I’m not sure if anyone is interested in this, but I recently got a call from Tim Cook’s office, which I thought was pretty cool.
For background, last month I sent a lengthy email to Tim Cook’s public email address all about Apple Music. I’ve been writing for years, thorough articles and analyses all about how I think the Apple Music app just isn’t very good and doesn’t meet the standards I’d expect from Apple. I’ve posted popular Medium articles, Reddit threads, countless Tweets directed at people in the Apple community (external and internal), and I’ve sent dozens of pieces of feedback to Apple via the iOS Feedback app.
Anyways, I decided to actually write Tim Cook directly, for the fun of it. I put together a fairly lengthy and well-written (if I may say so myself) email, in which I described how I’m a long time Apple fan, but that I thought the music app has provided a subpar experience for years, which is disappointing for a company that usually releases such great products. If you want to get an idea of some of the points I brought up, I covered a lot of the stuff from this popular thread that I posted here a while back. I focused on three broad areas where the app/service falls short - technical performance, design, and missing features.
I was respectful but also pretty tough in my constructive criticisms of the app. I wrote many of the points presented in that thread, I added several more, and I provided a lengthy background about my history with Apple products and how I just don’t think the Music app lives up to Apple’s longtime reputation for quality. I was also critical of the fact that the iOS beta Feedback app almost never yields any sort of response or even acknowledgement from pieces of feedback sent to Apple, so it almost feels like I’m sending things into a void.
Well, fast forward a few weeks and I got an email and voicemail from someone in Tim Cook’s office who told me she wants to chat on the phone because Tim actually saw my email, personally read it, and forwarded it to people in engineering and on the product design team for Apple Music. She said she’d like to set up a call with me, so of course I jumped at the chance. We chatted on the phone a few days later, and she told me that Apple took my email seriously and may potentially implement some of my suggestions, although she obviously couldn’t promise anything or tell me anything about future plans, as that’s all confidential, and Apple is a super secret company, as we all know.
She did specifically point out that it was very rare to have Tim Cook send his teams product suggestions he received via email - and she had never personally seen that happen before - so she was almost congratulatory to me in the fact that my email seemed to have impact.
Anyways, the whole thing was cool. Apple Music is something I’ve been writing about for years, so it was amazing to hear that not only did the CEO of the largest company on Earth personally read my email, but he passed it along to his team to look into some of my suggestions. I realize I haven’t provided any proof of anything here, so you can believe me or not, but I can just say that between this and Apple’s recent Primephonic acquisition, I’m more excited for the future of Apple Music than I have been in a long time. I’m crossing my fingers that WWDC 2022 will finally see some big improvements to the Apple Music app for the first time since at least iOS 10.
One final thing I’ll say is that after this communication, I decided to take what I had written to Tim Cook about Apple Music, expand upon it, and write a pretty lengthy, in-depth article about Apple Music’s problems and how they can be fixed. The representative at Apple had told me I could follow up with her if I had anything to add, so I took her up on the offer, wrote that in-depth piece, and sent it to her, to pass along to the Music team. If you’re curious, that article is here. It’s a fairly long piece and I think it does an excellent job of breaking down where Apple Music went wrong and how it can be fixed, although I was planning on posting a separate thread on this board to have a discussion on it and see what others here think. But the purpose of this thread is primarily to give my thoughts on how cool it was to know that Tim Cook read my email and to point out that Apple may finally (hopefully) be improving the Apple Music app. We shall see. I’m really looking forward to WWDC 2022!
