in charge of cloud initiatives, including iCloud and the infrastructure for services like iMessage and FaceTime, is leaving the company, adding to a wave of recent departures.
Abbott’s exit leaves a major hole in one of the company’s most critical divisions. As Apple’s vice president of cloud engineering, he’s in charge of the iCloud.com service, iCloud Mail and new features like iCloud data encryption. He also runs the company’s platform that powers iCloud, key communication services, the Find My feature and Emergency SOS on iPhones.A spokesman for Cupertino, California-based company declined to comment.
The cloud services group had invested heavily in building an infrastructure to power its offerings. But more recently, the company has pared back that effort in favour of using servers hosted by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Abbott’s group oversees a custom layer that sits on top of that infrastructure to optimise it for Apple’s offerings.
Abbott has held his role for five years. He joined Apple in 2018 after serving as an investor at venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins and an executive at Twitter, Microsoft and Palm. Apple employee shares vest in April, when Abbott plans to depart.