Apple Turnaround
This is where Apple finds itself today: in need of turnaround-scale changes, but not currently in the kind of (usually financial) crisis that will motivate its leaders to make them.
New leadership is almost always part of a turnaround. In part, that’s because poor financial performance is one of the few remaining sins for which CEOs are reliably held to account. But it’s also because certain kinds of changes need the credibility that only new faces can bring.
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Developers like money, but what they need is respect. What they need is to feel like Apple listens to them and understands their experience. What they need is to be able to make their own decisions about their products and businesses.
To understand just how little power the App Store commission rate alone has to heal this relationship, consider how Apple might leave the rate unchanged and still turn developer sentiment around. Maybe something like this… […] Apple will know it has succeeded when third-party developers feel like Apple is their partner in success, rather than their adversary or overlord.
Lots of ideas that would make Apple’s platforms better, but it’s hard to see them happening even with new leadership.
Adding features wins games, but bug fixing wins championships.
It’s been 15 years since Apple’s leadership last demonstrated that it’s willing to emphasize software reliability at the cost of new features. Since then, bugs in major features have been allowed to fester, unfixed, for years on end.
It’s so demoralizing and a waste of everyone’s time.
The title of my article, Apple Turntable—a less clever riff on its inspirations—signifies that I believe Apple is a broken record. In other words, it’s too late. My thesis is relatively simple: Apple, as a publicly owned corporation, is incapable of selecting a CEO who can follow Siracusa’s dictum, “Don’t try to make money. Try to make a dent in the universe.”
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Steve Jobs was an historical aberration. He and Woz, neither MBAs, selected themselves to found a company and establish its culture. Years later, Jobs was able to return and reinvigorate the company’s culture only via a fortuitous (for him) set of circumstances in which he was selected as the CEO of last resort. But when Jobs died, everything that made Apple special eventually withered and died too. Without Jobs as a protector, Scott Forstall was soon ousted under the pretense of Apple Maps. Tim Cook asserted his control over the company, putting his own personnel in place, and now his authority is absolute. Even those few others who remain from the Jobs era, such as “Apple Fellow” Phil Schiller, are overridden by Cook, as we learned recently from the Epic Games v. Apple court case, which revealed that Schiller had argued internally for Apple to relent on its App Store revenue demands.
I think you missed a critical aspect of respect towards developers: I still cannot install my own apps “permanently” on the devices that I own without paying Apple a fee or refreshing them every week, which is just stupid across all possible dimensions of the matter.
That is the one key reason I never published any iOS apps, and why I prototype things on Android.
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is just weeks away, but I’m sensing a lot of apathy in the community. The company’s relationship with third-party developers is at a low point.
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Trust is a hard thing to gain. Apple used to have the developers’ trust but now they’ve lost it. It’s much more difficult to regain lost trust than it is to gain it in the first place. I have read many reports of talented developers leaving the Apple ecosystem because they can’t take it any more. This is bad for all of us, but particularly bad for Apple.
I don’t imagine that anyone at Apple reads my blog, but I have thought of some things I think they could do to improve their relationship with their developers.
Sideloading, a public bug database, and better App Review.
now there is literally a whole generation of users that knows only $2 shovelware.
i’m not sure we can ever put the high quality software genie back in the bottle.
…and apple has no one to blame for this situation but themselves.
Some people wonder why we look so fondly back to what Mac OS X was back in the day. It was this, a bustling marketplace of indie apps made with love and care. You sensed the humanity in all of it. It really felt special back then.
I say let’s do this again. If Apple doesn’t want to be part of it, let’s do it somewhere else. We can make it happen.
Nobody seems to really like the direction things are moving towards. Why couldn’t we just collectively do our thing and not look back at what Apple does?
Tim Cook is doing an excellent job slowly accumulating all the blame for everything that is wrong with Apple. I wonder how many will actually be surprised when not much changes after he leaves…
The next 18 months defines Tim Cook’s entire legacy. And life story to an extent.
Apple is well known to take a long view, and by and large that’s paid off. They’ve been able to afford that long view historically, even though there have been grumblings along the way. However, I don’t believe Apple is dictating the terms or the timeline any longer.
In the case of Artificial Intelligence, as an example, who knows how that is going to play out for any of the players currently on the field or yet to come. But you can’t deny how OpenAI has changed the pace of things or how Google, and everyone else, is trying to play catch up. The recent announcement that OpenAI was purchasing Jony Ive’s design company to collaborate on what looks like new hardware, coming chock-a-block on top of Google’s mostly AI IO conference announcements, certainly changed the conversation. But then again it might be all smoke and mirrors, no matter how anxious everyone seems to be for some kind of new gadget of the future. Personally, I still think much on this AI front is a race without a finishing line or even a destination beyond collecting data for dollars.
That said, Apple is in it, perhaps thrust into the fray or perhaps fumbling along. Regardless, in my opinion any future achievements are going to require leadership change at the top.
This week in tech news:
Microsoft and Google courting developers with announcements that span the spectrum from useful, to tasteless, to repulsive. Including in person presentations, and demos.
Apple reluctantly lets developers bill people on the web and play a popular game after years of litigation. They also sent out invitations for people to watch a video in three weeks about how things are going great.
Previously:
- OpenAI Acquires Jony Ive’s io
- Fortnite Returns to US App Store
- Apple Appeals Epic Anti-Steering Injunction
- I’m an Apple Fan in 2025
- Soured
- Rotten
- iOS Announcements and Offers
- App Store Small Business Program With 15% Fee
- The Art of the Possible
- Apple’s Software Quality Decline
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My God, the only thing whinier than developers are Republicans Senators (in private).
Good summary of the times. I think I'm somewhere between Siracusa and Johnson. I do think it's possible for a new CEO to come in, make better decisions, and right the ship to some degree. But I agree that Apple's not at the point now that it was in 1997; the board isn't desperate enough to anoint a Jobsian CEO for whom product comes before profit.
Humbly submitting my own thoughts, written here: https://owenmathews.name/blog/2025/05/another-bite-at-the-apple.html
Sarah Reichelt:
"Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is just weeks away, but I’m sensing a lot of apathy in the community. The company’s relationship with third-party developers is at a low point."
This has been the case for the last 10 years at least. Also which category of 3rd party developers?
@someone, the only thing I disagree with you about is "the last 10 years at least". My thought is WWDC was forced to change (due to pandemic) in 2020, and since Apple does almost nothing live anymore. That's a big thing.
@Rui needs to detail his Mastadon quote. ".... I still cannot install my own apps “permanently” on the devices that I own without paying Apple a fee or refreshing them every week...." Oh? Not to say I disagree, just, HUH? Every week? Pay Apple a fee? Your OWN apps? I'm baffled. And since the extent of my social media exposure is commenting on blogs that still allow it (thanks Michael!) I won't be able to respond directly.
All told, a good spectrum wrap-up of how Apple is perceived by various developers. (Love the $2 shovelware comment along with the one about Cook's legacy. Don't forget where Apple was in 2010 though - that is also a part of his legacy.)
@Dave Rui means that if you code your own app and compile it on your Mac, you have two choices to get it onto your iPhone. You can install it for free, and then it will run for a week, and then you have to reload it from the Mac. Or you can pay Apple $99/year to install it with a certificate so that it can run “permanently.”
2010 meaning Peak Apple?
John’s comment:
“Developers like money, but what they need is respect.”
The money Apple takes from us?
It’s not about the money.
It’s about the time.
Stolen time.
Time I should’ve spent with my kids.
Time I’ll never get back.
They didn’t write the code.
They didn’t fix the bugs at 2 a.m.
They didn’t miss birthdays, dinners, or sleep to ship a product.
But they take their cut like they did—like it’s owed.
Not for helping. For gatekeeping.
It’s not a partnership.
It’s a shakedown. It’s exploitation.
@Michael, thanks for clarifying. While I'm not sure why anyone would build their app (unless we're talking about a macOS native one) and complain about the need to re-build it a week later, I just don't get.
Xcode is free. Building it, even for your own macOS use, is too. Yes, build times can be long, but what exactly is the problem? Is it the Mac App Store? There you have a choice to no submit it to Apple. (I thought many do not because it's not really adding to the bottom line.) If it's iOS (or iPadOS or any other of Apple's app stores, even TestFlight) than I'm *still* missing the point. Are you spending the time to code these apps because... well, it's a hobby? Even then it's something that all you need is to re-=build it for the device.
