Apple heads into developer conference under more scrutiny than ever
Apple urgently requires a distraction.
On Monday, the company will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2021), which comes at one of the most perilous points in Apple's history for developer relations. While Apple appeared to emerge from the Epic v. Apple trial in a strong legal position, its reputation suffered a setback. The evidence established that the company does not “treat all developers equally” — it struck special deals with large companies such as Amazon and Hulu and made arbitrary, cutthroat decisions to eliminate competition and lock in users.
For years, developers have known or suspected these things, and initially, online reactions were muted. After all, this is the third year in a row that the shadow of antitrust regulation has hung over WWDC, and the company has thus far escaped relatively unscathed.
However, Apple watchers detected something else in the company's testimony during the trial, something even devout developers couldn't ignore: Apple was arguing that the iPhone's success was entirely due to Apple, not developers.
Several of those developers are now ecstatic. Thus, it would be fortunate if Apple had a new MacBook Pro ready for them, one that could steer the conversation at WWDC away from contentious issues such as the App Store's fairness.
On May 21st, Tim Cook made Apple's position crystal clear: "I believe that we are creating all of the commerce on the store," Cook told Judge Rogers when she questioned whether Apple deserved all of the credit for retaining users. Later, Cook insisted that Apple would be compensated regardless of the outcome of the court case: "We would have to devise an alternate method of collecting our commission," he told the judge if alternative app payment mechanisms become a reality.
I thought Nick Heer put it well:
And on Wednesday, when Apple released what his fellow podcast hosts described as a "self-serving puff piece," prominent iOS developer Marco Arment apparently decided he'd had enough shaking. “To bully and gaslight developers into believing we should be kissing Apple's feet for allowing us to add billions of dollars of value to their platform is not only greedy, stingy, and morally reprehensible, but also deeply insulting,” Arment writes in a fiery new blog post titled "Developer relations" that's sweeping through Apple's developer community just days before the show.
“It isn’t the App Store that has enabled all of the commerce on iOS,” Arment challenges Cook:
This is the point at which Apple will argue that the App Store is much more — it is designed to be a secure, curated, and trustworthy environment where users can download apps without fear, which requires investment and a great deal of work. However, as we discovered during the trial, the head of Apple's FEAR (Fraud Engineering Algorithms and Risk) team believed Apple's App Review programme was a joke, "more akin to the pretty lady who greets you with a lei at the Hawaiian airport than the drug sniffing dog."
Additionally, internal emails revealed that Apple's executives couldn't believe some of the things App Review published, and yet obvious scams continue to thrive today. While Apple now claims that its teams prevent billions of dollars in fraud and use a variety of automated tools to identify malicious apps, the company also admitted that it only has 500 people reviewing the store's 1.8 million apps. (500 people is an insufficient number to moderate a platform run by the world's most profitable company, one that earned an estimated $64 billion last year from the App Store alone.)
Epic's central argument during the trial was that the App Store is absurdly profitable, with margins so high (78 percent) that they resemble the infamous "Apple tax" that Apple has long been accused of instituting. And, while Apple initially stated that it would refute that figure during the trial, the company repeatedly stated that it was unaware of the App Store's actual profit margin. The best it could do was lay out a laundry list of expenses that don't count toward the App Store budget and are presumably paid out of the goodness of its heart, such as the $50 million per year spent on WWDC.
Which brings us to Monday's developer conference and Apple's prospects for resolving this crisis. As with Arment, I don't believe Apple will suddenly announce that developers can use any payment processor they want or even direct their customers away from Apple's ecosystem. Additionally, there is little chance Apple will reduce its cut. For starters, the company has been very clear about its stance on each of these throughout the trial, and it will not relinquish its position until the lawsuit is resolved (and even then, not until after rounds of appeals.)
Furthermore, Apple may not feel the need for such drastic measures. While a number of prominent Apple developers and bloggers have spoken out against the trial, and while coverage of the trial has diminished Apple's status as a media darling — "The Apple Tax is Rotten," declared Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times — there are plenty of developers who are simply grateful to have a business at all. According to Creative Strategies principal analyst Ben Bajarin, who surveyed over 380 software developers ahead of WWDC, smaller developers are generally satisfied with Apple as a whole, and over 90% of developers surveyed thus far indicate they are likely to continue developing for Apple's platforms.
“There are still pain points, and everyone wants Apple to improve, but there is a demographic that recognises Apple provides them with value and enables them to pursue their dreams as a small indie developer,” he says. While many respondents expressed dissatisfaction with Apple's app review process and a lack of clear communication, and the "vast majority" stated that Apple could do more to combat scams, even the most vocal developers plan to stay. “You listen to these extremely vocal developers who are dissatisfied... if a viable alternative existed for them, they would switch, but Apple's platform and ecosystem are simply too good for them. They will not migrate to Android or Windows because they will not earn the same amount of money,” Bajarin explains. There is no other viable option.
When I ask prominent developer Steve Troughton-Smith what Apple needs to do this year to win back developers, he responds similarly: "the realistic answer is 'nothing' — where are developers going to go?" They're going to have to stick with the App Store if they want to make money on mobile, as there are no other options.” According to him, the majority of developers "are unaware of or unconcerned about the trial, and are content to build apps within the sandbox that avoid pushing the boundaries or running into existential issues — which is perfectly fine."
“However, I believe we've lost a decade of fringe innovation as a result of Apple's nannying, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to ignore as Apple increasingly reaches into apps and attempts to dictate their business models,” he adds, citing Apple's forced in-app purchases as an example.
Jason Snell, an Apple columnist and podcaster, agrees that Apple "denigrated their developers" during the trial, but does not expect them to rectify the situation at WWDC: “Short of changing long-standing App Store policies, such as allowing developers to link to websites for alternative payment methods, I'm not sure what they can do except power through the next round of OS updates and hope developers get caught up in what's new and forget what Apple said about the role of third-party developers on the stand,” he tells me.
However, I'm betting Apple has another plan to divert our attention away from developer concerns, one that has previously worked for the company — a shiny new piece of hardware that will get the company's "pros" excited to work on what's next.
Perhaps it'll be a sneak peek at Apple's long-awaited augmented reality glasses. That would undoubtedly dominate the headlines and be the topic of conversation for the remainder of the week and beyond. While the rumour mill is not expecting a product until at least 2022, Tim Cook has been trumpeting the potential of augmented reality for years, describing it as "profound," "huge," a "core technology," "as big an idea as the smartphone," and most recently, "critically important" to Apple's future. To be sure, the company's own WWDC teaser image above makes me think about augmented reality.
However, a safer bet is that Apple will use WWDC for the third time in the post-Steve Jobs era to remind its “pro” users that it knows how to build a Mac that balances power and flexibility. “I can't innovate anymore, my arse,” Apple executive Phil Schiller said at WWDC 2013, introducing the company's radically redesigned cylindrical Mac Pro with a quote intended to deflect attention away from the company's actual criticism that year.
He also claimed that the 2013 Mac Pro was "without a doubt the future of the pro desktop," and while that proved to be so embarrassingly incorrect that Apple ended up publicly admitting the 2013 Mac was a mistake, the company repeated the move at WWDC 2019 with its new, improved, and actually upgradeable cheese grater Mac Pro to demonstrate — once again — that it is listening to its most vocal audience.
Apple gains a new opportunity in 2021. Apple killed off the beloved MacBook Pro with Retina Display five years ago, exchanging its pro-friendly SD card slot, full-size HDMI and USB ports, and deep, familiar keyboard for a new machine with a gimmicky Touch Bar and a set of USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 ports that required dongles to connect virtually anything. Additionally, developers were disappointed by the lack of RAM. I wrote at the time, "Apple's new MacBook Pro is not for professionals." “The MacBook Pro is a fabrication,” asserts my colleague Vlad.
Yet the new MacBook Pro's primary flaw was revealed to be its ultra-thin "butterfly keyboard," a design so prone to dust accumulation that it prompted a public apology from Apple, multiple recall / repair programmes, and a certified class-action lawsuit. We dubbed it one of the worst buttons ever created and exhaled a sigh of relief when the MacBook Pro 2019 finally phased it out.
However, 2019's MacBook Pro largely corrected 2016's mistakes — and, in terms of pros, 2020's 13-inch MacBook Pro with Apple's new M1 chip falls short. It is essentially an M1 MacBook Air with an added fan, the same two ports, and a maximum memory capacity of 16GB.
Apple can demonstrate that it is listening again at WWDC 2021, and Bloomberg reports that it will: we expect to see a new 16-inch MacBook Pro that reintroduces the SD card slot and HDMI port, heralds the return of Apple's beloved trip-proof MagSafe connector, ditches the annoying Touch Bar in favour of physical function keys, and supports up to 64GB of RAM. They're also expected to have twice the number of high-performance CPU cores and at least twice the number of GPU cores as the Apple M1 chips, which upended our concept of laptop performance late last year.
For the first time in many years, Apple appears to be giving its professional users exactly what they want in a new laptop, and many of those professionals are the same developers attending WWDC and building for iOS. While a flashy distraction is unlikely to help Apple win at trial or fend off Amy Klobuchar, it may help change the tone of developer conversations this week at WWDC.
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