user experience. Second, Apple already was in a position once when it totally depended on third parties, and a very competing third party (I’m of course referring to Microsoft and Office in the darkest days of Macintosh), and it was in such a bad state that scared-to-death Apple then invested a lot of resources to make sure it would never happen again. But if Apple would now fully depend on another competing third party, Google, when it comes to Internet services, what would be the difference? For the company which business is fully based on controlling the user experience, such a disposition is just not acceptable.