The Apple Services Experience Is Not Good Enough
To me, the Apple brand ultimately stands for high-quality premium products, developed by teams of people that care deeply about what they are working on and have the freedom to sweat the details. Whilst they don’t always succeed, their consistency at achieving that feeling when it comes to hardware design is unrivalled. Every part, every component, every material, appears to have been thoroughly considered and debated. Nothing is rushed or skimped on. That permeates through to the end product, tangibly and intangibly so. That doesn’t mean everything they make is a surefire hit or a runaway success; just that someone cared about making it.
I’m not sure I could name a single Apple service that meets that bar. Apple’s services tick the boxes, and they mostly do what they promise. However, nothing comes close to the quality of experience I expect to have from things branded with the Apple logo. When I am using these apps, I am not filled with confidence that striving for greatness was a top priority. Far too often, meeting revenue goals and business objectives seem more important to their creation.
They are built to a passing grade, but nothing more. Basic features found in services from rival companies are either lacking altogether in Apple’s apps, or implemented half-heartedly and performance is sluggish. Browsing in Music and TV is painful, with an over-reliance on the infinite scroll. New content is just tacked on the bottom of already long lists. Meanwhile, the navigation bars are blank when they could include simple shortcut buttons and filters to help users navigate and explore. Moreover, these apps feature too many loading states and too much waiting around. They are akin to janky web apps, rather than richly-compelling responsive experiences.
Frequently, it seems the content teams and the tech teams are isolated from each other, when they really should be in sync and working together to make everything sing. Arcade is trapped inside a tab in the App Store app, and obvious synergies with Game Center are not exploited; Game Center remains in a quasi-extant state as a panel in Settings. The Library tab in TV is useless in the modern streaming service era. (Frankly, the entire TV app belies the content Apple is producing for it.) Another example: Apple Music relaunched the Radio tab significantly in 2020, boasting three live broadcasts and dozens of weekly shows, but all that is for nothing when it is still impossible for users to subscribe to a show to be notified when an artist goes live or when new episodes are available to listen to on-demand.
On a daily basis, I encounter issues, ranging from small niggles to significant gaps in functionality. These things have been in this state of mediocrity for many years. I’m losing faith that anyone in a position of power at the Services group cares enough to make them better. The high standards seen in the products of Apple’s hardware divisions are not reflected here.
Grading on a curve, Music and Fitness are the best, Arcade is in the middle, and TV+ and News+ are fighting it out at the bottom. But I stress, that’s grading on a curve of their own output. Apple’s best is not good enough. It is all middling to inferior, creaky and uninspired. Organisational dysfunction, a mountain of tech debt, distorted leadership incentives, and lack of passion likely all play a role. Whatever the cause, fixing this stems from the top. Services’ engineering and design teams have to be empowered with the resources and time to effectively execute and ultimately deliver excellence to customers, like the hardware teams clearly are.