The press release sounds more flexible than the actual guidelines:
Press release (emphasis mine):
"all apps that allow for account creation must also allow users to _initiate_ deletion of their account from within the app."
Guidelines:
"If your app supports account creation, you must also offer account deletion within the app."
Has anyone seen any clarification on what options might be acceptable? e.g. I'm wondering about something simple, like opening an email composer with the app support email address and a pre-filled message body requesting account deletion which would be performed async.
Why would you want to make manual work for someone who just wants their account deleted? You're possibly better off offering an option in the delete flow for them to "talk with you to see if you can work something out" versus manually processing deletion requests.
Effort on those requests might recover some users which may be especially valuable if you are a subscription business. If you can't benefit from interaction then immediately imitating deletion from an API seems the only thing that would pass muster.
I think different use cases will call for different solutions. My use case is a relatively tiny number of users and any manual work they would generate for account deletion would be nil, or very close to it.
It's not necessarily about recovering users who want to leave but rather minimizing the effort required to implement a more complex deletion flow that has a high probability of never being used by real users (in my case).
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"The Very Hungry Caterpillar" will always have a special place in my heart. I can't begin to describe how fond my memories are of my two year old son reciting the words on the Saturday page for the first time:
“On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon.
That night he had a stomach ache.”
Such a precious memory for me. Thank you Eric Carle. RIP.
Also thanks Eric Carle for getting my kids to eat apples, pears, plums, strawberries, oranges, chocolate cake, ice-cream, pickles, Swiss cheese, salami, lollipops, cherry pie, sausage, cupcake, and watermelons (and nice green leaves)!
This is a really great analysis of the situation but I think Ben, and Tim Cook in his public statements, are missing one important point: iOS 12 made the older devices (iPhone 5s, 6) run _much_ better than they were running on iOS 11 [1, 2, 3]. They improved the software so much on this iteration of iOS that they probably relieved a lot of the hardware upgrade pressure users were beginning to feel in the first half of 2018.
It will be very interesting to see if Apple even supports the iPhone 6 generation of hardware on the next version of iOS. If not, or if the software performance regresses significantly, I would expect the hardware upgrade pressure to really ratchet up again in the fall.
I don't think this surprised Apple. In their September 2018 event [0], Lisa Jackson took the stage to say that Apple sees longer-lived devices as a goal of the company, from both a consumer and environmental standpoint. She specifically called out the renewed life that iOS 12 will bring to older devices. On top of that, at WWDC 2018 [1], Federighi heralded the new life customers will find when iOS 12 would be released to 5 year old phones.
I don't think that any of this has surprised Apple. I think they have long seen that peak iPhone (and a mature market) is coming, or even already arrived.
Apple is focusing on their install base, which is enormous (over 1.5 billion devices [2]), and is figuring out ways to leverage that advantage. They know that the upgrades will come, albeit more slowly, but in the meantime, they can provide services, accessories, and eventually new products that customers will be fully willing to pay for. I think it is obvious that there is a pretty big transition that the company is in the middle of, but I think they are clearly best positioned to take advantage of that position.
It would, frankly, be baffling for Apple to suddenly change course direction over a single quarter. I think they are setting this course (ie, longevity of devices) because they think it is the right thing to do for their customers, similar to how they uniquely ran the battery replacement program. [3]
[3] - “We did not consider in any way, shape, or form, what it would do to upgrade rates. We did it because we thought it was the right thing to do for our customers. And sitting here today, I don’t know what effect it will have. And again, it’s not and was not in our thought process of deciding to do what we’ve done.” - Tim Cook
If all (or most of) the growth is in services as Apple claims, why hike hardware prices so much that it could over time erode their installed base?
I believe the answer is that Apple doesn't really believe that service revenue will grow fast enough to compensate for longer hardware replacement cycles.
And that belief is probably justified because their service offering doesn't seem very robust at this point.
Apple didn't just raise prices, for the sake of raising prices. Their takeaway [0] from the iPhone X was that customers were willing to pay for more advanced and more expensive features. FaceID, OLED, stainless steel, etc. Apple is making more expensive products (not just raising prices), because people have shown that they want to pay more for more value.
Lots of people on HN, as well as elsewhere, will take issue with that philosophy. But that is what Apple thinks, and why they have the roadmap they do.
Inevitably, there is a limit to that price elasticity, but I don't think this quarter indicates that the devices are too expensive. Also, I think you are right about services. It is the only current growth story, but 1.5 billion devices is a lot, and they will upgrade at some point in the future, most likely to another iPhone. But you are correct that there is nothing that will replace the rocket ship that was iPhone.
[0] Tim Cook - "And I think that iPhone X shows that when you deliver a great, innovative product there's enough people there that would would like that and it can be a really good business." https://www.imore.com/apple-earnings-q3-2018
I am not sure where you get that 1.5 Billion number from, I don't see Horace mentioning it. But the latest number of Active Devices, as Tim Cook mentioned a 100M increase would equate to 1.4B Active Devices. ( Which is actually slower than previous momentum, as they were adding 150M / year between 2016 and 2017. )
>I don't think this quarter indicates that the devices are too expensive
I don't claim that it does. My point is that there is a trade-off between increasing the average selling price of hardware and broadening the user base so you can sell more services to more people.
Apple's market share is now dangerously low in some parts of the world, including some rich European countries. It makes features and services that are restricted to Apple devices completely useless or far less valuable.
You can’t discount both the older generation phones that Apple still sells, the used market, and hand me down phones effect on the installed base.
Every phone that Apple has introduced since 2013 is still getting updates. The 2015 iPhone 6s still runs circles around midrange Android phones and is even faster than flagship Android phones in single core performance.
I'm not discounting it. I'm a happy iPhone 6 user myself. But the trickle down effect you're talking about has to start with some people actually buying new iPhones at some point. I'm a bit worried that Apple is overplaying its hand.
A premium strategy is fine. A luxury strategy could be a disaster, especially if they intend to make money on services that require broad adoption.
In non-US locales, aren't iPhones a major luxury item and status symbol? Increasing pricing to decrease the number of users feeds into this marketing strategy.
I don't think Ben misses this point. He concludes his pessimistic take with:
> It’s a bit of a hodgepodge with one primary takeaway: convincing customers to upgrade “good enough” phones is both challenging and unpredictable, and Apple can’t simply assume it will happen at the rate it has previously.
Ultimately he claims that users will eventually upgrade to the latest flagship iOS device. I think you (and I) disagree with his claim, though!
(I also might be falling prey to confirmation bias myself, specifically on the topic of phone pricing...)
users will eventually upgrade to the latest flagship iOS device
I know I fall into that group of users. I own a 7 currently, it's a few years old, but works well enough. I see no reason to upgrade to an XS today. If the 7 fails tomorrow, I'll buy an XS.
Ditto. Loved my 7. Walked into a pool with it in my pocket. Now have an XS. Typing this on a 2015 MacBook Air I only have because I traded my 2013 Air $500 to a neighbor for it. Plan on keeping it another 2 to 3 years; same, at the very least, for the iPhone.
They're well-built products that tend to work, and have warranties that show for it.
> This is a really great analysis of the situation but I think Ben, and Tim Cook in his public statements, are missing one important point: iOS 12 made the older devices (iPhone 5s, 6) run _much_ better than they were running on iOS 11. They improved the software so much on this iteration of iOS that they probably relieved a lot of the hardware upgrade pressure users were beginning to feel in the first half of 2018.
Meh, I don't know about that. Sure, iOS 12 is great and all, but the iPhone 5S and 6 have just 1GB of RAM. With essentially all mobile devices not using swap at all (due to the highly dubious endurance of the low-grade, Chinese-installed eMMC storage), that's just barely enough for the modern Web these days - and newer iOS apps can't be that much lighter, either! So, I fear that the iPhone 5S and 6 are practically on borrowed time, no matter what Apple does. The Nexus 5 is in far better shape, seeing as it came out with 2GB and will be able to run pmOS (on a mainline kernel, no less)...
Going a step newer, the Nexus 5X has common boot loop failure for which the solution is to flash a custom ROM that kills the pair of big A57 cores and use only the four smaller A53 cores. So it's not all sunshine and roses on the Android side either.
A friend of mine had a 5X replaced under warranty and immediately dumped it on eBay and bought something else because there was no sign of an official fix coming for this.
> that's just barely enough for the modern Web these days - and newer iOS apps can't be that much lighter, either!
You might be surprised. Desktop safari is significantly more resource (including memory) efficient than Chrome and Firefox. And iOS apps are written in objective-c and swift, which are also a lot more memory efficient than say Java or JavaScript.
Of course, 1GB of RAM is still pretty small. But if the idevices can last 5 years instead of 2, that would be pretty significant. I don't think anyone expects them to last forever.
I have two coworkers still running 4Ses, which are more than 7 years old now. Smallish company, maybe 25 people in my office. It still makes phone calls, sends texts, and takes photos, so they'll upgrade when it dies.
Stuck on iOS 9 with that so it might not be a good idea from a security perspective, but I'm impressed with the hardware. At least one of them I know had a screen replacement, but still.
Not really. Source: iPhone 6 user. Couldn't upgrade to iOS 12 because of lack of space. Finally made room and after being told 12 would speed my device I had high hopes. Turns out, I don't notice any difference. App launch times, keyboard launch times, and overall responsiveness is just barely tolerable. 6S devices feel like light speed in comparison.
Thanks for the reply. I actually did check my battery, purchasing one of those apps that was trending about 6 months back when news broke of Apple's throttling. Battery is fine - phone is just slow which as you mentioned is probably because of the RAM situation.
> They improved the software so much on this iteration of iOS that they probably relieved a lot of the hardware upgrade pressure users were beginning to feel in the first half of 2018.
Another other side of this is that they've given people good reasons not to upgrade: I've been surprised by the number of people who commented that the new phones are uncomfortably large to hold and, of course, a fair number of people don't like losing the headphone jack. None of those are complete showstoppers but since costs have also gone up around 20% beyond the rate of inflation[1], you don't need to give people much of a reason to delay a purchase which isn't necessary since everyone knows the phone you buy next year will be even better.
1. A quick spot-check comparing the iPhone 6S & 6S Plus we bought in 2015 vs. the XS / XS Max now has it at 24% with no improvement in storage capacity.
Yes, I totally agree. I think there are a constellation of factors that influence the upgrade decisions of users, but I have found it surprising how much the software has been under-discussed following Apple's miss.
If someone was happy enough with their iPhone 5s, 6, or 6s running iOS 11 when the X was released (Fall 2017) then I suspect they didn't feel much more pressure to upgrade when they were running iOS 12 and the Xs was released (Fall 2018).
The showstopper for me is FaceID. I won’t buy a device where that is the only biometric AuthN solution available. If/when my 7plus dies, I’ll buy an 8plus, either new or used.
I won’t buy anything newer than an 8, until such time as they give me fingerprint ID back in some form.
Why is that a showstopper but Touch ID isn’t? They’re both biometric systems where the raw data never leaves the secure element, both are hardened against simple attacks, etc.
Have you ever tried to use FaceID with a reader that is arms length away from you, and you can’t get any closer to it?
What about a reader that is not only arms length away, but oriented in a very inconvenient position?
I don’t want any device that could potentially unlock itself just by someone holding it up and asking if this is my phone. Or that could lock itself up tightly and possibly even wipe itself, because it had seen too many strange faces.
Now, I don’t use biometrics to unlock my phone. But the inconvenience of having to look at the phone and have it scan my face when I want to use ApplePay, that’s plenty enough reason for me to never use a device where face scanning is the only biometric method available.
I don’t care how much they claim that the data never leaves the phone. That’s just table stakes for me.
I think Apple will continue to have FaceID at their Entry level / lowest pricing iPhone. FaceID is expensive, I just don't see it coming to lower tier in the next two years.
Yep, substantially so. So the battery program plus the iOS update both gave people reasons to hold on to their phones longer.
I usually upgrade every year, but the new phones just aren't enough of an upgrade from the original X to warrant it, especially given the much higher cost.
software really is eating the world. in this case, apple's profits.
also software that causes such "harm" is typically written by someone else. it is funny seeing apple themselves write and distribute the harmful piece.
Congratulations to the buddybuild team. I've used buddybuild since 2015 and it has streamlined a lot of problems with building, signing, and distributing dozens of iOS apps I've worked on over that time.
It will be interesting to see how (and when) Apple integrates this into Xcode, iTunes Connect, TestFlight, and the rest of their development portal. I don't really see Apple running a hosted continuous integration system, but maybe they plan on investing more effort in Xcode Server[1] to sell some new Mac Pros, whenever they're ready.
Thanks for the feedback! Calendar integration is definitely on the roadmap, as are swipes between detail screens. Categorizing items is probably a bit lower on the list of things to do but I will definitely keep it in mind.
Send me a message if you'd like a promo code. rob@robmaceachern.com
Wow this is really surprising, especially after reading Craig Newmark's answer on Quora just the other day to the question "Why hasn't anyone built any products on top of Craigslist data?". His response:
"Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it's that simple."
Press release (emphasis mine): "all apps that allow for account creation must also allow users to _initiate_ deletion of their account from within the app."
Guidelines: "If your app supports account creation, you must also offer account deletion within the app."
Has anyone seen any clarification on what options might be acceptable? e.g. I'm wondering about something simple, like opening an email composer with the app support email address and a pre-filled message body requesting account deletion which would be performed async.