Dear Apple, let's talk about photos
I'm Peter, a Rails developer and entrepreneur. I'm an ex-computer vision researcher, the former CEO of Clickpass and a YC alum. I now work with an awesome team building Copyin - email for teams — We've been managing our photos together for almost a decade now.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nixey's letter joins a small but visible genre of public pressure on Apple: Readability ran an open letter to Apple back in February 2011, and this one arrives with unusual authorial weight — an ex-computer-vision researcher and YC founder arguing from nearly a decade of managing a shared family photo library.
The timing matters because Apple has been visibly staffing up on imaging: Wired reported in October 2012 that a color engineer announced a new boss on Apple's color team on Twitter, a signal that photo quality was getting internal investment even as users like Nixey publicly document where the product falls short. The pickup by Business Insider and several prominent tech voices on the day of publication shows the critique traveled well beyond his own blog.
First-order effects
- Apple faces a credentialed, widely amplified critique of Photos specifically — not from a rival company but from a power user whose decade-long shared-library use case exposes gaps casual reviewers miss.
- The Business Insider syndication turns one developer's blog post into a public talking point about Apple's consumer software quality on the day it publishes.
Second-order effects
- Developers and startups watching the reaction can read the gap between what power users need from photo management and what Apple ships as a market opening for third-party photo tools.
- Apple's response calculus shifts: with its imaging hires already public, silence on a high-profile letter costs more than it would have before the critique gained syndicated reach.
Third-order effects
- If open letters keep working as a lever on Apple's product priorities, they harden into a standard channel through which developers negotiate with the platform owner in public rather than through private feedback loops.
- As photo libraries become a decade-deep store of personal history locked into one ecosystem, the quality of Apple's default tools stops being a feature question and becomes a lock-in question.
The trend: Public developer letters are emerging as a recurring mechanism for pressuring Apple on consumer software quality, with photo management becoming the test case.