Bloomberg reports Apple has named Steve Smith head of mergers and acquisitions, and Carson Oliver to run the App StoreBloomberg reports Apple has named Steve Smith head of mergers and acquisitions, and Carson Oliver to run the App Store

Apple has named Steve Smith to lead its mergers and acquisitions team, replacing Adrian Perica, Bloomberg reported on 8 October.

The same report says Carson Oliver has been promoted to vice president of the App Store. Both changes are part of John Ternus's reshaping of Apple's management in his first weeks as chief executive. This is Reported grade: it rests on Bloomberg's reporting, which MacRumors, 9to5Mac and Investing.com all relay, and Apple has not announced either move publicly.

Who moves where

• Steve Smith takes over mergers and acquisitions and corporate development. Bloomberg describes him as Perica's "longtime lieutenant". He will report to chief financial officer Kevan Parekh.
• Adrian Perica, who joined Apple in 2009 and ran the deals team for more than a decade, keeps the iCloud, Fitness+ and Apple News businesses he has overseen since 2023. He will now report to services chief Eddy Cue.
• Carson Oliver becomes vice president of the App Store, reporting to Cue. MacRumors says he has run the store since Phil Schiller stepped down as its head in late August.

According to Investing.com's summary of Bloomberg, the move puts the deals team back inside the finance division for the first time since 2019. Bloomberg reported in April that year that Perica had begun reporting directly to Tim Cook.

Why does it matter who runs Apple's deals?

The team does more than buy companies. MacRumors notes that it handles arrangements such as the agreement that put ChatGPT into Siri, a partnership that OpenAI now tells a court dramatically underperformed. Search, AI and content deals with other companies pass through the same people.

The services side is changing at the same time. Investing.com, again citing Bloomberg, says Cue has taken on the App Store and the Health and Fitness teams in recent months, and that Jennifer Bailey, long the head of Apple Pay and Wallet, retires this year with no successor named. Bloomberg also reports that Cue is assessing who could eventually replace him, and that Perica and Apple Music's Oliver Schusser are seen as the leading candidates.

Our take

The reporting line is the real news. In 2019, moving the head of deals to report to the chief executive was read, in Bloomberg's own headline, against growing calls for Apple to make a big acquisition. Moving the job back under the finance chief reverses that signal. APPDOOK's reading is that Ternus does not want a dealmaker in his own reporting chain, and that a transformational acquisition run from the chief executive's office is less likely under him than it looked under Cook. That is an inference from structure, not anything Bloomberg reports.

Perica's move is the more interesting succession story. Services is Apple's second-largest business by revenue, and putting a long-serving executive directly under Cue while naming him as a candidate to replace Cue looks like a deliberate trial. It also fits the pattern of the Ternus era so far, which has been about fewer layers and clearer owners, from the cuts to program managers Bloomberg reported to this.

For anyone who sells through the App Store, Oliver's title matters more than his name. The store has a dedicated vice president again, rather than being one of Schiller's several jobs. What nobody has reported is whether any App Store policy changes come with him, and the fair assumption until Apple says otherwise is that none do.