Apple just reached a new achievement with its music-streaming service, but it's faced with criticism over some of its other software, particularly iTunes.
In a podcast titled The Talk Show with Daring Fireball's John Gruber, Apple executives Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi revealed that Apple Music has more than 11 million subscribers and a jaw-dropping 782 million iCloud users.
During the discussion, the two also touched on other products, saying that the company's system processes 200,000 iMessages per second and 750 million iTunes and App Store transactions weekly.
The show wasn't focused only on the positives, though, as Gruber continued to ask the pair about the issues of Apple's software, especially the ones found by popular Apple bloggers such as Jim Dalrymple and Walt Mossberg, who is also an executive editor at The Verge and at Re/code.
For background info, Mossberg says that he dreads opening iTunes and that it became "bloated, complex and sluggish" again. On top of that, he reports that the situation grew worse when the Cupertino brand integrated Apple Music with it.
"Just the other day, I tried to sync two iPads to it (a rare event) and it took forever for the program to recognize them. On my three Macs, which were built from 2013 – 2015, iTunes is just too slow at almost every task," he says.
However, Cue says that Mossberg's performance issues have "nothing to do with iTunes." Considering how everyone agrees with the issues pointed out, that comes off as a little bit odd.
"We designed it in a time when everybody was syncing directly via cable, so the things didn't exist in the cloud. And having a centralized place where having all your content there to sync was really key 'cause it made it really easy to do ... When we went to Apple Music ... one of the things that we wanted to do that was different was we didn't want just the music that lived in the cloud ... Right now we think we've redesigned iTunes ... that makes it even easier to use in the music space," Cue says.
For a better picture of the software problems, Reddit users at /r/Apple have listed a wide-ranging number of issues, including but not limited to in Notes, Siri and iMessaging. This clearly indicates that the company has a lot of wrinkles that it needs to iron out.
Michael Hiltzik of The Los Angeles Times made an interesting proposition regarding the matter, saying that Apple is "building new functions on top of an outdated core."
Of course, bugs and whatnot are common in virtually any software, but with many users singing the same negative tune shows that Apple has got to work on its apps.
"We're frustrated overall to hear this characterized as the quality is dropping overall because we know that's not true," Federighi says, noting that "there's certainly a reality that if people are having these experiences, then there's something we can improve."
To boil things down, it's impressive how Apple achieved 11 million subscribers on Apple Music, but if the company wants to keep the numbers growing, it'll have to focus on some tweaks here and there.
