Apple’s cloud manager, including iCloud, to step down

Michael Abbott, the head of all of Apple’s cloud side, including iCloud and the infrastructure of services like iMessage and FaceTime, will leave his post in April, according to Bloomberg. He will be replaced by Jeff Robbin, a longtime vice president of engineering at Apple, known for being the creator of iTunes.

Notable departure of Apple’s cloud manager

This departure of Michael Abbott leaves a significant void in one of Apple’s most important divisions. As Apple’s vice president of cloud engineering, he’s responsible for iCloud.com, iCloud Mail, and new features like iCloud data encryption. He also leads the company’s platform that powers iCloud, core communication services, Find My and Emergency Call on iPhone. We can also mention CloudKit, a service that developers can use to take advantage of iCloud with their applications.

Apple had invested heavily in building infrastructure to power its services. But more recently, the company scaled back that effort in favor of using servers hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. Michael Abbott’s group oversees a custom layer that overlays this infrastructure to optimize it for Apple’s offerings.

Michael Abbott was Apple’s chief cloud officer for five years and now he’s stepping down in April. His departure joins those of other key company executives in recent months, including Peter Stern, who was Apple’s vice president of services. The company also recently lost executives responsible for industrial design, its online store, information systems, purchasing, and parts of its hardware and software engineering divisions.

In some cases, Apple struggled to find successors, leading it to reshuffle the roles. The group opted not to appoint new chief privacy and design officers, and to split the responsibilities of outgoing executives among the remaining leaders.