Introduction

I’m about to start my second mission as a freelance CTO, and I thought: if anyone could benefit from my experience, maybe I could write a bit down about my experience.

First, a few words about me: I’m French, from Paris; I’m 31 years old, and I mostly define myself as an entrepreneur. Before starting developing, I studied fundamental physics, field in which I have 2 Master’s degrees (you can check my complete profile here on LinkedIn). My true vocation when I went to Leeds, England, in 2013: despite my internship being an incredible experience there, I realised 2 things:

• First, I didn’t want to spend 50 years in a lab. It was something I certainly enjoyed doing, set up experiment, taking measurements, processing data… But I just felt like I didn’t want to spend 50 years doing so.
• Second, and that’s the big one: France was far far behind England when we’re talking about IT infrastructures. As a consequence, a lot of things in England were automated when they required human inputs in France. I was thinking: “such a waste”.

That’s when I got my first project idea: help French universities automate their entire administrative system.

…

Too big too early, especially without any skill. Long story short, I gave up the project and immediately after my double Master’s degree, I subscribed to “École 42” which was just 1-year old at the time. For those who do not know about 42, it is a school funded by French benefactor and billionaire Xavier Niel. In this school, there are no classes and no teachers: you are given projects to achieve, a few hints, and you have to make it by yourself, with the help of others and the Internet.

I entered 42 in order to learn hard skills in IT as much as to build myself a network of entrepreneurs. I actually realised there were many other people like me (ie coming from another background who wanted to start in entrepreneurship) when I went there, and that’s the reason I started the club called 42 Entrepreneurs along with Pierre Lavaux, Bastien Botella, Iris de Villars and Gabriella de Poix who were the greatest contributors at the time, and who are all amazing human beings. If you get the chance to work with any of them, do not hesitate.

At the end of 2015, I decided it was time to move on and I gave the lead of 42 Entrepreneurs to a new team led by Kevin Primicerio. He and his team made an amazing work expanding the club to the point they know manage an acceleration program, called Hook, funded by Xavier Niel.

Since then, I started my business as an independent as well as trying to develop entrepreneurship projects of my own. I acquired skills in front-end development, technical specs, sales, project management… I’ve also been very interested in the blockchain ecosystem, especially since I’d been trading full time during the year of 2017. And it’s only since very recently that I realised that my experience as an entrepreneur and a tech could lead me to sell my services as a freelance CTO.

The Prelude

I’m a big fan of Apple products. Truly. I usually love their seamless design, how simple and productivity-oriented they are. As a software developer, it is a true pleasure to actually be working with their products and to have so little things to think about, because they take care of everything else. For god’s sake, my desk is an ad for Apple: iPhone 6s, Beats Solo 2, 2017 Macbook Pro, iPad Mini 4, Magic Mouse 2, Magic Keyboard 2… I even did my Christmas shopping at Apple: an iPad, 2 Apple Watch bands (that ended up almost as expensive as the iPad), and an iPhone 8 Plus.

Even if their products aren’t all without flaws, the Apple Support is usually here to right their wrongs. Politely, professionally, efficiently. They fix the products or replace them. Most of the time.

But in my terrible, terrible experience… There’s one particular product that failed to offer me the peace of mind I expect when buying an Apple product, and where the Apple Support was just as shitty as it could be. And shitty is a pretty nice word to describe what happened to me. Let me explain.

The Story

Everything started in September 2017. Since I just had a hell of a month with cryptocurrencies skyrocketing, I decided to pleasure myself with an Apple Watch Series 2. I wasn’t truly convinced it was actually useful, but it was something I wanted to try, especially since I’m also quite a regular swimmer. And I was thinking: “It’s Apple, what could possibly go wrong?”. How naive was I?

Well, everything went fine for 2 months. The Apple Watch was truly a great fitness tracker, no matter what activity, how intense it was, underwater or not.

But then… WatchOS 4 happened. And so many tragedies with it… You could check for yourself: go to the Apple Support website, and just check how many people have unresolved issues with their Apple Watch since the latest OS update: days completely disappearing and never to reappear, swimming distance completely failing, and… Achievements. Let’s talk about achievements.

The first week of 2018, there was a challenge: filling up your 3 activity circles every day of the week. Well… Some people filled it and did not get the achievement they should have. Later on… Neither did others get month achievements they should have. But people started noticing the simple explanation: the Apple Watch was evaluating the results of the previous month to deal the achievements of the current month. As stupid as it sounds, it deserves an explanation: when you code something, you have to decide with your team whether you start counting at 0 or 1. It’s like Computer Science 101. Obviously, the Apple Watch team didn’t concert about that and some started counting at 0, others at 1. And they took about 5 months to fix it. 5 months. For a 0 instead of a 1.

I mean… Isn’t there supposed to be some quality control to check those things software-wise? Apparently not. Not anymore at least. And the software developers behind the Apple Watch are as lazy as they can get.

With so many software problems with my Apple Watch, I obviously called Apple Support. The person I had in December was nice. Until he stopped answering for no reason.

I waited a bit more for a possible answer… A fix, a replacement, whatever. 3 months later, I decided to call Apple again, since we went from watchOS 4.0.0 to 4.2.2 and more software issues appeared. The Apple Support guy I had on the phone — let’s call him John — was truly nice, understanding… He tried to get me a replacement for my Apple Watch, but had to report the issues to the developer team. And gosh hasn’t he started to be annoyed by them. He started using “…” in his e-mails talking about them.

I was reporting every swimming session I had to John: true swimming distance, distance measured, percentage difference. Every. Single. Time. Every. Single. Session. The developers had all the data. Do you know what the developers asked from me then? Screenshots. For… Every. Single. Session.

For anyone — not just software developers — screenshots are usually a pain in the ass, because you can’t process them directly, and you have to copy the data manually. Well… Apparently they don’t mind if things geeeet sloooooweeeer. There is an official monitoring system where I can allow Apple staff to take control of my iPhone for a while, but asking for screenshots is so much cooler than exporting my data for Apple to analyse it and fix my problems, right?

The Explanation

First, this is all speculative. I don’t work at Apple. I don’t know anybody working at Apple. I didn’t hack Apple to get to read their e-mails. But when your end up spending a month sending screenshots to Apple, twice a week with 3 swimming sessions each time, for then not having your device fixed or replaced… Well you got to think about it.

There’s no debating the Apple Watch developers are terrible. For narrative purposes, I didn’t go through every bug my Apple Watch met, but I selected the two most speaking examples: they took 5 months to replace a 1 by a 0, and they are crazy lazy. So the first thing I wondered was “How could people like that work at Apple?”. Well, I asked around me, and a friend of mine told me “Maybe they got their worst software developers working on the Apple Watch”. So I first laughed, because it was supposed to be a joke. But it actually made sense. There are three OS at Apple: MacOS, iOS, and watchOS. MacOS is mostly used by professionals and students. Obviously you don’t want to mess with these, especially considering that some people buying iMac Pros or Mac Pros can pay as high as… $15,000. True story. Obviously you won’t mess with iOS either, because the iPhone is the most popular product of the company. What do we have left? Well… For developers who haven’t proved themselves to be trustworthy yet, if I was in Tim Cook’s shoes, I would probably let them work on the Apple Watch as well. So that’s one thing.

The second thing is quality control. Because most of the bugs affected not only a few Apple Watches but all of them, you must ask “What Apple did with quality control?”. My thought is the following: since Apple Watch is still such a niche (compared with iOS and macOS), the global budget allocated must be considerably reduced. So Apple makes sacrifices. And I think… They chose to crowdsource the Apple Watch quality control. We are the quality control. “We have such a great Apple Support people can call or chat with our staff every time there is a problem. Let’s use it instead of recruiting a team and spending 2 months to check if there’s no bug”. So they make updates, work on the next Apple Watch and release it… And then wait for people to call and report bugs so they can analyse them and fix them.

I think this is a respectable strategy… At the condition that the developers behind are reactive and efficient. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. And the staff working at Apple Support must be getting more and more annoyed every day…

So we end up with malfunctioning Apple products that cost around $400, we spend time reporting bugs and sending tens of screenshots for Apple developers not truly wanting to fix the software glitches they created. Then we don’t get paid, our products replaced, or any form of compensation. That’s not really Apple-material.

The Conclusion

Please, Apple. Please get your shit together.

And don’t forget you can clap this article if you liked it ;-)