The company is shaking up its development program to focus more on key features and push back others to the following year.
Apple's
annual software upgrade this fall will offer users plenty of new
features: enabling a single set of apps to work across iPhones, iPads
and Macs, a Digital Health tool to show parents how much time their
children have been staring at their screen and improvements to Animojis,
those cartoon characters controlled by the iPhone X's facial
recognition sensor. But
just as important this year will be what Apple doesn't introduce:
redesigned home screens for the iPhone, iPad and CarPlay, and a revamped
Photos app that can suggest which images to view.
Craig Federighi
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
These
features were delayed after Apple Inc. concluded it needed its own
major upgrade in the way the company develops and introduces new
products. Instead of keeping engineers on a relentless annual schedule
and cramming features into a single update, Apple
will start focusing on the next two years of updates for its iPhone and
iPad operating system, according to people familiar with the
change. The company will continue to update its software annually, but
internally engineers will have more discretion to push back features
that aren't as polished to the following year.
Software chief Craig Federighi laid out the new strategy to
his army of engineers last month, according to a person familiar with
the discussion. His team will have more time to work on new features
and focus on under-the-hood refinements without being tied to a list of
new features annually simply so the company can tout a massive
year-over-year leap, people familiar with the situation say. The renewed
focus on quality is designed to make sure the company can fulfill
promises made each summer at the annual developers conference and that
new features work reliably and as advertised. “This
change is Apple beginning to realize that schedules are not being hit,
stuff is being released with bugs – which previously would not have
happened,” when
Apple was a smaller company with fewer engineers, customers and devices
to manage, says one person familiar with the company. Apple declined to
comment. The
shift is an admission of what many customers have already come to
notice: Some Apple software has become prone to bugs and underdeveloped
features. In
recent months, users have complained about text messages appearing out
of order, the iPhone X registering incoming phone calls late and
frequent app crashes. Apple
has also recently released features later than it expected, as the rush
to meet the annual deadline overtaxed engineers and created last-minute
delays. For
example, last year’s iOS release didn’t initially include previously
touted features that would let consumers send money via iMessage or
synchronize full text message histories among Apple devices.
The
decision to formalize the process and give engineers more time to
perfect software is a major cultural shift. For years, the company has
funneled its energies into quick-turnaround, splashy upgrades that are
designed to wow the faithful and make rivals seem slow-footed.
The strategy has paid off handsomely because the
feature-packed upgrades keep customers tied to Apple’s ecosystem and
prompt them to use more of the company’s lucrative services. More than
90 percent of Apple customers use either of the last two major iOS
updates, compared with 30 percent of Android users who have downloaded
the two latest versions of Google’s mobile OS, according to data from
both companies.
Phil
Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, speaks
about the iPhone X during an event in Cupertino, Calif. on Sept. 12,
2017.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
But
the feature-packed upgrades place huge demands on Apple’s beleaguered
engineers. At Google, teams update apps on their own schedule and aren’t
tied to the annual Android release. At Apple, all new features are tied
to a big release in the fall, when Apple rolls out its splashiest new
software, and a more modest update in the spring.Individual apps aren't updated on their own, and everything is driven by the release schedule.
Under
the previous system, a person familiar with Apple says, “inevitably,
some things will be late because you underestimated how long it would
take. Some things have to be cut, some things have to be rushed. It's
the result of having thousands of people working on the same schedule.”
The
first test of the new development strategy will come in the fall, when
Apple debuts the next iPhone and iPad software upgrade. Internally
code-named “Peace,” it will likely be called iOS 12.
The change
that will cause the biggest stir: making it possible for a single
third-party app to work on iPhones, iPads and Mac computers. The upgrade
will be folded into the upcoming macOS 10.14 (known internally as
“Liberty”) and could involve bringing to the Mac some of Apple’s own
iPhone apps, including Home, which controls smart appliances.
Apple’s
popular Animojis will get new characters and a more easily navigated
menu. The animated emojis will also come to the iPad; the company is
working on a new model that will have the required Face ID camera. Apple
plans to integrate Animojis into FaceTime, letting people put virtual
faces over themselves in video calls. (Technology to bring multi-person
conferencing to FaceTime video calls is being explored but might not be
ready for this year.)
A customer tries out the Animoji feature on an iPhone X.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Also
in the works for this year: a redesigned version of Apple’s
stock-tracking app and updated version of Do Not Disturb that will
give users more options to automatically reject phone calls or silence
notifications. Apple is also working to more deeply integrate Siri into
the iPhone’s search view, redesign the interface used to import photos
into an iPad on the go and make it possible for several people at once
to play augmented reality games.
Consumers will have to wait
until 2019 for significant iPad-focused software upgrades. Among them: A
feature that will make it possible to run several windows in one app
and click between them just like tabs in a web browser (the Mac got this
feature a couple of years ago) and a related enhancement that lets two
screens from the same app run side-by-side. Other updates that have been
pushed back include new features for the Apple Pencil stylus and a
toggle in the email app that will mute notifications from specific
threads.
In the past, “Apple’s smaller scale helped it build
better-quality software than the rest of the market,” says Steven
Troughton-Smith, a veteran app developer. “But with its newfound size it
has seemingly been unable to find the right balance.”
Finding
a new balance between speed and quality will be tricky. On the one
hand, spreading feature updates over a longer period could hurt Apple’s
competitiveness in the fiercely contested smartphone market. On the
other hand, sticking to what Troughton-Smith calls a “ruthlessly
ambitious” upgrade cycle risks rushing out features before they’re ready
and undermining Apple’s vaunted reputation for quality.
No comments