When someone purchases an Apple product they expect a certain level of quality; however, recently, this expected standard of quality has not been met\u00a0 for many customers. Many of you probably had software issues this Fall where \u201cI\u201d changed to \u201cA {?]\u201d or more recently \u201cit\u201d changed to \u201cI.T.\u201d, and the list of recent glitches does not end there. These bugs are a huge issue that has created a burden for Apple users and has been a PR nightmare for Apple. Furthermore, Apple has had to pay external failure costs to have their employees work around the clock to fix these problems.<\/p>\n
The cause of these glitches is Apple\u2019s engineers trying to create innovative improvements at an exceptionally fast pace without the necessary amount of time to fix any issues. Apple\u2019s business model is to release updates every Fall meant to \u201cwow the faithful [Apple users] and make rivals seem slow-footed\u201d (Bloomberg). In comparison, their biggest competitor, Android, does not have any set release schedule and release updates on their own time. These two differing update schedules has created a huge variation in update rates between the two companies. Data shows that 90% of Apple users currently use one of the two most recent iOS updates; whereas, only 30% of Android users have downloaded the latest two versions of Google\u2019s mobile OS. The high rate of Apple downloads is due in part to users\u2019 expectation that the new iOS update will be a higher quality than the one they are currently using. But, when the update comes packed with glitches that expectation is unfulfilled and customers\u2019 perception of quality diminishes.<\/p>\n
Because of this, Apple is refocusing their strategy to prioritize quality over the number of features in an update. They are redesigning their update schedule to be one a two-year cycle instead of one year. Furthermore, they are allowing their engineers to have more \u201cdiscretion\u201d and allowing them to suggest delays to the release of features that are not completely perfect and glitch-free. This is all an effort to improve the quality of Apple\u2019s product. An example of this is their planned release for next Fall. They have decided to delay their launch of new home screens for the iPhone and iPad as well as updates to the Photos and CarPlay apps. Instead they will be focusing on the updates for seamless use of apps across devices, a new Digital Health tool, and improvements to Animojis. The Bloomberg <\/em>article states, \u201cthe renewed focus on quality is designed to make sure the company can fulfill promises made each summer at the annual developers\u2019 conference and that the new features work reliable as advertised\u201d. They are prioritizing releases an ensuring a level of quality that they might not have before.<\/p>\n At this point, it is not realistic for Apple to be able to release updates that have a full roster of improvements at the speed they used to. App developer, Steven Troughton-Smith states \u201cApple\u2019s smaller scale helped it build better-quality software than the rest of the market, but with its newfound size it has been seemingly unable to find the right balance.\u201d However, with this new schedule it seems like they are making the appropriate steps between speed and quality.<\/p>\n Sources<\/strong>:<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2018-02-12\/how-apple-plans-to-root-out-bugs-revamp-iphone-software<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2017\/12\/2\/16727238\/apple-macos-ios-software-problems-updates<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When someone purchases an Apple product they expect a certain level of quality; however, recently, this expected standard of quality<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[71151],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-managing-quality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-05\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-05\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-05\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-05\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-05\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-05\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-05\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-05\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mgmt340-05\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}