The Apple Battery Cover-Up: Triumph of Management, Failure of Leadership

The Apple Battery Cover-Up: Triumph of Management, Failure of Leadership

Hardik Gandhi   February 01, 2018

This is a difficult post for me to write. It’s a post about Apple — yet it’s not the same Apple where I spent 22 years of my career. It’s also a post about competent management — and, the utter failure of leadership.starti

You’ve probably seen the headlines by now. Apple recently rolled out an update that slows down older phones, ostensibly in an effort to preserve the life of aging batteries.

The thing is, Apple didn’t tell anyone that this was happening; a lot of iPhone users upgraded to newer models, when they could have simply bought new batteries — a much smaller financial investment — and continued to use their old phones.

It’s been a public relations nightmare, with multiple class action suits already filed. And Apple’s solution to the problem has been to apologize — rather feebly, and only after the whole thing was uncovered by a Reddit user — and knock down the battery replacement cost to $29. (It normally runs about $79.)

This is unbelievable to me.

When I was at Apple in the early 2000s, I ran into a somewhat similar problem, albeit on a much smaller scale. About 800 iBooks (yes there was actual hardware called an iBook), all of them in university settings, started exhibiting problems with their CD trays.

We acted quickly, and replaced every single one of those 800 units, no questions asked.

I know for a fact that we lost a couple of customers to Microsoft over this. I also know that we did the right thing. We were proud to have done the right thing. And most of our customers appreciated it.

Even with this slight inconvenience, they felt good about how we were treating them. Our response to the hardware malfunction enhanced our brand and our reputation.

Again: The Apple you’re reading about today is not the same company I worked for all those 22 years.

I can think of so many better ways they could have handled this:

1. The best solution would have been to just be upfront with customers in the first place. Say, “Hey, we’re glad you enjoy your old-school iPhone, but you’re going to be left behind; in order to download the latest iOS updates, you need to upgrade to a newer device.”

This kind of thing is, of course, totally normal in the tech world; you can’t run the latest macOS on an older MacBook any more than you can run the latest version of Windows on a 1980s PC. Tech changes, and eventually goes obsolete.

2. Another solution? In response to the aging battery issue, offer a coupon to those old-school iPhone users, giving them 50 percent off an iPhone 8. This is a feel-good solution — a new phone for a fraction of the price! Plus, it gets people into the Apple Store, and makes them actually happy.

3. Apple could even have offered to replace those old batteries in the store, free of charge — an inconvenient and cumbersome solution, but at least it would have shown some real customer service initiative. And again, it would generate traffic to the Apple Store and an opportunity to upgrade. Has everyone forgotten about the traffic conversion factor?

Any of those solutions would have been preferable to Apple’s secretive software upgrade — which, again, we only know about through social media users, not because Apple was forthcoming about it — to say nothing of its lame apology and its trifling $29 battery offer.

Here I might note that, according to some of my sources on the inside, the actual cost of a battery is in the single digits — so the fact that Apple is still making people pay $29 for a new one, in the face of a major PR scandal and with $200 billion in the reserves, is absolutely stunning.

Sure: In the short term, Apple’s saving a few bucks. That’s because the company is managing this problem well.

Managing a problem means getting through it with minimum trouble to the company. It involves a focus on numbers and accounting, but a short-sightedness when it comes to relationships and customer goodwill.

Instead of managing the problem, Apple should be leading it — not doing the bare minimum to save its neck, but doing the right thing, taking pride in doing the right thing, and trusting that customers will appreciate it. That’s what leadership means.

In other words, Apple should be thinking a few steps ahead, and realizing that a few bucks for free battery replacements (or discounted iPhone upgrades) mean nothing compared to the loss of goodwill the company now faces.

Goodwill (or relationships, when you get right down to it) is the most precious commodity it or any other company has. And Apple is squandering it.

And that’s to say nothing of the lack of communication here — as if Apple’s executives don’t know the old political adage, that the cover-up is always worse than the deed.

This whole episode may be seen as a turning point for Apple — its real transition from Steve’s company into Tim’s. Tim Cook is a great manager, and he’s certainly managing this situation ably.

But Steve would have done something better: He would have shown leadership.

Facebook’s newsfeed changes: a disaster or an opportunity for news publishers?

Facebook’s newsfeed changes: a disaster or an opportunity for news publishers?

Hardik Gandhi   January 13, 2018

Social media and digital executives in newsrooms already have a tough job connecting their content to consumers via social media, but Facebook’s proposed changes in the algorithms of its ‘newsfeed’ are going to make it a lot harder. Social networks offer immense opportunities for reaching vast new audiences and increasing the engagement of users with journalism. The most important platform in the world is about to make that more difficult.

Clearly, this is a blow for news publishers who have spent the last decade or so fighting a battle for survival in a world where people’s attention and advertising have shifted to other forms of content and away from news media brand’s own sites. They are clearly very concerned. Yet, could this be a wake-up call that will mean the better, most adaptive news brands benefit?

I’m not going to argue that this is good news for news publishers, but blind panic or cynical abuse of Facebook is not a sufficient response. The honest answer is that we don’t know exactly what the effect will be because Facebook, as usual, have not given out the detail and different newsrooms will be impacted differently.

It’s exactly the kind of issue we are looking at in our LSE Truth, Trust and Technology Commission. Our first consultation workshop with journalists, and related practitioners from sectors such as the platforms, is coming up in a few weeks. This issue matters not just for the news business. It is also central to the quality and accessibility of vital topical information for the public.

Here’s my first attempt to unpack some of the issues.

Mark Zuckerberg: making time on Facebook ‘well spent’

Firstly, this is not about us (journalists). Get real. Facebook is an advertising revenue generation machine. It is a public company that has a duty to maximise profits for its shareholders. It seeks people’s attention so that it can sell it to advertisers. It has a sideline in charging people to put their content on its platform, too. It is a social network, not a news-stand. It was set up to connect ‘friends’ not to inform people about current affairs. Journalism, even where shared on Facebook, is a relatively small part of its traffic.

Clearly, as Facebook has grown it has become a vital part of the global (and local) information infrastructure. Other digital intermediaries such as Google are vastly important, and other networks such as Twitter are significant. And never forget that there are some big places such as China where other similar networks dominate, not Facebook or other western companies. But in many countries and for many demographics, Facebook is the Internet, and the web is increasingly where people get their journalism. It’s a mixed and shifting picture but as the Reuters Digital News Report shows, Facebook is a critical source for news.

From Reuters Digital News Report 2017

If you read Zuckerberg’s statement he makes it clear that he is trying to make Facebook a more comfortable place to be:

“recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”

His users are ‘telling him’ (i.e. fewer of them are spending less time on FB) what a plethora of recent studies and books have shown which is that using Facebook can make you miserable. News content — which is usually ‘bad’ news — doesn’t cheer people up. The angry, aggressive and divisive comment that often accompanies news content doesn’t help with the good vibes. And while the viral spread of so-called ‘fake news’ proves it is popular, it also contributes to the sense that Facebook is a place where you can’t trust the news content. Even when it is credible, it’s often designed to alarm and disturb. Not nice. And Facebook wants nice.

One response to this from journalists is despair and cynicism. The UK media analyst Adam Tinworth sums this approach up in a witty and pithy ‘translation’ of Zuckerberg’s statement:

“We can’t make money unless you keep telling us things about yourself that we can sell to advertisers. Please stop talking about news.”

Another accusation is that Facebook is making these changes because of the increasing costs it is expending at the behest of governments who are now demanding it does more to fight misinformation and offensive content. That might be a side-benefit for Facebook but I don’t think it’s a key factor. It might even be a good thing for credible news if the algorithmic changes include ways of promoting reliable content. But overall the big picture is that journalism is being de-prioritised in favour of fluffier stuff.

Even Jeff Jarvis, the US pioneer of digital journalism who has always sought to work with the grain of the platforms, admits that this is disturbing:

“I’m worried that news and media companies — convinced by Facebook (and in some cases by me) to put their content on Facebook or to pivot to video — will now see their fears about having the rug pulled out from under them realized and they will shrink back from taking journalism to the people where they are having their conversations because there is no money to be made there.”*

The Facebook changes are going to be particularly tough on news organisations that invested heavily in the ‘pivot to video’. These are often the ‘digital native’ news brands who don’t have the spread of outlets for their content that ‘legacy’ news organisations enjoy. The BBC has broadcast. The Financial Times has a newspaper. These organisations have gone ‘digital first’ but like the Economist they have a range of social media strategies. And many of them, like the New York Times, have built a subscription base. Email newsletters provide an increasingly effective by-pass for journalism to avoid the social media honey-trap. It all makes them less dependent on ‘organic’ reach through Facebook.

But Facebook will remain a major destination for news organisations to reach people. News media still needs to be part of that. As the ever-optimistic Jarvis also points out, if these changes mean that Facebook becomes a more civil place where people are more engaged, then journalism designed to fit in with that culture might thrive more:

“journalism and news clearly do have a place on Facebook. Many people learn what’s going on in the world in their conversations there and on the other social platforms. So we need to look how to create conversational news. The platforms need to help us make money that way. It’s good for everybody, especially for citizens.”

News organisations need to do more — not just because of Facebook but also on other platforms. People are increasingly turning to closed networks or channels such as Whatsapp. Again, it’s tough, but journalism needs to find new ways to be on those. I’ve written huge amounts over the last ten years urging news organisations to be more networked and to take advantage of the extraordinary connective, communicative power of platforms such as Facebook. There has been brilliant innovations by newsrooms over that period to go online, to be social and to design content to be discovered and shared through the new networks. But this latest change shows how the media environment continues to change in radical ways and so the journalism must also be reinvented.

Social media journalist Esra Dogramaci has written an excellent article on some of the detailed tactics that newsrooms can use to connect their content to users in the face of technological developments like Facebook’s algorithmic change:

“if you focus on building a relationship with your audience and developing loyalty, it doesn’t matter what the algorithm does. Your audience will seek you out, and return to you over and over again. That’s how you ‘beat’ Facebook.”

Journalism Must Change

The journalism must itself change. For example, it is clear that emotion is going to be an even bigger driver of attention on Facebook after these changes. The best journalism will continue to be factual and objective at its core — even when it is campaigning or personal. But as I have written before, a new kind of subjectivity can not only reach the hearts and minds of people on places like Facebook, but it can also build trust and understanding.

This latest change by Facebook is dramatic, but it is a response to what people ‘like’. There is a massive appetite for news — and not just because of Trump or Brexit. Demand for debate and information has never been greater or more important in people’s everyday lives. But we have to change the nature of journalism not just the distribution and discovery methods.

The media landscape is shifting to match people’s real media lives in our digital age. Another less noticed announcement from Facebook last week suggested they want to create an ecosystem for local personalised ‘news’. Facebook will use machine learning to surface news publisher content at a local level. It’s not clear how they will vet those publishers but clearly this is another opportunity for newsrooms to engage. Again, dependency on Facebook is problematic, to put it mildly, but ignoring this development is to ignore reality. The old model of a local newspaper for a local area doesn’t effectively match how citizens want their local news anymore.

What Facebook Must Do

Facebook has to pay attention to the needs of journalism and as it changes its algorithm to reduce the amount of ‘public content’ it has to work harder at prioritising quality news content. As the Guardian’s outstanding digital executive Chris Moran points out, there’s no indication from Facebook that they have factored this into the latest change:

Fighting ‘fake news’ is not just about blocking the bad stuff, it is ultimately best achieved by supporting the good content. How you do that is not a judgement Facebook can be expected or relied upon to do by itself. It needs to be much more transparent and collaborative with the news industry as it rolls out these changes in its products.

When something like Facebook gets this important to society, like any other public utility, it becomes in the public interest to make policy to maximise social benefits. This is why governments around the world are considering and even enacting legislation or regulation regarding the platforms, like Facebook. Much of this is focused on specific issues such as the spread of extremist or false and disruptive information.

Learn mobile app development with these 10 online courses

Learn mobile app development with these 10 online courses

Hardik Gandhi   January 12, 2018

Top 10 online courses to help your learn mobile app development plus some advice from the experts on why app prototyping makes all the difference!

Thinking about becoming a Mobile App Developer? You’re in luck! There’s never been a better time to learn mobile app development. Take a look:

• The market for apps is soaring. Apple’s App Store and Google Play global downloads reached nearly 26 billion and global mobile app revenue was estimated at $77 billion in 2017.
• App Developers are some of the hottest prospects on the current job scene, with the average Senior Mobile App Developer in the US on $80,013/year.
• Looking ahead, the app business is expected to do even better, with global mobile app revenue forecast for 2020 at $189 billion.

For budding developers, it’s time to hop aboard the gravy train. But what’s the first step in learning mobile app development? What courses should you sign up for? Should you teach yourself app development? We’ve got you covered.

And yes, the first step is learning how to prototype a mobile app. Learn why here — plus get our top 10 online courses on mobile app development to get you started right away, no matter where you are!

10 free and paid online courses to help you learn mobile app development

Here are our top 10 online courses to help you learn mobile app development:

1 — Android Development Tips Weekly series on Lynda

Teach yourself app development with this series of Android development tips by David Gassner.

Each week, David shares techniques to help you speed up your coding, improve app functionality or make your apps more reliable and refined.

The tutorials cover developing the app’s user interface, backend processing and open source libraries, to get your coding knowledge off the ground even quicker.

• Level: Beginner — Intermediate
• Commitment: approximately 3h per video
• Price-point: 30-day free trial, from $19.99 thereafter

2 — Mobile App Development for Beginners on Udemy

Dee Aliyu Odumosu’s mobile app development course is ideal if you’re looking to break into iOS.

Learn how to create and customize 10+ iPhone apps (using Swift 3 and Xcode 8) with easy step-by-step instructions. The course begins with implementation of basic elements — UILabel, UIButton, UITextField etc. — Auto Layout and multiple-sized icons, with more advanced classes covering memory issues, storyboarding and displaying rich local notifications.

Note that this course requires you to own and already be familiar with Mac.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: approximately 33 hours
• Price-point: $10.99 (New Year discount, was $50.00)

3 — iOS App Development with Swift Specialization on Coursera

This is the ultimate Swift for iOS development course, brought to you by Parham Aarabi and the University of Toronto.

Using XCode, Parham will teach you how to design elegant interactions and create fully functioning iOS apps, such as the photo editing app for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The course also includes best practices to help you become proficient in functional Swift concepts.

Note that this course requires you to own and already be familiar with Mac.

• Level: Intermediate (some previous experience required)
• Commitment: 6 weeks
• Price-point: 7-day free trial, $49 per month thereafter

4 — Introduction to Mobile Application Development using Android on edX

Learn mobile app development and the basics of Android Studio in Jogesh K Muppala’s introduction to the Android platform.

In this 5-week course, you’ll explore the basics of Android application components as well as Activities and their lifecycle, some UI design principles, Multimedia, 2D graphics and networking support for Android.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: 6 weeks
• Price-point: free

5 — Full Stack Web and Multiplatform Mobile App Development Specialization on Coursera

If you’re learning mobile application development for Android and found the above course useful, try this course out next.

Here you’ll have the chance to build complete web and hybrid mobile solutions, as well as master front-end web, hybrid mobile app and server-side development.

• Level: Intermediate (some previous experience required)
• Commitment: approximately 20 weeks
• Price-point: 7-day free trial, $39 per month thereafter

6 — iOS 9 and Swift 2: From Beginner to Paid Professional on Skillshare

Mark Price’s online course for iOS Swift is everything you need to know about iOS 9 development.

This is another great set of classes for novice iOS coders. Build 15+ apps for iOS 9, learn swift 2.0 and publish apps to the App Store. Warmups, class projects and exercises will help you keep on top of the workload.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: approximately 37 hours
• Price-point: from $15 a month

7 — The iOS Development Course That Gets You Hired on Career Foundry

Jeffrey Camealy presents the iOS Development course to get your hired.

1-on-1 mentorship from industry experts and real-world projects complement a set of 6 structured modules. The course covers the very basic principles of iOS development and takes you right to the point of submitting an app to the App Store.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: 6 months
• Price-point: $4000 (payment plans available)

8 — Get Started With React Native on TutsPlus

Markus Mühlberger’s course for React Native is perfect for anyone who wants to code for multiple mobile platforms.

Learn how to create and customize UI elements, build user interaction, and integrate third-party components into apps for both iOS and Android. Upon completion, you’ll be able to write mobile apps in React Native.

• Level: Intermediate
• Commitment: 1.2 hours
• Price-point: $29 a month

9 — Build a Simple Android App with Java on Treehouse

Ben Deitch’s course will help you build simple mobile apps for Android with Java, without any prior knowledge.

Best-suited to budding Android developers, this course will explore programming in Android and some very basic concepts of the Android SDK. By the end of the course, you’ll have a working knowledge of how a basic app works.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: 1.5 hours
• Price-point: from $25 a month

10 — Try iOS on Code School

Gregg Pollack’s tutorials on iOS app development from the ground up and requires only basic coding experience.

Write your first iPhone app code and learn about different UI elements, such as buttons, labels, tabs and images. Upon completion, you’ll be able to connect to the internet to fetch data, build out table views and navigate between different areas of your app.

• Level: Beginner
• Commitment: 6–8 hours
• Price-point: $29 a month

It’s an exciting time for mobile app developers. And as you can see, there are plenty of resources out there to help get your career off the ground. But don’t forget to look at the big picture.

Prototyping is an integral part of the mobile app life cycle. Download Justinmind now and explore a prototyping tool that’s made with the entire product team in mind.

Why people shouldn’t learn to code

Why people shouldn’t learn to code

Hardik Gandhi   January 10, 2018

As a scholar, I like arguing against myself. Thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis: the Hegelian dialectic can be one of the more productive and entertaining paths to truth.

And so, in this post, I attack the central thesis of my research: that the ability to program a computer, and the computational thinking that can come with it, is a power that must be democratized.

Why do I believe this? I believe that a severe concentration of power nearly always leads to injustice, and justice is one of my core values. That only 20 million people write the software that shapes the digital experiences of the 7.5 billion people on Earth is concentration of power second only to global income inequality. My research aims to lower the barriers to acquiring the power to code, which I hope will more evenly distribute this power, which in turn will reduce injustice.

Agree with me? Great! But that’s no fun. And it leaves this position open to attack, with no sense of how robust it actually is. My position might even be wrong.

So let’s consider three anti-theses to my thesis.

Ability is an arms race

One critique of my thesis is that the ability to code is an arms race. No matter how easy we make it to learn to code, this greater ease will only amplify the abilities of those who already could. The privileged few who learn to code now will learn younger and faster. All of those talented new engineers that didn’t have jobs before still won’t get jobs at Google because everyone else will be that much more talented. No matter what we do, power will remain concentrated, because the underlying social structures that protect that power will remain unchanged.

This is an instance of Kentaro Toyama’s argument about technology as an amplifier rather than a catalyst of social change. The argument is that technology of any kind, whether a learning technology, a better pedagogy, a simpler programming language, or a better developer tool, will only intensify whatever social structures exist. It’s up to us to change our behavior, our values, and ultimately, our institutions, if we want to redistribute power. More effective learning will not.

Software is evil

Another critique of my thesis is that the software itself is a net loss for humanity. Communication technologies have eroded our relationships, democratization of publishing has eroded truth, platforms have eroded innovation, and automation has eroded our livelihood. There may be some good things that come from digitizing information and automating decisions, but on the whole, they take more than they give. We should therefore have less software, not more, and so we should have fewer people that can code, not more. Like nuclear weapons, we should use software sparingly, if it all.

This argument abounds in pop culture of today. As all dystopian sci-fi has for a century, Black Mirror is popularizing this position, portraying how even small changes in how we use software can lead to plausible and horrifying outcomes.

Software is dangerous

One of the critiques I’ve heard most is the idea that software is too powerful to be democratized. As in medicine, engineering, and law, some knowledge should be regulated, only accessible to people with appropriate training. The risk of allowing everyone have the ability to code is that we increase harm. And perhaps were already seeing the result of unregulated access to the ability to code: software fails, people die. In fact, I analyzed 30 years of software failures reported in the news, finding that about once per month, the news reports at least one death, injury, or threatened access to food or shelter due to software problems. Is all of this faulty software really worth this increasingly frequent harm?

Some countries such as Canada do regulate software engineering. These efforts are often poorly implemented and premature, but not necessarily wrong in principle. We don’t want a billion people to know a little bit about heart surgery. Why would we want a billion people to know a little bit about software development?

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Now, to synthesis. How can we reconcile these conflicting stances?

All four of these arguments have a kernel of truth. The small number of developers in the world really do concentrate power, and that does lead to injustice like algorithmic bias, poor software accessibility for people with disabilities, and innovations that primarily serve the privileged classes that created them. And yet, software does cause harm and can be evil. It’s entirely possible that by helping more people learn to code, we’ll just end up with more people with brittle knowledge of how to create software, more bad software, and the same people in power.

The fatal flaw that puts these positions in conflict is that none of them make explicit who will learn to code and what they will do with that knowledge. I envision a world in which a vast majority of educated people understand enough about code not to become engineers, but to advocate for justice. Some of those people will become software engineers, but they will be different, more diverse people, who represent society, unlike the engineers we have now. This larger group won’t make any more software than we would have made otherwise (and therefore won’t cause any more harm or evil than we would have had otherwise). Rather, this new majority of computationally literate citizens will be a political force that demands justice.

This literacy could not be more pressing. For the next century, we will be heavily debating net neutrality, privacy, the regulation of automation. We will be trying to parent in the presence of social media. We will be trying to make objective journalism sustainable and desirable. We need every parent, politician, and person in power to understand what code is and what it isn’t. And we need the 20 plus million developers in the world to reflect everyone, so the software they create serves everyone.

The other fatal flaw in all of the positions above is that they don’t make clear what “learning to code” means. What does everyone need to understand about software to be in a position to advocate objectively? It’s not necessarily knowing a programming language. It might mean knowing what programming languages are and are not capable of. It might mean understanding the intersection between computing and policy. It might mean understanding how software is engineered and who engineers it, so everyone can comprehend what any particular policy proposal they’re voting on would actually mean in practice. Some of these ideas have made it into our curricular standards and assessments, but most have not. We need to understand what this knowledge is and invent ways of teaching it effectively.

Software is not going away. It will continue to be evil and dangerous. It will continue to bring joy and prosperity. But it will not bring social change, and it will not provide universal access to knowledge about computing. That’s up to us.