Apple is slowly changing its ways and one of the first steps is to be more open and fix issues right away

Jun 30, 2015 20:55 GMT  ·  By

Who would have imagined that Apple may reverse one of their thought decisions after an open letter from an artist. Not only did they do that, but the response did not come as a Press Release a couple of weeks later, but as tweets posted by Eddy Cue himself.

Ten days ago, Taylor Swift wrote an open letter to Apple. She was not willing to release her new album on Apple Music - the streaming service they were about to release just because she didn't find it fair to have no income for the first three months, while the service was free for new users. Seems like a reasonable request after all and everyone expected for her to fail. Why? Because Steve Jobs' Apple never backed down from a decision unless it was truly a big mistake.

FLASHback

Remember the big Flash debate from a few years ago? Steve himself wrote a letter to explain why his company chose not to accept Adobe's product on iPhone and iPad. Nothing could convince Steve Jobs that this was not a wise decision. Developers, investors and even the media was against it and Steve did not back down.

Imagine an open letter sent by a developer or a user who wanted to play flash games on his iPhone would have reached Steve Jobs. I'm pretty sure he got a ton of letters, but the decision was already in place. Now, what is different about these two situations? Sure enough, Steve Jobs is long gone and the way Apple works has changed.

However, their reaction to Taylor Swift's open letter was not due to the public character of this issue. Apple, the company lead by Tim Cook, wants to makes things right.

The Press Release bottom line

A small change to the way the Apple Press Releases are written went unnoticed. A month ago, the last line used to say "Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad." In other words, Apple was about the technology and the way this can change our future. Good enough!

The Press Releases sent in June have a different ending line that says "Apple’s 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it."

The change is obvious. Apple is not about technology and making money anymore. They want everyone to understand that they are about people, about leaving the earth in a better shape and caring for the things around us.

Tweeting their way into the future

Twitter is real time and Apple wants to prove they get back to people in a modern way. Eddy Cue sent out three tweets in a matter of minutes. Three short messages that confirmed the huge company can react quickly and fix their issues. Eddy Cue usually tweets once a week. He may have never sent out 3 messages one after another, but this was the perfect moment to do it.

The conclusion was clear: Apple reacted in real time and the message was pretty straight-forward: They have the money to support the artists even when the customers are not paying. Apple Music is out today. Guess who is on top of the page for promoted artists? Taylor Swift. Her album "1989".

Open sourcing Swift

Another piece of news that only made waves in the developers' community was the one about Apple open-sourcing Swift - their new programming language. Apple announced version 2.0 of Swift and they want to make it truly available. There are voices in the community that say Apple opted for an open-source just because they will be the ones benefiting from it. After all, the more developers use their language, the more apps will show up in the AppStore and the more money they will make.

This is not the first time Apple is giving away free stuff just to have more developers around. The news is that Apple will release Swift ports for OS X, iOS, and Linux. Having the Linux community in this game may finally bring them over to the Mac. From what I understand, old developers are not eager to change their code from Objective-C to Swift just yet. The new language is not 100% baked anyway. However, new developers have a good reason to start their learning and code in Swift only.

There are two ways in which Apple has changed in the last year. The real-time (or just plain fast) responses to issues have repelled the haters. The way they open to developers will attract more people in this game.

Now if only someone could write an open letter to have them release a smaller iPhone and a retina MacBook Air...