Roger Fingas
Apple is once again at work on serious improvements to iCloud, a recent job listing may suggest.
The company is hunting for a senior product designer, according to the listing, spotted on Reddit. It was opened on July 9, but has yet to be filled and calls for someone to "work on new products and initiatives, and enhance existing experiences, for iCloud and Apple ID."
Candidates must be familiar with "Sketch, Keynote, Photoshop, or other design tools," and have five years of experience in user interface design, as well as "deep" familiarity with iOS and macOS.
"This person will specialize in distilling complex technical requirements into simple and effortless experiences for customers that uphold Apple's commitments to user privacy and security," the description explains, adding also that candidates should have "exemplary presentation skills in order to convey design directions and reasoning to executive sponsors." That indicates that the incoming designer will be responsible for high-level changes.
The job could simply represent the status quo, but Apple's online services are becoming increasingly important to its bottom line. In the June quarter, services revenue rose 31 percent year-over-year to $9.5 billion. That segment includes not just iCloud but Apple Music, iTunes, Apple Books, the App Store, and AppleCare.
The company will at least need to keep iCloud and iCloud Drive competitive with similar online services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. While people are often latched into iCloud from the moment they buy an Apple product, they can still choose to use alternate services for things like calendars and file storage.
The company has several paid iCloud plans, costing 99 cents per month for 50 gigabytes, $2.99 per month for 200 gigabytes, and $9.99 for 2 terabytes. In fact Apple is often criticized for its 5-gigabyte free plan, since that room all but evaporates after backing up a single device.
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4 Comments
An easy-to-use off-site backup service would be nice.
This is an area that is ripe for innovation. What Apple can bring to the game, and what differentiates it from so many other personal and consumer oriented cloud services, is trust. All cloud services must provide highly available, resilient, and high performance access to personal and shared assets and services. At the very least your relationship with your cloud service provider should be similar to your relationship with your bank. You have to trust your service provider/bank to safeguard your assets and you have to know that you can get at your assets at any time, or at least within an agreed upon timeframe and schedule. You also have to have a high degree of confidence that your service provider/bank isn't going to go out of business and take your assets with it to its grave. You also need to know that your service provider/bank is not going to let someone other than you dig around in your stuff for any reason, much less to glean information that benefits themselves. Until cloud service providers start treating their customer's data like tangible assets stored in a bank the entire industry will be held back.
I have no problem with using cloud services for other reasons, like caching and streaming, but when it comes to managing customer assets, if they aren't treating my assets like it's my money and safeguarding it in the same way a bank treats my money, I will not trust them and neither should you. I'm not a regulation hound, but I'd like to see cloud services providers be required by law to insure customer assets against loss. We have to set a high bar on this and I trust that Apple is one of the few companies that can actually deliver. Companies that aren't trustworthy need to find a new line of business.