Apple announced on Tuesday that longtime marketing boss Phil Schiller will step down from his role and be replaced by one of his deputies, Greg Joswiak, who now has Schiller's former title of vice president of worldwide marketing.
Schiller will continue to work at Apple as an Apple Fellow, the company said, and will continue his role as the boss of Apple's App Store and company events. Schiller will also continue to report to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Schiller has worked at Apple since 1987.
"I'll keep working here as long as they will have me, I bleed six colors, but I also want to make some time in the years ahead for my family, friends, and a few personal projects I care deeply about," Schiller said in a statement.
Schiller's departure from his formal role on Apple's leadership team comes following several other notable departures over the last couple years, including head of design Jony Ive, PR boss Steve Dowling and retail boss Angela Ahrendts. But Apple also made an addition to its exec team in that time period with John Giannandrea, the head of artificial intelligence.
Joswiak, who goes by the nickname "Joz" within Apple, was vice president of worldwide product marketing before taking on the new role. He's been an Apple employee for more than 20 years.
Schiller is one of Apple's most visible executives, and makes frequent appearances presenting new products at the company's keynote addresses. He also leads a group within the App Store that makes decisions on whether or not to allow apps into the store. Schiller also took over as head of communications after Dowling departed the company last year.
Schiller's work is far from finished. The App Store has become a target of scrutiny, with notable developers like Spotify questioning the standard 30% cut Apple takes for app sales and subscriptions in the first year, claiming it hurts competition and favors Apple's own apps instead. Spotify filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the EU in March 2019.Â
Apple has consistently denied its App Store rules hurt competition. Last week, ahead of the Big Tech CEO hearing, Schiller told Reuters that Apple doesn't make special exceptions for apps, and that the rules are applied uniformly to all companies that submit apps to the App Store. The company also hired a team of researchers last month to show that the cut it takes from app sales is fair.
But in documents released by the House Antitrust Subcommittee as part of its investigation into tech giants Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook, emails between Apple exec Eddy Cue and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos show that the two companies made a sweetheart deal to give Amazon a break on the cut Apple typically takes from streaming video sales and subscriptions.
