Apple apparently painfully undercounts Apple News usage:

However, Apple has mistakenly has been underestimating the number of readers using the News app since its launch, and passing that inaccurate information on to publishers, according to the WSJ.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, told the publication that the company missed the error as it focused on other aspects of the product. The company didn’t explain how the problem occurred or say exactly when it might be rectified.

“We’re in the process of fixing that now, but our numbers are lower than reality,” he told the WSJ. “We don’t know what the right number is,” but he added that it was better to undercount than overcount traffic.

Sounds like a fail. The real red flags for me is the excuse-speak from Cue.
  • the company missed the error as it focused on other aspects of the product
  • it was better to undercount than overcount traffic.
No, Cue, it's best to get the count right. Saying, "We don't know what the right number is," is more worrying than encouraging. I understand protecting privacy, but this sounds more like poor programming -- an increasingly common mantra in Apple software design -- than privacy. Saying it happened due to "focus[ing] on other aspects of the product" pushes the buck well past programming to management.

That is, signs like these suggest that Apple software development is often-to-routinely poorly managed.

Is there a more important metric for your news aggregator when your business model is selling ads than reader count? What "other aspects of the product" were you concentrating on? Bugs QA missed? /sigh

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