John Gruber, of Daring Fireball It's from The Talk Show, managed to interview Phil Schiller (Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing) and Craig Federighi (senior vice president of software engineering). Now, accompanied by Eddy Cue (senior vice president of software and internet services), Federighi he was interviewed again on Gruber's podcast.
THE timingOf course, it couldn't be better as the two executives lead Apple's software initiatives, something that has recently been heavily criticized by influential people, like veteran journalist Walt Mossberg, practically Apple spokesman Jim Dalrymple, journalist Jason Snell, among many others.
One of Ma's most criticized software (including Mossberg's article) is iTunes, which in a way creates both Cue and Federighi. User complaints are always the same: heavy app, with many features, which absorbed many functions, etc. Gruber questioned Cue about this, asking how Apple imagines the user's experience with iTunes.
Cue's response seemed sincere, saying that iTunes was created at a time when people needed software to sync their devices via cable. A kind of place to centralize all the content that could be placed inside the devices now, for obvious reasons, this is no longer necessary.
With the launch of Apple Music, Ma had a challenge ahead and decided to focus on music on iTunes, trying to put together a local experience (user music library) with streaming (cloud) of the service itself. Such decisions, however, are constantly reassessed and the proof of this is that there are plans to release a new version of iTunes with OS X 10.11.4, next month.
Federighi also spoke a little about the dilemma that deciding on a major change in a given project using Photos for example. While many users liked the new OS X photo management app because of its simplicity, speed and cleaner interface, others found the software to be of poor quality just because they were already used to the iPhoto experience and did not want change. In other words, to think about a complete redesign of iTunes, without a doubt something they do within Apple, but a lot has and must be considered to make a “radical decision” like that.
They also talked a little about the news of tvOS 9.2 as support for Dictation (Dictation) is something that Apple wanted to launch in the beginning, but it was not possible, apart from a future update to the app Remote in order to make it compatible with Siri (transforming your iGadget) on a Siri Remote).
In addition, some interesting numbers from Apple were shared in the interview, check out:
- Apple Music: the service now has more than 11 million of subscribers;
- iMessage: more than 200,000 messages they are sent per second at peak times;
- App / iTunes Store: more than 750 million transactions per week are made in stores;
- iCloud: Apple's cloud service has 782 million users;
- Maps: more than 2.5 million of corrections were made based on feedback from users.
Talking a little about the Radar, a tool by which developers report Apple bugs, Gruber asked if they really paid attention to what happens there. Despite not responding to all incoming notifications, Federighi said that everything is read and taken into account.
The executive stated that there is nothing at Apple that they take more into account than the quality of software / services. He believes that things have improved significantly over the past five years. “Every year we look at the things we did well in the previous year and the techniques we used to create the best software we could are not suitable for the next year as the level of demand continues to rise.”
The full interview can be heard both on the Daring Fireball how much in The Talk Show.
(via MacRumors, 9to5Mac, The Verge)
