Apple touts a lot of things—vertical integration, interface design, the longevity of its hardware, the direct-to-consumer retail experience, and more—as part of the reason for its success. But there’s a fractured, bureaucratic, resource-constrained version of Apple, and it’s one we’ve been seeing more and more often. One Apple-designed app will do things their way, another app or piece of hardware will be stranded for years, bug reports disappear into an uncaring void, settings and warning dialogs get out of hand, notification spam goes out of control… the list goes on.
The people with the power to move mountains and get things done are at the top, but if a matter doesn’t arise to their attention—either by being something they’ve personally experienced, or were told about by a similarly influential person—then the matter is more likely than not to remain unresolved.
We need some people who can manage from the bottom up. Who can talk to developers directly about App Store issues. Whose responsibilities are the interrelated aspects of customer experience, not just the UX of a single product.
Decades ago, Apple changed its relationship with the community with Apple Evangelists. Maybe it’s time to do so again with a team of Apple Ombudspeople?
Ombudsdev
Apple’s behavior is frequently all over the place, contradictory and confused. It needs someone to smooth all this stuff out before it becomes a problem.
Take Apple’s recent back and forth with Epic Games in the EU: Epic applied to have a developer account and create an app marketplace in the EU, and were granted that. Then an executive found out about it and killed it. But then, after some saber rattling by European regulators, Apple had to reverse course. (Chapter two, ongoing: Some ridiculous stuff about button design.) Sure, Tim Sweeney and Epic have had a contentious relationship with Apple and some Apple pundits feel like it’s worth punishing them, but it really isn’t. Apple risks further regulatory action because of poor decision-making that is going unchallenged inside the company.
AltStore developer Riley Testut—who I think we can all agree has been a peach during the entire process of setting up his marketplace in the EU—faced a protracted review process. Meanwhile, Apple cooked up new App Store policies to permit “retro game console emulators,” presumably to diminish the launch of Testut’s Delta emulator on AltStore. Resilient Riley launched it in the App Store and AltStore. Then Apple just rejected an update to his emulator in the App Store because of the whims of App Review. This will surely be reversed, eventually, but why did it happen to begin with?
Where is the person inside of Apple who can look out for someone like Riley Testut and institute policies that prevent it from happening? Will anyone inside Apple ever define why a retro game console emulator is different from a retro computer emulator, and communicate it? Who can push inside Apple to keep the notarization system from being abused, and prevent Apple from coming across as a whimsical tyrant?
It’s called self-regulation, which is the best and safest kind of regulation, because it reduces the number of times Apple must spar with governments, the press, and its own developers.
Cross-device cross-purposes
Apple famously isn’t aligned around product lines, which is part of the whole “secret sauce” of Apple product development. Except it sometimes seems that nobody is asking the big questions about how Apple’s products interoperate. Do Apple products need their own internal ombudspeople?
Take Siri, which is due for big changes later this year, or maybe sometime next year. In some devices, anyway. What happens when you ask Siri to do something on this device? That one? What improvements will be made to the current Siri that’s going to still be in use for years and years to come?
This question can go to the heart of the user experience, and reflect Apple design decisions in unexpected ways. Sometimes there are dramatic issues with syncing data between Apple devices, and then other times there are the everyday inconveniences. Apple Intelligence relies on personal information compiled in the new semantic index, but (for example) Spotlight can’t index files that aren’t stored locally. Apple recommends people let macOS manage what files are on their Mac, but the potential side effect is that your Mac’s AI features will be cursed with swiss cheese memory if you follow Apple’s instructions.
Who is clearing their throat in the conference room and making sure everyone’s on the same page? And are they able to convey these decisions to the side of Apple that’s determining the base amount of storage space available on next year’s laptops?
Who supplies the balance?
It’s easy to look at some of Apple’s interface decisions on the Mac in the last few years and imagine that the teams that focus on security and privacy have run roughshod over everyone who cares about providing good user experience.
It’s not the job of the security boffins to worry about balancing security with user experience. They’re thinking about making sure the user is safe, and that’s a fine role. But it has to be counterbalanced by larger considerations, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone is empowered to do that right now. If nobody’s got that kind of clout, maybe there’s room for an ombusperson who is empowered to pushing back on onerous features that train people to thoughtlessly approve or dismiss security warnings, thereby making things less secure.
Theoretically, executives should be concerned with these things—but I suspect they lack the bottom-up perspective required.
This ‘buds for you
Everything is complicated, which is why it helps to have people inside Apple who are empowered to think critically about the overall Apple product experience. High overall Customer Satisfaction scores are great, but they don’t exactly find the pain points—nor does an iPhone survey root out a frustration with something on the Apple TV. And it’s easy to miss larger trends over time.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow to have an employee of your company point out all the ways something falls short when they don’t put in the time to work on it. But if that bitter pill is good medicine and it makes you better, you swallow the pill.
I guess I’m the doctor in this metaphor. Here’s my prescription, Apple: You need more people on the inside who can see the big picture and intervene before critical mistakes are made. The more the better.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist, writer, and co-host of the Defocused and Unhelpful Suggestions podcasts.]
