Jeff Williams named Apple COO, Phil Schiller takes over App Store leadership
Apple Names Jeff Williams Chief Operating Officer — Johny Srouji Named to Executive Team; Phil Schiller Adds Ecosystem Responsibilities — Tor Myhren Joins Apple — Apple® today announced …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple formalized its post-Jobs operating structure at the end of 2015: Jeff Williams, long Tim Cook's operational deputy, was promoted to chief operating officer while retaining oversight of the health initiatives, and the same release elevated chip chief Johny Srouji to the executive team. The accompanying moves rounded out a generational handoff — Phil Schiller added App Store leadership on top of worldwide marketing, and ad veteran Tor Myhren joined to succeed the retiring Hiroki Asai.
The promotion read immediately as succession management: contemporaneous analysis called Williams the obvious successor to Cook, and a later profile cemented his standing as Tim Cook's heir apparent. A decade on, that arc closed when Williams stepped down as COO in 2025, handing the role to Sabih Khan — the same Khan who got his own SVP of Operations title alongside this 2015 reshuffle.
First-order effects
- Williams gains the formal COO title over Apple's global operations and supply chain, converting de facto deputy status into a named role on the executive team alongside Srouji.
- Schiller's portfolio doubles: he now owns both demand generation (worldwide marketing) and the App Store's developer-facing rules and economics, while Myhren takes over creative/marketing design from Asai.
Second-order effects
- Concentrating the App Store under one senior leader prefigures the platform-governance battles of the following decade, where App Store policy decisions would carry regulatory and antitrust weight far beyond marketing.
- The Khan appointment embedded in this reshuffle created the internal pipeline that paid off ten years later, when Khan succeeded Williams as COO rather than an external hire.
Third-order effects
- The 2015 design-reporting chain — which by 2019 had Evans Hankey and Alan Dye reporting to Williams after their move under him — ultimately unwound differently: upon Williams's retirement, Apple routed the design team directly back to Tim Cook, ending the COO's decade-long span of control over industrial design.
- Schiller's App Store remit outlasted his marketing job — he ceded the latter to Greg Joswiak in 2020 while continuing to lead the store as an Apple Fellow, making the 2015 ecosystem assignment the longer-lived half of the deal.
The trend: Apple's executive architecture has evolved around an operations-first succession line — Williams's 2015 elevation to COO defined the role's holder for a decade before passing to his own deputy, Khan.