Apple Services in 2025
2025 was a record-breaking year for Apple services, marked by remarkable growth, global expansion, and continuous innovation. From Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple News, to daily essentials like Apple Pay and iCloud, we delivered enriching experiences to users worldwide. Reflecting on 2025, we remained committed to enhancing our users’ daily lives, with incredible engagement during the holiday season.
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As we look ahead, we’ll continue to bring innovation and intelligent enhancements to Apple services, always guided by our commitment to privacy and a phenomenal customer experience.
I’m not sure any Apple service has a phenomenal customer experience these days. Looking at the ones he mentioned, I was thinking maybe Find My. But then I remembered how it pretty much no longer works at all on my Apple Watch SE that’s limited to OS 10. And how the Mac version doesn’t let you open more than one window.
Apple Pay does “just work” except that it often doesn’t work at gas pumps, and it’s a major pain to upgrade your watch or phone, with each card taking multiple steps (and often a phone call). Apple Cash remains less convenient than Venmo, requiring more steps to transfer funds and without e-mails for reliable notifications and record keeping. You can request a PDF statement via e-mail, but it doesn’t include the names of the people, nor any descriptions of what the transactions were for.
See also: John Gruber:
Previously:
- Apple’s Q4 2025 Results
- Abysmal Services
- Apple Services Price Hikes
- The Apple Services Experience Is Not Good Enough
- Apple Services
4 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I agree that many of their services are being enshittified by ads, but I upgrade my iPhone yearly and Watch every 2-3 years, and I have never had any issue transferring Apple Pay cards, or using Apple Pay at a gas pump. The only times I have had Apple Pay fail (more broadly, not just at gas pumps), it is due to the merchant's terminal ("Oh, yeah, we've been having problems with tap lately").
I would say for me, at least, Apple Pay remains a shining (nearly singular?) example of something they're doing completely right. Except the ads in the Wallet app... though luckily the number of times I need to open it in a year can probably be counted on two hands.
Transit is pretty good I guess. Maybe keys will work as well. But marginally better than competition (or convenience and/or locking in) is a far cry from phenomenal.
I have tons of issues with iCloud forcing downloads of huge files. I vacate them, they immediately get downloaded again. Restarting the computer, reinstalling the operating system from scratch (all demanded by Apple support) did nothing and then they ghosted me after supposedly escalating it to an "engineer" and giving me a support liason, who never followed through on anything and never responded to my checkins
Apple Pay is always so nice to use, but especially so when buying on the Web with that one button to give shipping address and pay.
iMessage, Apple Maps and directions (in the US in cities has gotten really good), Freeform, Pages... privacy in general... all are nice/positive/better than average experiences for me.
Their stuff is generally pretty good so it's all the more painful when there's a regression in usability.
