Eddy Cue says Apple has 782M iCloud users and 11M+ Apple Music subs, and Craig Federighi addresses complaints of bugs in Apple apps on John Gruber's podcast
people just notice bugs because they actually use it (aapl) Timothy J. Seppala / Engadget : iPhone soon becoming ‘full replacement’ for Apple TV remote Susie Ochs / Macworld : Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi discuss the state of Apple software with John Gruber Adam Westlake / SlashGear : Revamped Apple TV remote app for iPhone coming soon Gautam Prabhu / iPhone Hacks : Apple to release new Remote app with full Apple TV Remote capabilities Patrick O'Rourke / MobileSyrup.com : Apple says it has 11 million Apple Music subscribers, 782 million iCloud users Chris Barylick / O'Grady's PowerPage : Apple's Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi discuss Apple Music, iCloud subscription numbers Greg Kumparak / TechCrunch : Apple Will Update The iPhone's Remote App To Do Everything Apple TV's Own Remote Can Nate Swanner / The Next Web : Apple says there are over 11 million Apple Music subscribers, 782 million iCloud users Tyler Lee / Ubergizmo : Apple Music Now Has 11 Million Subscribers Jules Wang / Pocketnow : Apple Music nets 11 million subscribers at eight months Charlotte Hassan / Digital Music News : Apple Music Now Has Over 11 Million Paying Subscribers Tweets: Mark Suster / @msuster : Apple's response to your software quality has gone down “It's not us. It's you.” What bulls**t. http://www.theverge.com/... Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : Eddie Cue: ‘iMessage peak traffic is 200k messages/second’. That would be over 17bn/day. 1/2 - 1/3 WHatsApp. Dan Frommer / @fromedome : Possible “iCloud users” is a more meaningless stat than “Google + users”? Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : Siri gets ‘billions of requests a week’ Matt Rosoff / @mattrosoff : Apple says people send as many as 200,000 iMessages per second http://www.businessinsider.com/ ... via @sai
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks after Apple reported over 1 billion active devices, up 25% year-over-year, executives took the numbers tour to John Gruber's podcast: Eddy Cue put the attach base at 782 million iCloud accounts and more than 11 million paid Apple Music subscriptions, while Craig Federighi fielded the recurring criticism that Apple's own apps feel buggy — his framing being that people notice bugs precisely because so many people use the software.
The disclosure matters because it turns a hardware company's quarterly story into a services one: the same interview cycle also promised a revamped iPhone Remote app with full Apple TV control, extending the ecosystem further onto the phone.
First-order effects
- Apple Music's first public subscriber figure gives investors and rivals like Spotify a direct benchmark for how the service is converting the installed base in its first year against an incumbent streamer.
- Federighi's on-record response puts Apple defending its software quality publicly rather than through release notes, acknowledging that scale itself has made defects visible to hundreds of millions of users.
Second-order effects
- With the device base already past a billion, each disclosed services metric raises expectations for the next one — pressure that shows up three years later when Apple reports 50 million paid Apple Music subscribers, roughly quadrupling this figure.
- The revamped Remote app shifts Apple TV control onto hardware customers already own, reducing dependence on the Siri Remote and making the iPhone the default interface for another Apple category.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's valuation narrative migrates from unit sales to per-user services revenue across iCloud, Music, and eventually News and Pay — a structure where the installed base disclosed here becomes the funnel every future subscription product sells into.
The trend: Apple is repositioning its public metrics from device shipments toward per-user services adoption, with the billion-device base serving as the conversion funnel.