7/1
We're deep in the post-WWDC media frenzy and I have been reading and watching all the coverage I can stand to consume. While I'd love to be a bigger part of the content creation side of the equation, I don't actually feel there's much more for me to add. There's already a lot of great writing out there.
While consuming all of this content, however, I came across two different articles that I just couldn't resist saying something about.
First off, was this article from FastCompany:
Mark Wilson says this about Siri's iOS 14 makeover:
...[in] iOS 14, Apple reveals Siri at the bottom as a big, spinning marble that seems to pull from every color of the rainbow, popping out from the rest of the flat interface in 3D (and covering other apps). It’s absolute visual overkill. This is futuristic Marvel movie stuff, as if Siri were designed by Apple in the year 2030 and sent back to the iPhone of today.
And he finishes the article by saying:
No doubt we will all quickly adjust to Siri’s new look, and what’s overt today will seem bland tomorrow. But if you want a signal that Apple sees Siri as core to the future of its business, then look no further than the shimmering, iridescent AI dancing at the bottom of your screen.
I wouldn't use the word genius but Wilson's spot on with his observations; new Siri is surprisingly and unexpectedly gaudy. As a designer I see it for what it is: a deliberate decision that I don't have the context to understand. Tim Cook has reassured everyone on multiple occasions that Siri will get better. Apple has continued to buy companies that would seemingly bolster Siri's abilities, as well. Consumers have had little to point at as major improvements, though. Meanwhile, Google's Assistant can screen calls for you and even book appointments on your behalf. There's a gulf between the two digital assistants that's not only wide but extremely obvious.
I don't doubt that Siri will continue to play a big part in Apple's future—Google has shown us how valuable this kind of assistant is when it's actually good. I question the decision to bring such prominence to a clearly underperforming aspect of iOS. When I design interfaces I try not to emphasize a product weakness. If Apple had simply reduced Siri's full screen UI to a small, motionless icon and kept the new UX they would have still been celebrated. The amount of attention new Siri calls to itself isn't aligned with its actual worth. It's an odd kind of dissonance I can only assume Apple plans to pay off at some point. There has to be a reason for it and it's clearly not anything in the current version of iOS 14.
The next article that caught my eye was from Forbes—not an outlet I generally read for tech news but I really couldn't let this one slip by without comment.
I'm going to ignore the obvious (but entertaining) anti-Apple tone here and cut straight to the meat. Ewan Spence suggests that Apple has sacrificed a stable iOS 14 release by including so many new features.
Spence's own words:
With a new version of iOS debuting at Apple’s virtual WWDC, Tim Cook and his team have brought us a raft of new features. Would they not have been be better served in taking a year out of ‘new’ and address all the older damaging bugs in iOS and improving the quality of life of countless of millions of iPhone users?
He goes on to point out that there are longstanding bugs that Apple still hasn't addressed that iOS 13 introduced. He also raises the point that there may be a culture within Apple's development teams that makes it more difficult for older bugs to be fixed, so they linger on. I have no issue with any of that. I design and build software for a living—the more complex your software gets the more bugs you will create. The more bugs you create, the more bugs slip through QA. That's not a justification, just the truth. Apple needs to tighten up their release process and from what I've read, they made changes very shortly after iOS 13's release.
What I do take issue with is the notion that a major software release—one as important to Apple as iOS is—can only be stable or innovative. Why can't it be both? Shouldn't we demand that much from a company like Apple? They need iOS 14 to be more performant so they don't repeat the messy launch of iOS 13—no arguments there. They also need to remain competitive. Apple can't do that without releasing new features. Consumers have been trained to expect new features with major software releases long before Apple started pushing out buggy iOS versions. With their customers only getting one major update per year, taking a whole year off from meaningful feature development is simply not an option anymore. iOS 12's marquee focus on performance and stability can't be a headlining feature again; it's not enough. Apple has to push forward, especially when you consider the slower pace they generally move at.