Apple keeps improving everything, but major strategic shifts are nowhere to be seen
WWDC 18 Keynote didn’t leave a very good taste in my mouth. On the surface, Apple introduced a big number of really great improvements across the board that will make it even easier and more efficient to use their products. I’m particularly pleased with the fact that Apple, very much to my biggest desire, focused a lot on first party apps and services that would further differentiate their operating systems — something that I badly wanted them to do this year. However, across all of the improvements and changes, there was one thing that was missing from the announcements and direction Apple is taking, and it is the clear vision of Apple in the world of cloud-first platforms and services, and ambient computing paradigm. While Microsoft and Google shown some impressive progress in these areas earlier this year, Apple keeps doubling down on hardware-first, apps-first, on-device paradigm, and paints the world in which cloud data processing and the web take secondary roles (this is especially apparent if you analyse what Apple did with Siri Shortcuts). Perhaps the most technically interesting announcement Apple made was future support of UIKit apps on the Mac, which is, essentially, Apple’s way of bringing apps from one mature classic OS platform to another — not exactly the most strategically forward-looking thing.
If Apple is indeed well positioned to leverage cloud and transition to a world where traditional operating systems are increasingly commoditised, signs of this are nowhere to be seen, and this gets concerning.
Another big concern which was not addressed is Apple’s on-going inability to multitask and focus on many things at once, which is apparently rooted in Apple’s functional organisational structure. Scaling issues is something that I mention a lot in the notes below.
Here are some key thoughts I have following the Keynote address and State of the Union:
Order of OSes — It’s interesting that, unlike previously, Apple didn’t move iOS to the end of the keynote as the headlining OS, but instead opened the show with it. In hindsight, it makes sense, since in iOS 12, Apple presented some features and apps that were later in the keynote unveiled for macOS Mojave, and it would make no sense if the order was the other way around — but the first thought I had was “Okay, is iOS update really that minor this year so that they decided to open the keynote with it?”
iOS 12
Customer Satisfaction is at 95% — I’m very curious how Apple is measuring this metric. To my knowledge this is the first time Apple reports customer satisfaction for their operating system — sounds like it was a reactive move against the narrative of “iOS getting slower and less reliable”. Anecdotally, the higher customer satisfaction numbers Apple reports for various products, the more I see people around me getting increasingly frustrated with these products.
Focus on older devices and performance — this is a great move which has been overdue. It’s clear that Apple’s business is not about pushing you to get a new device every year or two — the company is fine if you cling to your device for many years (and better yet, keep paying Apple for services), but would then certainly upgrade to a new Apple device when the time comes. The only way to ensure this is to keep customers happy with their older devices and invest into customer engagement and retention. Apple is doing exactly that with iOS 12, and it’s smart. However, optimisation for older hardware should be a constant never-ending priority for Apple’s software teams, not just a feature of a certain major iOS release, and it should be a big concern with Apple’s software development processes if this is not the case.
AR — I’m still struggling to see really useful real life applications of AR without the use of dedicated hardware such as smart glasses. Nobody will be playing AR-based games while holding heavy iPads in their arms for long periods of time, and most of the educational and general purpose ARKit-enabled apps I’ve seen could be equally functional with no AR support at all. We are clearly in the very early days of the technology in search of both a “killer app” and a proper hardware product form factor. I’m not sure that the newly introduced USDZ file format will get a significant traction, unless it becomes a universally adopted cross-platform solution.
Doubling down on first party apps — something I really hoped Apple would do, and I’m happy they are moving forward with this approach of further differentiating their operating systems with exclusive apps. Measure app might feel like a toy, but in reality it will be a very handy tool, used by millions. Apple Books has finally received some treatment and got an App Store-like design overhaul, which is great (it’s also great that Apple renews its commitment to digital books business). FaceTime has finally received a major update with group calls.
Scaling is still a problem — one app, however, didn’t receive a long overdue update many people wanted — Apple News is still, after all these years, is available in only three launch countries. Compared to Google News that is launching now in 100+ countries, this is just plain sad. It’s very difficult to take Apple’s services ambitions seriously if the company can’t scale one of its core services even to a handful of regions. It appears that scaling remains a core processual and structural problem for Apple, and it gets increasingly more painful compared to competing companies that can walk and chew at the same time.
Apple Photos — on the surface, the new Photos improvements look great and is exactly what I wanted in order for Apple to remain feature-competitive with an increasingly impressive Google Photos. However, my trust with Apple’s ability in constantly improving and iterating their services is gone. Since launched in 2014 with iOS 8, Apple Photos has received very minor updates, and even its face and object recognition functionality and search, which was inferior to Google’s technology even when it launched in 2015, has seemingly received zero meaningful improvements. Great that Apple finally put an effort in Photos again, but how many years will we have to wait till the next improvement in Apple’s computer vision algorithms applied to their Photos app? In the meantime, Google iterates on their service constantly, and object recognition algorithm gets better all the time due to cloud machine learning and data processing — something that Apple is still not doing after all these years. Also, Google Photos exists as a sleek web app — way better user experience than Apple’s Photos in iCloud.
Siri Shortcuts — to me, this is the most questionable announcement Apple has made this week. On one hand, using Workflow and repurposing it for scripted Siri actions is smart and sounds like a great improvement to Siri’s usability and functionality. However, the ability to “hack” Siri with teaching it custom phrases feels like a substitute for real advancements in the assistant’s intelligence — instead of putting the investment focus into Siri knowing more about the world around, Apple is basically delegating the process of teaching Siri cool new things to the users. Instead of making Siri a cloud-based platform which would be device- and OS-agnostic, Apple makes it even more entrenched into different OS silos and local on-device apps (if I set up a certain shortcut on my iPhone and set a trigger phrase to it, will Siri on my Mac or Apple TV understand me when I use that phrase there? I’m not sure). Finally, I feel that vast majority of “normal” iOS users would never bother with custom Shortcuts and trigger words, which makes this feature focused on power users. With Siri Shortcuts in particular, Apple is fighting the cloud future instead of embracing it, and I couldn’t be more concerned with this approach.
Do not disturb — features in iOS 12 that focus on users being less distracted and anxious with their devices is important. In the digital world, companies should take responsibility for protecting their customers well-being and making sure their products enrich and enhance people’s lives, not take away from them — it’s great to see that Apple and Google are both making advancements here.
Memoji — a great advancement of the technology that will delight millions of people around the world. Memoji screams for the functionality of automatic setup of your virtual avatar based on your face recognition — manually building your own memoji feels very ancient.
iPad — there were close to zero iPad-specific iOS improvements introduced this year. If Apple is serious about making iPad a next-generation general computing platform and wants to convince both their customers and developers that iPad is a serious deal, it should refine iPad software constantly. Again, scaling remains a problem for Apple. How many years should we wait until the next big leap in iPad’s software?
watchOS 5
Fitness improvements — very useful across the board. Apple Watch is increasingly running away with the fitness-tracking and health-related features compared to the rest of the market, and Apple’s focus here is logical.
Walkie-talkie — first announced for the very first version of watchOS, it finally arrives in watchOS 5. I can see myself using walkie-talkie all the time, and it’s one of those little software features that can drive hardware sales (another reason for everyone in your family to wear Apple Watches).
Siri watchface improvements — Apple clearly sees how Siri watchface is becoming the primary output interface on Apple Watch for many users. This is a prime example of what smart watches can be — intelligent, proactive and helpful assistants to your daily life. I use Siri watchface all the time, and using any other watchfaces feels boring and stale in comparison. Having the ability to use Siri Shortcuts from the Watch is great.
WebKit on watchOS — this was unexpected and is kind of a big deal. While obviously Apple doesn’t want a full-featured web browser to run on a Watch (who wants that?), having an ability to glance into the web content will be helpful and could potentially open doors for some new categories of apps.
Podcasts — thanks God! The only reason I’m listening to music instead of podcasts now when I’m doing my outdoor exercise is because there has been no Podacst app on watchOS until now.
Apple Watch is so ahead of the competition, nobody is even close — this is the overall impression that watchOS 5 presentation simply reinforced. There is no real smart watch market anymore — there is only Apple Watch market.
tvOS 12
Eddie Cue was nowhere to be seen during the keynote — previously, it was Eddie who was doing tvOS-related updates on WWDC. Is Eddie no longer overseeing the Apple TV product? Is he now solely focusing on Apple’s content business? Or did Apple just decide to invite a new face to its keynote?
Good progress on content — while it doesn’t feel like Apple is breaking any speed limits, its pace of adding new content and introducing new ways of using Apple TV is solid. However, scaling is an issue with Apple TV specifically — outside of the US, content available on tvOS is still not that impressive, and tvOS App Store is a ghost town.
Apple is still ignoring games — Apple spectacularly shot itself in the foot when it introduced tvOS with severe software limitations and requirement for supporting Siri Remote. Having now completely failed to leverage Apple TV as a meaningful gaming platform, Apple is apparently not even trying anymore, which gets increasingly frustrating as gaming becomes an ever bigger force in worldwide entertainment business, let alone big screen entertainment.
macOS Mojave
Dark Mode — a fantastic addition to macOS, which immediately makes it look way more modern. macOS has started to feel somewhat boring and dated recently compared to Windows 10, and it’s great to see Apple moving the needle here. However, in order for third parties to properly adopt the Dark Mode, developers would need to put some effort, and I’m fairly certain that lots of third party apps, especially older ones, will ignore the Dark Mode, which will result in the OS looking awkward and sloppy.
Finder — super useful improvements across the board, all of which are great examples of why macOS is such a delight to use. Apple is also integrating certain Finder-related features with Touch Bar. Apparently Touch Bar is still alive! (Which is great, as I love the Touch Bar concept and I think it is very smart and forward-looking.)
Continuity — great to see Apple leveraging their ecosystem play here. I’m using my iPhone camera all the time to take pictures and scans of documents I would then use on my Mac, and it’s great that this process will be even more streamlined in Mojave.
Focus on first party apps — as with iOS 12, I’m happy to see Apple finally putting focus on their own apps. While I’m not sure that Stocks or Voice Memo would be super useful on the Mac, it’s a good start.
Apple continues its fight with ads — new Safari features improve security and privacy of browsing the web and are very bad news for ad tech industry. At this point I wonder what Apple hates more — is it web advertisement or cloud data processing?
App Store redesign is overdue, but the problem with Mac App Store is not design — none of the third party apps that left Mac App Store in recent years did so because of the dated design. Seeing many of them returning now, one wonders what exactly made them do so, and for how long will they stay? There are talks of Mac App Store changes when it comes to sandboxing, and apparently free trials can also be implemented via newly-supported subscriptions mechanism. Will these new features, as well as Apple’s new focus on app discovery, be enough for developers to share 30% of their revenues with Apple? As much as I love Mac App Store and would love it to thrive, I’m not confident in its long-term success. And again, there is a great chance that having launched the new Mac App Store, Apple will go into a full ignore and zero improvements mode for many years, as it did previously, which doesn’t exactly builds trust and confidence on developers’ behalf. Scaling issues again!
Tightening the screws on non-MAS apps security — as introduced during the State of the Union keynote, Apple will now require apps distributed outside of Mac App Store and signed with Developer ID to undergo a “Notarize” review process, which is designed to detect malware and provide Apple with tools to revoke a specific bad release, rather than a developer’s entire certificate. I applaud Apple’s never-ending focus on user security with features like this.
Apple is deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL support in favor of Metal, and also sunsetting 32-bit apps on macOS — these are bold steps that are needed in order to move the platform forward into the future rather than clinging to the past. However, game developers are already threatening quitting macOS development for good, so these changes might negatively affect the third party app ecosystem on the Mac.
UIkit apps coming later to macOS — this is a big deal for the Mac. There are, however, many questions. Will many iOS app developers invest into porting their apps to macOS just because it would now be easier to do so? macOS is still a niche platform, and recently developers have been in fact killing native macOS apps in favor of web-based experiences (just look at Twitter), and I’m not sure if UIKit support dramatically changes this dynamic. Also, many iOS apps are designed specifically for mobile use cases and make little to no sense on the Mac. Finally, in order for these apps to feel truly native on the Mac, developers would still need to invest a lot of time into adopting pointer-based interface, touchpad gestures, keyboard shortcuts and other Mac-specific features. I also wonder if UIKit support on macOS will later make it easier to port macOS apps to iOS instead of the other way around — for example, there is still no Logic, Final Cut or Xcode on iPad, which are long overdue.
