What I Learned About Apple from My Twitter Customer Support Experience

In late March, I found myself in the grips of terrible frustration with my iPhone SE. As I've noted many times in the past, there are so many issues and bugs with iOS 11, it's really unbelievable. Here are the two tweets that triggered Apple Support to reach out to me.

Each day, I am constantly reminded how @apple iOS 11 has transformed the iPhone SE that I was once quite happy with into one of the worst devices that I've ever used. Crappy lagging UI animations, touch-screen locations that don't work. It's the worst.

— yaMarketingGoomer (@MarketingToMe) March 23, 2018

Beyond the whole #batteryReplacement scandal, iOS 11 doesn't make me want to upgrade my iPhone. Rather, it makes me want to throw my iPhone at the new Apple #spaceship building. Some other once loved devices that they no longer support I'd chuck at them too...

— yaMarketingGoomer (@MarketingToMe) March 23, 2018

I'm not sure whether it was the mention of "lagging UI animations" or the "#batteryReplacement" hashtag that prompted them to reach out, but shortly thereafter, I was working with Apple Support through Twitter's Direct Message in an effort to diagnose and fix my iPhone.

The first thing that we started to address was the lagging iPhone behavior. After running their basic diagnostic tool and getting results back that seemed to indicate that the iPhone was running properly, they had me restore the iPhone as though it were a new device. When this seemed to eliminate the issue, they had me restore my device from iTunes. Sure enough, a number of the lagging animation behaviors returned. Over the course of that exercise, one of the things that I realized is that when I restored as new, the font sizes were much smaller, so I tried reducing the font size (I had been running at something like the +2 font size setting, making it easier to read emails and texts on the device). Reducing the font size seemed to solve some of the lagging animation behavior.

At this point, Apple Support wanted to see if they could improve performance further and suggested that I turn on the General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion setting, something I said that I'd had turned on since they introduced the stupid motion feature. And that was the last time I heard from Apple Support.

A couple of days later, I tried to pose another question to them about how, when I touch the top left corner of the screen on the iPhone in something like the Messages app, instead of taking me back to the list of messages from other people, it scrolls to the top of the current message list, like clicking the home key. That query was also met with crickets.

My Apple Support Takeaway
Looking back, it seems clear that my tweets that related to Apple's very public trouble surrounding the battery issue were the driver for Apple to engage with me. Over the past year or several, I've been vocal in my frustration with many aspects of Apple's products, but this is the first time that Apple Support has reached out to me over Twitter. Clearly this has become an extremely sensitive topic for them and they seem to be focusing their efforts at making sure that more battery-related PR issues don't blow up on them.

That being said, it's also another example of how iOS 11 seems like a product that only functions correctly within a certain narrow set of parameters. While I'm sure that iOS 11 probably works more like it's supposed to on an iPhone 8 or iPhone X, it makes you wonder whether you'd see the same issues with font sizes on those larger-screen devices.

When you consider how much the company has grown since the iPhone took off, it's kind of funny that they can produce software that seems inferior to the earlier versions of the software and the iPhone. For me, I'd much prefer an iPhone that worked correctly than an "animoji" feature that I'll never use.