Apple has launched ApplePay in China:

You can now support Apple Pay for your customers in China, providing an easy, secure, and private way for them to pay using their China UnionPay credit and debit cards. Apple Pay lets users buy physical goods and services within your app without having to enter payment or contact information.  Learn more.

The O2O market in China is massive, and if Apple release a Venmo-like service for Apple Pay, this could change the way people do business.

Tim Cook has published a heroic defense of American’s right to privacy in the face of a court order Apple has been served by the FBI:

The government would have us remove security features and add new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by “brute force,” trying thousands or millions of combinations with the speed of a modern computer.

The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.

Apple is doing this because this is the right thing to do: there may be not a lot a stake in unlocking this particular phone, but the precedent that the government wants to set is clear. There’s a lot of excellent journalism you can find on this topic, and I may publish a round-up post with some analysis later. But for now, I want to be absolutely clear about my support for Apple and my condemnation of any technology company which doesn’t stand with Apple on this.

Writing about Apple software quality woes, Michael Simon makes some really good points in his latest piece for Macworld. There’s something really problematic about the opening paragraph however:

Twice over the past month I’ve had to erase and restore my iPhone. Both times were related to an attempted install of the iOS 9.3 Public Beta; instead of upgrading my phone with Night Shift, secure Notes, and better News, I got stuck in an endless Apple logo loop that required plugging into the dreaded iTunes and wiping my drive.

Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue were recently on The Talk Show with John Gruber and argued that because more people are installing the software on day one more than ever, that this is one of the challenges that Apple has to contend with with regard to software quality. That was nonsense because it’s Apple themselves that are releasing more than ever, being more aggressive with upgrade prompts than they’ve ever been, and arguable seeking more users than ever. What Simon has to say about the betas being an indication of software quality is equally nonsense because they’re betas: the fact that his install failed is actually what betas are supposed to do. It’s fine that these problems crop up in the betas, the problem is that they also make it to the final build.

Everyone, even Apple, still seems to be trying to figure out what people want or need to do on their wrist. Prominent WatchKit developer David Smith muses:

What doesn’t work is easiest to say. Apps that try to re-create the functionality of an iPhone app simply don’t work. If you can perform a particular operation on an iPhone, then it is better to do it there. The promise of never having to take your iPhone out of your pocket just isn’t quite here yet. The Apple Watch may advance (in hardware and software) to a point where this is no longer true but the platform has a ways to grow first.

In response, Federico Viticci:

[…] As I tweeted yesterday, my favorite Watch apps aren’t trying to mimic iPhone apps at all. If the same task can be completed on the iPhone, I don’t see why I would try on a smaller, slower device.

Something you might not hear elsewhere: I’m rather interested in the possibilities of fleets of watchOS devices in enterprise. I’ve heard of a real, albeit crazy, case of a company deploying a fleet of iPhones that workers wear on their wrists to inform them of certain events as they happen. Of course, the Apple Watch would be perfect for this, but it’s been billed and tooled to be such a personal device, I don’t think the platform is quite ready for enterprise needs like multi-user of deploying many of them.

But perhaps one day.

Sync is still hard. Versioning documents, resolving conflicts, and issues of connectivity still cause every cloud storage solution trouble. Even for high-profile software like iCloud and Dropbox. Consider that Federico Viticci just tweeted:

Just lost 1.5k words I had prepared for tomorrow because I wanted to try iCloud sync instead of Dropbox this week.

In response, Manton Reece writes that iCloud is too opaque:

I hear that people love iCloud Photo Library and Notes, and that the quality of these apps and companion services has significantly improved. That’s great. (I also think that CloudKit is clearly the best thing Apple has built for syncing yet.)

But to me, it doesn’t matter if it’s reliable or fast, or even if it “always” works. It only matters if I trust it when something goes wrong. Conceptually I’m not sure iCloud will ever get there for me.

This is absolutely right. I used to be “all-in” on Apple’s software when iPhoto was around, because I could back up the managed folder and still access that data in a directory structure that made sense to me. I migrated to a Dropbox and Adobe Lightroom based workflow because of performance, reliability, power, and predictability. Perhaps Photos is simpler and more convenient for most consumers, but it just is too risky and too opaque for me.

This discussion reminds me somewhat of why Marco Arment and David Smith use their own Linux servers instead of BaaS.

The iPad Pro was reviewed by Amanda Summers on Medium, titled “A UX Designer’s Review of iPad Pro”:

We are confident in saying we are able to sit down with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and create something just as good, if not better, than sketching traditionally using pencil and paper.

Apple Pencil feels completely natural in our hands. There’s no latency and the shading and pressure points feel all too real. The palm rejection technology works great, allowing us to rest our palm on the screen without worrying if it will mess up our drawing.

This is the most consequential review I’ve ever read of the iPad Pro, all of the reviews which came out on the first day were mostly to the tune of “Yeah it’s a big iPad, and the Pencil is cool but rather expensive.” If creatives are successfully using professional grade software to get real work done, this is an excellent sign of the potential of the platform. I do wonder though: is this a good sign for the form factor of the iPad Pro, or is it a good sign for the utility of a stylus on tablets generally? I suspect the latter, and we’ll see what Apple have to say in March about it.

Unrelatedly, I found the article’s placement and production interesting as a published piece. It’s under Amanda Summers’ name, but it’s “published in” her employer’s “organization” entity. I suspect that what MindSea Development get from having their employee’s publish to Medium is status and marketing, and it’s yet to be seen how Medium will make money from this.

Right on the heels of Parse shutting down, Apple have announced they’re expanding the capabilities of their similar API, CloudKit:

In addition to providing a web interface for users to access the same data as your app, you can now easily read and write to the CloudKit public database from a server-side process or script with a server-to-server key. Learn more about generating a server-to-server key and composing web service requests.

Now users of CloudKit can interact with the data from their own server. To be a serious replacement for Parse, however, there needs to be a way for non-Apple clients to interact with it.

Software quality is a nebulous and divisive topic. There are many parameters to software quality – reliability, speed, user experience, design, discoverability, and more – and a move towards any of these virtues leads to sacrifices in others, especially on a limited time schedule. Additionally, a number of forces influence software quality over time, like accommodating for different use cases, changes in platform, changes in hardware, changes in design preferences, changes in market, changes in expectations, and more. Finally, software is not like digging a hole, say, where more people really can dig a hole faster than fewer people: in fact, more people can often slow down a software project.

Nobody knows this better than the technology titans of today: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle have all experience unanticipated software problems and regressions and high profile bugs. These are organizations with thousands of programmers writing and maintaining millions of lines of code for billions of devices. And these devices are machines which require perfection: one slight ambiguity of intent, any minor breach of contract, any single unexpected 0 where there should be 1 or vice versa … has the capability the bring down the whole system. In fact, it often does. Countless kernel panics, stack overflow errors, null pointer exceptions, and memory leaks are plaguing poor users and tired system administrators and overworked programmers right now. Machines are fast, but they can be awfully dumb.

And no company is feeling the pain of software’s nebulous nature and hardware’s mindless computing more than Apple right now. The underdog that many loyal fans rooted for is now the world’s (perhaps previous) most valuable company. With that, comes insanely high expectations: they need to grow the world’s biggest company every quarter to keep Wall Street happy, and even harder, they have to keep those nerds that kept them alive through the hard times happy too. And with release after release of the most revolutionary operating system ever, it’s tempting to picture Apple like an actual Titan, in particular Atlas, holding the world upon his shoulders. But it seems more and more every day that another Greek tale is more fitting: it’s time to admit that Apple have flown too close to the sun.

Walt Mossberg, technology journalism’s elder statesman, has this to say about Apple’s software quality:

In the last couple of years, however, I’ve noticed a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps, on both the mobile iOS operating system and its Mac OS X platform. It’s almost as if the tech giant has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to these core software products, while it pursues big new dreams, like smartwatches and cars.

On OS X this is especially true: OpenGL implementation has fallen behind the competition, the filesystem desperately needs updating, the SDK has needed modernizing for years, networking and cryptography have seen major gaffes. And that’s with regards to the under-the-hood details, the applications are easier targets: it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app), the entire industry have left Final Cut Pro X, I dare not plug my iPhone in to my laptop for fear of what it might do, the Mac App Store is the antitheses of native application development (again being some Frankenstein of a web/native app), and iCloud nee MobileMe nee iTools has been an unreliable and slow mess since day one.

This isn’t the first time that a prominent member of the Apple community has criticized Apple’s software quality. Here’s Marco Arment from January of 2015:

Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has fallen so much in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions. Just a few years ago, we would have relentlessly made fun of Windows users for these same bugs on their inferior OS, but we can’t talk anymore.

This is still as true today as it was last year. Macs and iPhones have gotten thinner, more beautiful, and more powerful; the Apple Watch and the new Apple TV are magnificent additions to the product line up. But I’d speculate that part of the problem Apple is having is that if it took 1,000 engineers to write software for Mac when that was the only product, it doesn’t necessarily take 4,000 people to write software for four product lines. In fact, 10,000 of the same grade of engineers might not even do it, especially without proper management and unified goals. Apple may not have listened to rockstar developer Marco Arment, but Walt Mossberg will definitely get their attention. Here’s an anecdote about Steve Jobs from the last time that Mossberg complained about Apple’s software quality:

In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article.

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

Jobs was also particularly angry about the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg not liking MobileMe:

“Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.”

It really is time for Tim Cook to take action as drastic as this regarding software quality on Apple’s existing platforms. What worries me is that AAPL the stock ticker and Apple the company are in a (self-driving) crash course with one another: AAPL needs to launch new products to drive growth and Apple needs to improve the products that have already shipped. The most valuable asset that Apple own is their brand, and that’s the brand that’ll drive sales of any car that may or may not be in development. If that brand name is tarnished by regressions and performance problems, what consumer would buy a car from the brand? In fact, anecdotally, talking to my friends, the Apple Car already has an uphill battle with the kerfuffle surrounding the Maps launch.

Jim Dalrymple, in response to Mossberg, writes:

I understand that Apple has a lot of balls in the air, but they have clearly taken their eye off some of them. There is absolutely no doubt that Apple Music is getting better with each update to the app, but what we have now is more of a 1.0 version than what we received last year.

John Gruber, in response to Dalrymple:

Maybe we expect too much from Apple’s software. But Apple’s hardware doesn’t have little problems like this.

The best thing for Apple to do is to re-take their position as a leader of software quality before it’s too late: consumers know that Apple’s hardware is the very best, but more and more they’re using apps made by Google and Microsoft and Facebook. If this trend doesn’t turn around, Apple will find their breakout product and all of its growth will be owned by competitors. And when the time comes to launch their car, they’ll find that loyal fans and everyday consumers have lost trust in the brand. Having said that, I’m still a Mac user at home and at work, my iPhone is a wonderful device that I enriches my life, and I’m still finding new ways to make use of Apple Watch. And to give credit where credit is due: Logic Pro X has improved a lot recently, and Music Memos is a welcome addition to Apple’s music line up. I even use Apple Maps. Apple can do this. It’s not too late. But for sake of all us poor users, and Apple’s tired system administrators and overworked programmers, I hope they started 6 months ago.

Marco Arment:

Apple needs a healthy developer ecosystem now, more than ever, as customers clamor for their new platforms to have more and better software — but now they’re paying for their own neglect of healthy App Store economics and tense developer relations for so long.

I hope Apple sees that as a problem. With the recent consolidation of the entire App Store under new leadership (Phil Schiller), maybe they do.

Apple’s developer ecosystem is healthy, with two exceptions:

1. Backend services: iCloud and CloudKit are to platform dependent and iOS developers aren’t (in general) competent in backend development;
2. App review: compared to web development, taking up to 3 weeks to ship an app because of a review process is a huge burden.

These are no insurmountable challenges for the developer ecosystem, but it does pose some challenges for Apple. In order to provide an integrated backend solution that would really be an option for indie developers, they would have to risk ending the thermonuclear war and allowing Android and web to access the service. It’s apt that this discussion should arise on the shuttering of Parse, a Facebook-bought company, because this wouldn’t be a problem for Apple if they have bought Parse. But had they bought Parse, just like when they bought TestFlight and Siri, Apple would have immediately shut down the the Android component. The sad and ironic fact of the matter is that Apple are actually in a great position to run a service like Parse at a loss, because all of Apple’s software (in a sense) is the cost required to make the stupendous profit on the iPhone. Perhaps a reasonable compromise position for Apple to enter into the *aaS space would be to subsidize development by making iOS use of CloudKit free, and provide other platforms at cost.

On the second challenge, I’m not sure what challenges there are in scaling Apple app review process, but anecdotally, the last time I heard of someone going through the process recently, it took 5 days from submission to store. If this proves to be consistent this year, it still isn’t fast enough to submit hot-fixes like the web can, but it would definitely be a welcome improvement. But the pain of the submission process goes further than just the review process, it’s also the incredibly clunky iTunes Connect and the inconsistent enforcement of the guidelines. These complaints just cover the iOS App Store, however, Apple have a lot more (a less profitable) work to do on there other three App Stores.