Apple’s WebKit team published its tracking prevention policy last week, outlining its stance against technologies designed to track user activity across the web.
Falling in line with the company’s pro-privacy position, the WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy outlines the web tracking practices it believes should be limited by default. Webkit, the open-source rendering engine that powers Safari, aims to treat attempts to circumvent the policy as security abuse: “We treat circumvention of shipping anti-tracking measures with the same seriousness as
“No exceptions.” The policy issues a firm warning to parties who fail to adhere to the standards, stating:
“We do not grant exceptions to our tracking prevention
technologies to specific parties. Some parties might have valid uses for
techniques that are also used for tracking. But WebKit often has no technical
means to distinguish valid uses from tracking, and doesn’t know what the
parties involved will do with the collected data, either now or in the future.”
Tracking prevention measures. According to the document, WebKit has implemented (or will implement, as new circumvention methods arise) protections and defenses against tracking techniques that could impede user privacy.
Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) has evolved since it launched in 2017 — primarily to cut off workarounds by ad tech firms. ITP is designed to block first and third-party trackers from capturing cross-site browsing data for ad targeting purposes.
WebKit said it will prevent covert tracking and all cross-site tracking (even when it’s not covert). This includes cross-site tracking, stateful tracking, covert stateful tracking, navigational tracking, fingerprinting, as well as all tracking techniques not currently known.
Additionally, the document states that if a tracking technique
isn’t preventable “without undue user harm,” WebKit will take measures to limit
the use of such techniques by obtaining explicit user consent for potential
tracking. “For example, limiting the time window for tracking or reducing the
available bits of entropy — unique data points that may be used to identify a
user or a user’s behavior,” WebKit wrote.
Google’s response. While Apple makes its play to tighten the reins on user data privacy, Google is challenging Apple’s approach with call this week for an industry discussion on how to balance user privacy and
Why we should care. Apple’s firm stance on tracking user’s web activity has implications for tracking parties and advertisers that have already been wrestling with Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention efforts.
Apple isn’t closing the door all the way, however. “We may alter tracking prevention methods to permit certain use cases, particularly when greater strictness would harm the user experience,” the document states. “In other cases, we will design and implement new web technologies to re-enable these practices without reintroducing tracking capabilities.”
Apple’s policy certainly disrupts how user data is collected, how advertisers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns on Apple’s Safari browser on iOS and macOS devices. Additionally, advertisers may face further restrictions to audience measurement, analytics tracking
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Apple is taking a hard stance on online privacy with a new anti-tracking policy in Safari.
The iPhone maker has published a “WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy” that goes into specifics about the types of anti-tracking methods it has developed, the practices it believes are harmful to users, and the unintended consequences of those preventive countermeasures.
The open-source WebKit browser rendering engine is the basis for Safari, in addition to the browsers bundled with Amazon Kindle ebook reader and Samsung Tizen OS.
Blink — the rendering engine that powers Google Chrome — is also a fork of WebKit. But on iOS, Chrome and other third-party browsers rely on WebKit due to restrictions imposed by Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines (Section 2.5.6).
The policy enforcement comes as use of ad-blockers is at its peak, with privacy-focused web browser Brave registering a 1,200 percent increase in verified publishers using its Brave Rewards program since July last year.
Brave blocks ads by by default, but allows its users to earn BAT tokens if they choose to accept ads that are provided by the company.
Intelligent Tracking Protection
Publishers and companies rely heavily on online tracking — i.e. collecting (anonymized) data about a user’s activity on the web — to keep tabs on your every move as you hop from one site to the other.
Thanks everyone who attended my talk on web privacy at #usesec19. My demos worked – yay!
By the way, we *just* announced the WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy: https://t.co/jo5MPkNAAs
— John Wilander (@johnwilander) August 14, 2019
While this is typically used for targeted advertising, the implications go beyond just serving relevant ads in that it allows marketers to create detailed dossiers about your interests — resulting in significant loss of privacy.
This involves the use of cookies, tracking pixels, browser and device fingerprinting, and other adtech-based navigational tracking methods intended to amass browsing activities and build elaborate profiles of web users.
Apple, for its part, began to crack down on web-tracking two years ago with Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP). The technology aims to limit advertisers’ cross-site tracking on iOS and macOS Safari browsers, at the same time, measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns on the web without compromising on your privacy.
The anti-tracking policy
Viewed in that light, the new policy is an extension of this privacy-by-design paradigm. It seeks to prevent all forms of covert tracking methods outlined above, failing which it will ask for user’s informed consent before allowing tracking.
Apple warns that parties trying to circumvent its anti-tracking tech in Safari will be treated “with the same seriousness as exploitation of security vulnerabilities,” and that it “may add additional restrictions without prior notice.”
This is a big deal — @webkit releases a Tracking Prevention Policy outlining the types of tracking practices that are (or will be) blocked in WebKit (and thus Safari). https://t.co/E0SKOx6rqp
— Steven Englehardt (@s_englehardt) August 15, 2019
At the same time, the Cupertino-based tech giant acknowledged it will “try to limit unintended impact” of its anti-tracking methods, particularly on practices that could be affected because “they rely on techniques that can also be used for tracking,” such as “Like” buttons, third-party sign-on, and bot detection.
It is, however, not immediately clear if paywall detection methods employed by publishers will be considered forbidden in this context.
Privacy trumps all
“When faced with a tradeoff, we will typically prioritize user benefits over preserving current website practices,” the WebKit engineering team said.
Apple is not the first company to go after abusive tracking methods — the company notes its anti-tracking methods were inspired by Mozilla’s anti-tracking policy. But with Safari being the default browser on all Apple devices, the development could tip the scales in its favor.
By equating circumvention of anti-tracking measures with a security vulnerability, Apple has taken its efforts to guarantee user privacy up a notch.
While a lot of it will depend how the policy is enforced, you can bet it will force advertisers and other browser makers — including Google’s widely used Chrome — to rethink their approach. And that can only be a win for privacy.
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Apple is offering between $100,000 and $1 million for anyone who can hack an iPhone.
Chesnot/Getty Images
Apple has massively increased the amount it’s offering hackers for finding vulnerabilities in iPhones and Macs, up to $1 million. It’s by far the highest bug bounty on offer from any major tech company.
That’s up from $200,000, and in the fall the program will be open to all researchers. Previously only those on the company’s invite-only bug bounty program were eligible to receive rewards.
As Forbes reported on Monday, Apple is also launching a Mac bug bounty, which was confirmed Thursday, but it’s also extending it to watchOS and its Apple TV operating system. The announcements came in Las Vegas at the Black Hat conference, where Apple’s head of security engineering Ivan Krstić gave a talk on iOS and macOS security.
Forbes also revealed on Monday that Apple was to give bug bounty participants “developer devices”—iPhones that let hackers dive further into iOS. They can, for instance, pause the processor to look at what’s happening with data in memory. Krstić confirmed the iOS Security Research Device program would be by application only. It will arrive next year.
$1 million for an iPhone hack
The full $1 million will go to researchers who can find a hack of the kernel—the core of iOS—with zero clicks required by the iPhone owner. Another $500,000 will be given to those who can find a “network attack requiring no user interaction.” There’s also a 50% bonus for hackers who can find weaknesses in software before it’s released.
Apple is increasing those rewards in the face of an increasingly profitable private market where hackers sell the same information to governments for vast sums.
As Maor Shwartz told Forbes, the cost of a single exploit (a program that uses vulnerabilities typically to take control of a computer or phone) can fetch as much as $1.5 millon. An exploit targeting WhatsApp where no clicks are required from the user, for instance, can be sold to a government agency for that much, though such tools are rare. Only one or two a year will be sold, from a pool of around 400 researchers who focus on such high-end hacking. “It’s really hard to research them and produce a working exploit,” he said.
Previously, a company called Zerodium was vocal about how much it will pay researchers before handing them to its unknown government customers. In January, the secretive company announced it was offering $2 million for a remote hack of an iPhone.
Krstić said the bug bounty had been a success to date, with 50 serious bugs reported since the 2016 launch.
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Apple is offering between $100,000 and $1 million for anyone who can hack an iPhone.
Chesnot/Getty Images
Apple has massively increased the amount it’s offering hackers for finding vulnerabilities in iPhones and Macs, up to $1 million. It’s by far the highest bug bounty on offer from any major tech company.
That’s up from $200,000, and in the fall the program will be open to all researchers. Previously only those on the company’s invite-only bug bounty program were eligible to receive rewards.
As Forbes reported on Monday, Apple is also launching a Mac bug bounty, which was confirmed Thursday, but it’s also extending it to watchOS and its Apple TV operating system. The announcements came in Las Vegas at the Black Hat conference, where Apple’s head of security engineering Ivan Krstić gave a talk on iOS and macOS security.
Forbes also revealed on Monday that Apple was to give bug bounty participants “developer devices”—iPhones that let hackers dive further into iOS. They can, for instance, pause the processor to look at what’s happening with data in memory. Krstić confirmed the iOS Security Research Device program would be by application only. It will arrive next year.
$1 million for an iPhone hack
The full $1 million will go to researchers who can find a hack of the kernel—the core of iOS—with zero clicks required by the iPhone owner. Another $500,000 will be given to those who can find a “network attack requiring no user interaction.” There’s also a 50% bonus for hackers who can find weaknesses in software before it’s released.
Apple is increasing those rewards in the face of an increasingly profitable private market where hackers sell the same information to governments for vast sums.
As Maor Shwartz told Forbes, the cost of a single exploit (a program that uses vulnerabilities typically to take control of a computer or phone) can fetch as much as $1.5 millon. An exploit targeting WhatsApp where no clicks are required from the user, for instance, can be sold to a government agency for that much, though such tools are rare. Only one or two a year will be sold, from a pool of around 400 researchers who focus on such high-end hacking. “It’s really hard to research them and produce a working exploit,” he said.
Previously, a company called Zerodium was vocal about how much it will pay researchers before handing them to its unknown government customers. In January, the secretive company announced it was offering $2 million for a remote hack of an iPhone.
Krstić said the bug bounty had been a success to date, with 50 serious bugs reported since the 2016 launch.
Apple’s move will force Facebook to redesign its messaging apps, two people familiar with the issue said. It may have a particularly heavy impact on WhatsApp, which has been using the internet calling feature in a variety of ways, including for implementing the app’s end-to-end encryption, the people said. Other messaging app developers, who have long relied on the internet calling feature to keep their apps running in the background on Apple mobile devices, will also have to rebuild their apps, said people familiar with the issue.
In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said the company was not collecting data through the calling feature. “The changes to the upcoming iOS releases are not insignificant, but we are in conversations with Apple on how best to address,” the spokesperson said. “To be clear—we are using the PushKit VoIP API to deliver a world-class, private messaging experience, not for the purpose of collecting data.”
A spokeswoman for Apple did not have a comment.
The change comes as Apple and Facebook are embroiled in a fight over messaging—which is strategic to each for different reasons. Facebook is taking steps to unify its messaging services, which it sees as a way to keep its users loyal and engaged, and which could lead to new revenue streams around commerce and other services. But a stronger Facebook messaging service could threaten Apple’s iMessage, one reason why people keep buying iPhones.
Apple is making the change in the September rollout of its new mobile operating system, iOS 13. App developers have until April 2020 to comply with the new specifications. While the change was announced in a breakout session at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June, it has received very little public attention since then.
Debate about how app makers use the internet calling feature, which relies on a technology called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, has been simmering for years. After Facebook split off messaging into a standalone Messenger app in 2014, the social media giant tried to keep the technology in its main app. But Apple figured out what Facebook was doing and made it stop, said Phillip Shoemaker, who until 2016 was the head of Apple’s app review team. But Messenger and WhatsApp, which allow internet voice calls, still use the feature.
“Messenger can still use [VoIP background] mode, and does,” said Mr. Shoemaker. “What they do in the background, whether it be accept calls, listen in all the time or update the content of the main app, it’s all unclear to Apple, but could be happening.”
Aside from potentially gathering data, the feature also sucks up system resources, shortening battery life. The impact on battery life briefly made it into the headlines back in 2015 when it was discovered that the main Facebook app was using the voice-calling feature to run in the background.
Other major messaging apps like Snapchat and China’s WeChat have been using the feature to run in the background for a number of reasons unrelated to voice calling, one of the people familiar with the issue said. Snap had no immediate comment, and WeChat didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Privacy Battles
Apple cited the need to protect privacy and to improve performance of its devices when it unveiled the change to the internet calling feature at the Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple CEO Tim Cook has come out forcefully on the need to protect privacy in recent years. “Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” he said at a privacy conference in Brussels last year.
Although Apple has been rolling out a number of features to protect user privacy in the software running on its devices, iOS 13 is especially robust when it comes to privacy. One new feature, for example, gives users more options to limit location tracking by apps. The biggest headline grabber coming out of its June developer conference was “Sign in with Apple,” a privacy-centric single sign-on feature that competes with Google and Facebook.
As Apple has ramped up its privacy push, it has targeted Facebook. Earlier this year, for example, Apple shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute iOS apps to its own staff for testing following a TechCrunch report that Facebook was violating Apple’s rules by distributing a data-gathering app outside of the App Store to non-employees as part of a paid survey program.
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Facebook is well aware of the kind of impact these changes could have on its bottom line. Upcoming features in Google’s Android operating system also include many limits on apps running in the background. In response to a question during a recent earnings conference call about near-term challenges for the company, Facebook CFO David Wehner said they include “platform changes as it relates to operating systems and more of a focus on privacy from the operating systems, and the impact that that can have on measurements and also on targeting.”
—Alex Heath contributed to this article
In response to concerns raised by a Guardian story last week over how recordings of Siri queries are used for quality control, Apple is suspending the program world wide. Apple says it will review the process that it uses, called grading, to determine whether Siri is hearing queries correctly, or being invoked by mistake.
In addition, it will be issuing a software update in the future that will let Siri users choose whether they participate in the grading process or not.
The Guardian story from Alex Hern quoted extensively from a contractor at a firm hired by Apple to perform part of a Siri quality control process it calls grading. This takes snippets of audio, which are not connected to names or IDs of individuals, and has contractors listen to them to judge whether Siri is accurately hearing them — and whether Siri may have been invoked by mistake.
“We are committed to delivering a great Siri experience while protecting user privacy,” Apple said in a statement to TechCrunch. “While we conduct a thorough review, we are suspending Siri grading globally. Additionally, as part of a future software update, users will have the ability to choose to participate in grading.”
The contractor claimed that the audio snippets could contain personal information, audio of people having sex and other details like finances that could be identifiable, regardless of the process Apple uses to anonymize the records.
They also questioned how clear it was to users that their raw audio snippets may be sent to contractors to evaluate in order to help make Siri work better. When this story broke, I dipped into Apple’s terms of service myself and, though there are mentions of quality control for Siri and data being shared, I found that it did fall short of explicitly and plainly making it clear that live recordings, even short ones, are used in the process and may be transmitted and listened to.
The figures Apple has cited put the amount of queries that may be selected for grading under 1% of daily requests.
The process of taking a snippet of audio a few seconds long and sending it to either internal personnel or contractors to evaluate is, essentially, industry standard. Audio recordings of requests made to Amazon and Google assistants are also reviewed by humans.
An explicit way for users to agree to the audio being used this way is table stakes in this kind of business. I’m glad Apple says it will be adding one.
It also aligns better with the way that Apple handles other data, like app performance data that can be used by developers to identify and fix bugs in their software. Currently, when you set up your iPhone, you must give Apple permission to transmit that data.
Apple has embarked on a long campaign of positioning itself as the most privacy conscious of the major mobile firms, and therefore holds a heavier burden when it comes to standards. Doing as much as the other major companies do when it comes to things like using user data for quality control and service improvements cannot be enough if it wants to maintain the stance and the market edge that it brings along with it.
Apple is regressing to their 1990s disposition
A friend of mine found himself working for a school in the mid 1990s, deploying a new lab of Apple Mac computers designed to teach graphic design. Before the deployment, he went to the technology decision-makers and told them that they could build a much faster lab for half the cost, since their Adobe software can also run on PC. He also noted that Macs play well with other proprietary Apple stuff, whereas PCs played well with most technologies and had a much longer useful lifetime due to upgradability. It was where the industry was moving, and it made logical sense to move in that direction.
They were stupefied. All they knew was Apple, and moving to something else was blasphemy. In the end, they deployed a very slow and expensive lab of Apple Macs.
In my circles, Apple was a footnote during the rise of the Internet and networks during the 1990s. We called them beige toasters, because they were beige in color, and about as powerful as a toaster. Most people in the tech industry viewed them as expensive tinker toys for people who feared technology (or two mouse buttons ;-). Since they had their own proprietary versions of most things, including connectors, cables, file formats and protocols, it was a pain to get them to work with other technologies that were outside of the Apple ecosystem. And their OS (typically Mac OS 8/9) had a lot of issues, especially if you used certain programs, such as Internet Explorer for Mac (at the time, Internet Explorer was the best Web browser, but prone to crashing on Mac OS if you didn’t have enough hardware).
Of course, that changed in the early 2000s with the release of the Mac OS X operating system, which was essentially a rebranded version of NeXTSTEP UNIX. Because Mac OS X was UNIX, it was fundamentally open – you could easily port/run a plethora of open source software for UNIX/Linux on it, or easily customize the operating system to suit your needs. Plus, it played well with everything else on the network.
Ditto for Apple hardware hardware in the 2000s. While they used relatively obscure PowerPC CPUs in the early 2000s before switching to Intel, nearly all of their other hardware was non-proprietary, and easily upgradable. Plus, their laptops at the time had a multitude of different ports, an Escape key, and used Phillips screws. Apple even published step-by-step visual guides for upgrading or repairing anything on their website.
They were still more expensive than equivalent PC hardware, but not tremendously so, and the added build quality alongside their no-questions-asked warranty policy (at the time) justified the extra cost.
To tech-minded people in the 2000s, Apple was no longer this closed, proprietary, expensive tinker toy. They were a decent UNIX workstation manufacturer that fostered openness. And I purchased my first Mac in 2003 as a result.
The iPad and iPhone made Apple a massive company, and encouraged people to buy Mac computers, especially software developers that wanted to create mobile or Web apps. If you asked me what computer you should buy in 2012, I would have said “Mac” because their hardware, operating system, and support was excellent at the time.
But since then, it seems as if Apple has continually made decisions to move back in time to the 1990s. Rather than adopting open standards in their operating systems, they started focusing on developing their own, intended to work within their own ecosystem only. More and more parts of the operating system started to become closed and unalterable. On the hardware side, prices kept rising to reflect their newly-attained brand awareness, and corners were cut to bolster even more profit. Big hardware quality issues started popping up that resulted in class action lawsuits and lengthy repair programs. Expandability and upgradability of hardware was reduced or eliminated altogether. Apple repair shops were threatened with legal action while Apple stores told customers that small repair issues would cost thousands of dollars to fix (to encourage them to buy a new Mac). And fixed storage is now held hostage by a security chip that prevents you from installing non-macOS operating systems like Linux natively on the hardware.
In short, Apple’s earlier openness has been crushed by their desire for a closed ecosystem.
And in today’s age of open source, it’s clear that the future is open, and Macs are starting to look more and more like expensive tinker toys for rich kids.
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Apple has long performed like clockwork, growing steadily and producing an ever-growing stream of profit. Not anymore.
On Tuesday, the Silicon Valley behemoth said that its net income had fallen 13 percent and that its revenue rose 1 percent in the latest quarter, with iPhone sales continuing to decline and gains in the company’s services and wearables business failing to make up the difference.
The results showed persistent signs of weakness for one of the world’s financial standouts. Apple built its enormous business on the iPhone, but sales of the device have slipped for three straight quarters in a saturated market for smartphones.
Yet the results also suggested that the company could be starting to halt declines in those sales and other key areas, including revenue from the Chinese market. Over the previous two quarters, Apple’s profits and revenue had fallen over all.
“Obviously on the iPhone, we’ve gone through a period where we’ve seen some revenue declines,” Luca Maestri, Apple’s finance chief, said in an interview. “But we are very excited about our product road maps, and we’re very optimistic about the future.”
Apple said net income had dropped to $10.04 billion for its fiscal third quarter, from $11.5 billion a year earlier, with profit of $2.18 a share exceeding Wall Street estimates. Revenue rose to $53.8 billion from $53.3 billion a year earlier. Mr. Maestri said profits had fallen while sales had risen because of narrower margins that he attributed to foreign-exchange rates.
Apple shares rose more than 4 percent in after-hours trading. “They essentially beat fairly low expectations,” said Angelo Zino, an analyst at CFRA Research.
Mr. Maestri said Apple had slowed the bleeding in its iPhone business by offering financing, cutting prices in some countries and starting a trade-in program for owners of older models after finding that people were keeping their iPhones longer. In the latest quarter, revenue from iPhone sales fell nearly 12 percent, to $25.97 billion, from a year earlier. In the company’s previous quarter, iPhone sales fell 17 percent.
For the first time since 2013, iPhone sales did not account for at least half of Apple’s revenue, said Yoram Wurmser, an analyst at the market-research firm eMarketer.
Consumers are finding fewer reasons to upgrade their iPhones, analysts said, with newer models offering only incremental improvements. The trend could continue this year, when Apple is likely to unveil a new slate of iPhones. The latest models, expected in September, are unlikely to work with the new fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless technology that offers far faster download speeds than current service. Apple is expected to have 5G iPhones for 2020, analysts said.
The other shrinking part of Apple’s business has been China. Sales in the region that includes China fell nearly 25 percent over the previous two quarters, sparking a sell-off of Apple shares in January. Apple blamed the drop in part on economic weakness in China.
In the latest quarter, Apple’s sales in the region fell 4.1 percent, while revenue specifically in mainland China grew. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said on an earnings call that business had been lifted in part by Apple’s move to cut iPhone prices there and an economic stimulus program from the government.
“There were a lot of questions and uncertainty around China, so the fact that the year-over-year growth rate has improved is likely a relief for investors,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein.
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The Chinese market, Apple’s third largest for sales, has emerged as one of the company’s greatest vulnerabilities. This month, Chinese officials disclosed that the country’s growth had fallen to its slowest pace in three decades. Apple also assembles most of its products in China, which has drawn the ire of President Trump, who has publicly pressured Apple to build more products in the United States.
Since 2013, Apple has made its top-of-the-line Mac Pro desktop computer in Texas. Doing so led to headaches that delayed the computer’s launch. In June, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that Apple would shift assembly of its new Mac Pro to China.
Last week, Apple filed requests with the United States trade representative’s office asking that components used in the Mac Pro, like power cables and circuit boards, be excluded from tariffs. Apple said in the requests that it could not find the products outside China.
Mr. Trump responded on Twitter that Apple “will not be given Tariff waiver, or relief, for Mac Pro parts that are made in China” and that the company should “Make them in the USA, no Tariffs!”
On Tuesday, Mr. Cook said Apple still wanted to make the Mac Pro in the United States and suggested that exclusions from the tariffs could help make that happen.
“We’ve been making the Mac Pro in the U.S.,” he said. “We want to continue to do that.”
Mr. Trump has placed tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods, but so far, Apple products have largely escaped the tariffs’ effect. Mr. Cook has encouraged officials in the United States and China to resolve the trade dispute, but while the countries resumed trade talks this week, hopes for a transformative deal are dwindling.
Apple faces other issues in Washington, including antitrust concerns. Last week, the Department of Justice said it was opening an antitrust review of the Big Tech companies. Apple has come under particular scrutiny for how it wields power in its App Store, where it distributes games, ride-hailing programs and more.
As Apple’s iPhone sales fall, the company has sought to make up the gap in revenue with an expanding business selling apps and services to its existing customers. Apple now offers subscriptions for news, music and TV services and is preparing to start a gaming service soon. Its services revenue rose more than 12 percent to $11.5 billion.
Apple also showed strength in its wearables business, which includes Airpods and the Apple Watch. That business grew nearly 64 percent to $5.5 billion, surpassing the iPad in sales.
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These are the words that make every UX designer’s heart sink: “Make it work like [insert generic tech-industry leader]’s site!”
The moments when a client throws out your initial ideas and pleads with you to replicate their favourite company’s homepage are the stuff of nightmares.
Now, I don’t want to take any shots at clients. Being a good client is often as hard as being a good designer. I’ve been on both sides of the fence and taking on the client role, it’s not usually long before you find yourself saying exactly the same things that make your teeth grind when you hear them from your own clients.
Still, there’s a particular kind of client who is incredibly difficult to work with and, as designers, we quickly need to learn to identify this particular attitude and find our own ways of overcoming it.
Usually, you’ll hear this from the numbers people – money guys for whom the world is ranked into a hierarchy. In this world, there is only one right way of doing things and the only way to succeed is to do just that. You can see the elementary logic in it: Apple is the biggest tech company in the world, their site content and advertising is beautiful; surely, if we just do what they do, we’ll succeed?
Well, no. Not at all.
First thing’s first, Apple is rolling in cash. If your company is as big as Apple, then you probably don’t need my advice to succeed and have no need to continue reading. Apple have millions of dollars to spend on hiring the best creative and UX design agencies in the world to produce incredible, award-winning content and a UI that makes everything else look slightly wonky.
With the best will in the world, producing a site of the quality that Apple is capable of, is beyond the budget and talent of almost everyone other than Apple. It’s simply not realistic.
However let’s pretend it is in fact possible for any agency to achieve the results Apple can on a fraction of the budget. But even then, you wouldn’t necessarily want to. Here’s why:
Apple isn’t desperate for money
If you’re an Apple superfan, furiously refreshing their store page to be one of the first to order the brand-new iPhone on the day of release, only to find the website interface is frustrating and awkward, are you going to swear off Apple and go buy an Android phone? No, of course not.
Apple’s UI doesn’t need to be good, so why would we assume that Apple’s site is the gold standard that we should be aiming for, even if it looks stunning? Do we know if the user feedback supports our assumption?
Apple’s site makes the elementary mistake of having a huge drop-down menu for navigation. I’d be interested to see what the user feedback and bounce rate is on that. If you don’t have the brand loyalty that Apple commands, you might need to do better than Apple has bothered to do.
Apple is a premium product
There’s a good reason why Apple is charging over £1,100 for its cheapest iPhone nowadays. It’s the same reason why Apple phones are made of glass and metal, while Huawei are selling similar-specced phones made of plastic for £300: Apple is a prestigious product. Having the latest iPhone is a status symbol – an accomplishment.
As such, struggling a little to navigate their beautiful-looking site makes you feel even more like you’ve worked to earn an iPhone to impress your friends. When you’re in Apple’s position, having a sucky UI can actually help contribute to the user experience. If you’re not in Apple’s position, a bad UI can harm your conversion.
Furthermore, in general…
You aren’t Apple
Are you selling high-tech smartphones to the hipster elite, capitalising on their vast expendable income? No? Then why do you think copying a company that’s trying to do that will get you success with your users?
The most fundamental principle of UX design is to build your site around your users. If your users are not exactly the same group as Apple customers, then why would copying Apple’s site be the right strategy?
Two Apples aren’t better than one
To take this argument ad absurdum, let’s push the realms of plausibility even further and say that you aren’t any different from Apple: let’s say you’re selling almost exactly the same product as Apple; let’s say you’re selling to almost exactly the same group of customers as Apple; let’s even say you have exactly the same budget and resources that Apple have. Still, why do you want to be like Apple?
The tech industry is all about disruption. As a brand-new industry full of start-ups, most companies are in a David-and-Goliath position where a young company with limited resources and a slingshot idea are taking down the big industry leaders. That industry-disrupting idea is what’s important, not the money and power. That tiny little idea is what makes you different and that’s what sells.
If you’re offering exactly the same experience and products as Apple to Apple users, what reason are you giving them to switch from Apple to you? As such, whether you’re in the same position with the same resources or not, copying another company is a fundamental mistake, regardless of the circumstances.
Making the case to be unique
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here. No UX designer would turn up to a pitch meeting with screenshots from Apple’s site proposing recreating the site exactly. However, when you turn up to a meeting with a client and they declare they want you to make something that looks like Apple or Facebook, what can you do?
Well, the joy of user experience design is that there’s very little room for argument. If you’re a graphic designer, your client can always say they don’t like your graphics, but as a user experience designer, only the user can judge you.
Remind your client that they are trying to appeal to their customers and we can’t make assumptions about what their customers want until you’ve done the research and conducted the interviews. Assure them that if the users want and react well to a site that looks exactly like Apple, then that’s what you’ll work to produce.
Try presenting them with good and bad examples of sites designed by their direct competitors as an example of the UX work being done in their field, as opposed to Apple’s area. This will highlight examples of UX that’s directly relevant to their products, trigger jealousy over good UX and a feeling of superiority over bad UX. Ask them how they feel about their competitor sites and, better, ask them to ask their customer-facing staff what their customers say. Begin the UX research in the pitch meeting and lay down the groundwork.
Of course, you come to the meeting armed with your pitch, but you should always have some back-up examples of your own success stories in your pocket, ready to pull out if things go wrong. Show your process – this client had this problem and this is how we solved it. Try to draw them into a practical conversation about doing real work, rather than just some pie-in-the-sky concept of being a tech-industry leader.
Overall, make your client feel listened to and appreciated – flatter their ideas – then pull them back down to earth to actually do the work. If that isn’t effective and your client just wants to copy the look of something they’ve seen online, then they aren’t really interested in a good user experience and nothing you do for them is going to make them happy. In those circumstances, the very best thing you can do is say “thanks, but no thanks” and walk out.
If you try to make a site that looks like Apple, you will likely make something that looks like a poor knock-off; it won’t be right for the user and the conversion rates won’t make your client happy. You’ll come out of it with low client satisfaction, poor work for your portfolio and a lot of frustration and stress.
If your client isn’t focused on their users, there is very little you can do for them.