Geoffrey Wiseman

The Trouble with Sticky Apple Services

Google's services are "sticky", resistant to change. People who use a Google service often want to continue to do so and choose related services and devices at least in part on their compatibility with those services.

For instance, heavy users of Gmail would be less likely to buy a mobile phone that just won't work with Gmail, because that would make it difficult to send and receive email on a service they have used for years and value.

Apple services (iCloud, Maps, etc) have some stickiness, but it's not as strong, which makes it easier for users of those services to switch services, and potentially to adopt products that aren't tied into Apple's ecosystem, like an Android phone.

There are at least two reasons why Apple's services are less sticky:

• Insular
• Hard to Share

Insular

Apple services are often insular. They require you to have an Apple product, a mac, iPad or iPhone. They only work with applications sold through the Mac app store.

There are ways that this insularity encourages lock-in because if you really want to take advantage of all of these capabilities, you need to buy into the whole ecosystem. You need a Mac and an iPhone, possibly an iPad. You need to buy your applications through the Mac app store. If you do buy into all these elements, you might feel as if this insularity locks you in, but it doesn't always increase stickiness, because inevitably you will use things that aren't in the ecosystem.

For instance, almost everyone uses other web sites, web applications and web services provided by other companies, and because none of those are built within the Apple ecosystem, they cannot tie into Apple's insular services.

Ever logged into a third-party website with your Apple/iCloud ID? How about shared some iCloud data from an iOS app with a third-party web application? Sent a restaurant location from their website to your phone? No? That's because you can't. Apple's insular services can't be integrated with web applications or with applications that aren't sold in one of Apple's stores.

This basically guarantees that anyone using Apple services is also using other competing services. Even if Apple's maps is your primary map that you access every day on your phone, when you look at a map on a restaurant website, you're probably looking at a Google map. Even if you prefer to store your data in iCloud, you probably store other data in Google drive or Dropbox, because applications that you care about can't integrate with iCloud.

This ensures that users of Apple services don't rely on them exclusively, that they are in fact familiar with and regular users of its competitors.

This insularity also makes it difficult to share.

Hard to Share

If you use Apple services, it can be difficult to share them with others, particularly if those others don't own or aren't currently using an Apple product.

For instance, if I'm using Apple's maps, can you share the destination that you've just looked up with someone who's using an Android phone? a PC? Yes, you can, in a .vcard format containing a URL that will redirect the recipient to Google Maps. Not only can you not send that person to a website showing Apple's map, but you can actively direct a friend to a competitor's service.

Apple services are often hard to share because don't have web versions, or they don't have good web versions, or they have web versions that are heavily tied in to Apple's infrastructure (for instance, they require an iCloud account to access.)

What Else?

There are other reasons, of course.

They're also not as robust as Apple's other products. It's clear that mobile me, iCloud, iMessage, Siri all have failures with some regularity. They're reasonably reliable, they're good enough not to drive people away, but they're not so good that people come to rely on them completely. What would life be like without Siri? Anyone who has used Siri regularly has experienced life without Siri, because Siri isn't always available.

And, frankly, Apple's reputation for delighting its users doesn't carry through to its online services. People use Apple Maps, they use Siri, they use iCloud, but they don't love them and evangelize them the way they do with Apple's other products. For Apple's services to be truly sticky, Apple needs to improve this, and that comes down to polish, reliability, and countless other little details that Apple tends to obsess about, but still hasn't managed to get quite right for its services.

How to Solve These

For Apple's services to be truly sticky, Apple would have to fix many if not all of the above problems. Apple could do many of the following:

• Reduce the insularity of Apple services:
  • Make iCloud a central authentication mechanism that other applications can use. This could be OpenId or something else, even something proprietary.
  • Allow web applications or desktop applications not sold in the app store to integrate with at least some of Apple's core services.
  • Make sure that the best experience for Apple maps is on iOS, but make it possible for someone to access it from a PC or an Android phone.
• Reduce the friction to sharing Apple services:
  
  • Give iCloud a thin social layer. Don't make it a twitter copy, but make it possible for iCloud-integrated services to get a sense (with appropriate permissions) what other accounts you might want to connect to.
  • Make web APIs and web clients for as many important Apple services as is possible. This might include:
    • Integrating Apple maps into websites (e.g. directions to restaurants)
    • Sharing of locations from Apple's map applications to people who don't have an Apple device.
    • Sharing your photo stream on the web more easily with people who don't have an iPhone or a Mac.
    • Integrating websites with iCloud-stored documents and data.
• Make all Apple services reliable and delightful.
  • Obsess about the details in the same way they do with the hardware and software of iPhone, iPad and Mac.
  • Reduce downtime. Solve problems. Provide offline support for core features like Siri.

Should Apple Do It?

There's a cost to making Apple services sticky and it's significant. These things don't directly drive Apple revenues by selling hardware. They distract Apple by taking precious manpower that could be used on iOS and Mac and hardware and using it instead on data centers, web services, web clients. They push Apple into competing with Google on Google's strengths.

Should Apple go down this path? I don't know. I'm afraid that if they don't, they'll always be ceding this ground to other companies, other companies that will use this weakness to erode Apple's core business. But if they do, they'll have even more wars to fight, even more ground to protect, even more distractions.

If Apple has a great web client for its maps, gets sufficiently better with map data and encourages sharing of maps, this means that people might begin to rely on Apple maps that don't currently own a Mac or an iPhone. Those people might later become Apple customers, of course, but in the meantime there's a cost of supporting users who might use Apple services without buying Apple hardware. Is it better to accept that Google Maps will always be the service people share, or is it worth trying to stay competitive in maps both on mobile phones and on the desktop, the web and shared information?

Apple does need to decide if its services are in the supporting role, propping up the hardware business, but no more, or world-class services on their own rights, where they can truly claim that their services are competitive with companies like Google. Right now, they're in the awkward middle ground of aspiring to offer world-class services, but under-delivering.