Written: December 27, 2016
The truism that’s done the rounds in consumer tech circles in recent years is that Apple somehow doesn’t “get” S/services, a broad category both in Apple’s reporting structure and in people’s descriptions of a variety of activities at Apple. This has included maps, iMessage, iCloud, and a variety of other bits and pieces, only some of which are actually part of Apple’s Services segment, and criticisms cover performance, user interfaces, reliability, feature sets, and more.
Some of this criticism has been legitimate – the launch of Apple Maps as a replacement for the earlier Google-based maps was something of a disaster, and iMessage in particular has suffered from poor syncing between devices and weird glitches involving message delivery. But both of these particular issues are largely resolved at this point – though Apple Maps arguably still trails Google Maps in some ways, it’s an entirely serviceable product at this point, and iMessage also largely behaves itself today.
Certainly, some of Apple’s cloud services aren’t as fully featured as competing products from service-led companies like Google, but that’s representative of Apple’s approach of starting with a focused product and adding features incrementally. And it’s arguable that Apple’s services don’t need to be the best for them to succeed, because of the power of being the default option. Integration often trumps naked feature functionality, and this allows Apple to maintain a parity of sorts.
Arguably the bigger recent weakness of Apple’s services has been trying to do too much in version 1, such as with Apple Music, which felt bloated at launch, but has been trimmed and reorganized since in a way that makes more sense. This is reflective of the Tim Cook era at Apple, under which that and not missing features is the problem, and rapid iteration after launch is the solution, across both services and software (see also watchOS).
At the same time, services (with a small s) continue to be one of the three legs of Apple’s stool, tightly integrated with hardware and software, and they’re a key part of the ecosystem that draws people to and keeps them using Apple’s products. The App Store in particular is both a key part of the iPhone value proposition and an increasingly important revenue driver for the company, and though it has flaws it’s by far the largest app store by revenue despite iOS’s smaller market share relative to Android. Apple’s users continue to outspend their Android counterparts, and that’s validation of the attractiveness of Apple’s services for both users and developers. And again, the privileged position Apple’s services enjoy on its own devices makes services like iMessage extremely powerful even when limited to a single platform, especially as Apple has continued to add features, notably in iOS 10.
Apple can definitely do better in services, and I expect it will continue to make incremental improvements. But such things at Apple are mostly a matter of focus in the overall context of tight resources – the company famously has to shunt engineers from one project to another rather than dedicating resources to particular products and services, and this sometimes creates a sense of benign neglect. As Apple returns to growth in the coming months, I would hope that it would ease up on its hiring freeze and bring in the necessary talent to keep the services business on the right trajectory.