Apple appoints Jeff Williams as COO, Johny Srouji as SVP hardware, Phil Schiller now in charge of App Store

Phil Schiller has been leading Marketing at Apple and is now taking charge of App Stores

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Apple has announced the promotion of Jeff Williams as Chief Operations Officer, the addition of Johny Srouji as VP of hardware and SVP of Marketing Phil Schller is now in charge of the App Store.

Williams is Tim Cook's second in command, a former IBM'er and now occupies Cook's position before Steve Jobs turned over the reigns to Cook in 2011. While it may or may not be an indication of succession for Apple's top executive position, it does show confidence in Jeff William's ability to manage operations as Apple scales in terms of operations and services.

“Jeff is hands-down the best operations executive I’ve ever worked with, and Johny’s team delivers world-class silicon designs which enable new innovations in our products year after year," Tim Cook said in the company's release. High praise from Cook who is credited for making Apple run at peak efficiency even before he took the reigns.

Another interesting indicator of where Apple is headed, is the promotion of Johny Srouji to the executive team. "In nearly eight years at Apple as vice president of Hardware Technologies, Johny Srouji has built one of the world’s strongest and most innovative teams of silicon and technology engineers, overseeing breakthrough custom silicon and hardware technologies including batteries Johny joined Apple in 2008 to lead development of the A4, the first Apple-designed system on a chip."

Apple has been making its own custom silicon, not only has the company been buying up small foundries, it designs the processors that go into the iOS devices, including the A9 and A9X processors in the recent iPhones and iPad Pro. Many see Apple's own processors as approaching the level of performance of Intel's PC chips but with better battery management and it is just a matter of time before Apple silicon is used throughout the company's product line.

The most surprising announcement was that Apple SVP for marketing Phil Schiller, who does many of the product launches for the company, is taking over the App Store. Once the domain of Eddy Cue, the App Store has grown exponentially and now includes Watch, AppleTV and iOS and Mac OS applications. Schiller has long been one of the more visible and quotable Apple executives and has great rapport with developers so it makes sense to put this under his jurisdiction.

"Phil now leads nearly all developer-related functions at Apple, in addition to his other marketing responsibilities including Worldwide Product Marketing, international marketing, education and business marketing. More than 11 million developers around the world create apps for Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — as well as compatible hardware and other accessories, and customers have downloaded more than 100 billion apps across those platforms," Apple said.