I am not the first person to complain about the permanence of Apple’s preloaded apps. I am in no way the most qualified to complain about Apple Music. I would, though, like a chance to join this chorus---because I want to make Music go away. And frankly, it’s in Apple’s best interest to let me.
You might remember a similar wave of complaints after iPhone owners woke up to find a meaty iOS update had landed a Watch app on their phones, regardless of whether they owned or wanted to own or had even heard of Apple’s shiny new $350-$17,000 accessory. Smart and observant writer folk rightly called out Apple’s “junk drawer” problem, their increasingly overstuffed iPhone folders labeled “Apple Crap.”
It was bad then. It’s worse now. In fact, it’s gotten to the point that it’s not just frustrating for consumers. It might end up hurting Apple.
Let’s think about this from Apple’s perspective for a minute. It’s not hard to imagine why it might want to highlight its own wares, in the same way you don’t wonder why Legoland doesn’t feature a “World o’ K’Nex” installation. It’s just good business.
“Music, Photos, anything that ties into the cloud, all of these things are ecosystem plays,” explains Forrester mobile analyst Michael Facemire. “We’ve seen that just having a good device isn’t good enough in mobile… For Apple to maintain its stranglehold on the markets it enjoys, the higher-end markets, it needs to make sure it has that complete ecosystem buy-in."
It’s true that Apple has the strongest (though not the largest, thanks to legions of perfectly decent, inexpensive Android device) smartphone and tablet ecosystem in the world. Getting iPhone owners to use Music instead of Spotify, or Apple Maps instead of Google Maps, is a hypothetically terrific way to ensure that dominance continues.
In practice, though, spotlighting your own apps only works as well as the apps themselves do. Apple Maps, which arrived on millions of iPhones in 2012, was so outrageously bad that Apple CEO Tim Cook penned a public apology (since deleted from Apple’s web site) that included the unthinkable act of suggesting iOS users rely on a competitor instead:
“While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their Web app.”
Eep. And yet! Apple Maps, junked up as it was, remained on iPhones through the (lengthy) renovation process, an unmoving mistake.
Apple Music, the latest size-14 first-party footprint to land on iPhones and iPads, isn’t nearly the same category of trainwreck as Maps. It ain’t great, though. Stalwart Apple advocate and editor of the Loop Jim Dalrymple called Music “a nightmare” this week, after it gobbled up 4,700 songs from his music collection; he’s going back to Spotify. “Nightmare” was also the pejorative of choice for iOS developer Cezary Wojcik, who wrote a lengthy breakdown of Music’s usability, or lack thereof. And here are several hundred forum users either complaining about or offering sympathy for iCloud wreacking havoc with people’s Music libraries.
This is not a best foot forward. This is taking off your sock and chirping “Look at my gout!” And because users can’t delete it, for many it’s just a constant reminder of that thing Apple tried once that they didn't particularly like.
“Let’s say everybody buys into Facebook Messenger and leaves iMessage out of the loop,” says Facemire, describing what Apple’s undeletable apps are safeguarding against. “All of a sudden that’s a crack in Apple’s ecosystem that’s very hard to get back. Once you have that crack, one or two more cracks, now I don’t need an iPhone anymore.”
All of which makes a strong case in favor of preloading apps. But it also assumes the alternatives Apple offers are better, or at least good. They are often not. It’s true that if I like Messenger better than iMessage (which would not be a very controversial stance), I don’t need an iPhone anymore. If I’m pushed toward Music and find it unbearable though, I get closer to thinking an iPhone---or at the very least, anything iCloud-related---is something I might not even want. And* that* is potentially a much bigger problem for Apple.
Apple’s customers are also under more app strain than ever. The Junk Drawer principle holds up just fine, but it’s starting get mighty full.
Last fall, Kirk McElhearn looked at just how much space Apple’s apps (including recommended but optional offerings like the iWorks suite) took up. The figure he landed on? Just over 3GB, which combined with how much room iOS itself takes (and the vagaries of measuring storage capacity) left him with just over 8GB of usable space on a 16GB iPad Mini.
This was before either the Watch app or Music app landed, the latter of which appears to be a serious space hog due to some aggressive caching. All of this is space that could be going toward photos, or videos, or games, or comics, or any of a hundred other experiences that iPhone and iPad owners actually want.
“You don’t want to become like Acer, or any of those companies, where any time you bought one of their PCs the first thing you saw was 800 things that were installed on there, taking up space,” says Facemire. “At 16GB, for the lower-end iPhone and iPad, that’s a valuable commodity.”
One answer would be “just don’t buy a 16GB device,” which is true enough, but Apple still sells them without offering any caveats. Besides, at this point even larger sizes aren’t immune from feeling claustrophobic. The question becomes, then, when do our Apple Crap folders suck up so much oxygen that we can’t just ignore them anymore?
“I would contend that the point is probably here,” says Facemire. “There can’t be another Music that comes out, that’s for sure. Until we get to a space where network connectivity is ubiquitous, and I don’t have to store anything at all locally, the space that’s already taken up is about the max that I would want to continue.”
But why would anyone expect that sort of restraint? Apple hasn’t walked back any of its preloaded iPhone apps, despite being increasingly commoditized or irrelevant (looking at you Compass). Not even the Tips app can be banished, even if you know its contents by rote.
Apple does clearly put thought into the apps it preloads, though, in a way that’s somehow more galling. iPad owners, for instance, aren’t saddled with Watch, or Calculator, or Stocks, or Compass, or a handful of other in-house apps, presumably because they don’t fit the imagined tablet use case (and don’t, importantly, feed into iCloud).
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t need Apple to imagine a use case for me. I can manage my own. I don’t need Music or Tips or Photo Booth on my iPhone, but I wouldn’t mind having that space to squeeze in a few more comic books. You might want it for a few dozen more photos, or to complete your menagerie of fart apps. Your specific priorities don’t matter, other than that you should be able to act on them to the fullest extent possible.
Yes, most of this applies to Apple’s competitors as well. There are plenty of preloaded Google apps on Android phones, and many are saddled with useless carrier bloat as well. There’s a key difference though, beyond even the simple fact that Apple has unilateral control over its ecosystem and could simply decide to change course. While you can’t delete them, even the most entrenched Android apps can be easily disabled, locked down to their smallest form and blocking any future updates. You can freeze Android apps in carbonite; Apple apps will only keep expanding.
Again, I’m not the first or only person asking for the power to delete Apple’s apps from my iOS devices. I won’t be the last. With any luck, though, we’re nearing a point where Apple finally asks itself how much intractability is really worth, and how much it ultimately costs.
