I think the article's author is right and that there could easily be high-end market shift from Android at the margin. On the other hand, Android Wear watches are already shipping, Google voice search is better than Siri, Google Now is kinda magic, Material Design is a very nice unified design language that is arguably better than iOS, and Android Auto could take off.
(By way of background, I'm working on developing http://recent.io for both iOS and Android. Currently I switch between an iPhone 5 and a Nexus 5 and expect to buy both the iPhone 6 and the Nexus 6/X rumored to be coming out this fall.)
>with the iPhone 6 Plus (a very Microsofty name, it must be said)...
Except for the Apple II Plus, the Mac Plus, the LaserWriter Plus, the Apple IIc Plus, the Apple III Plus[1]... In reality I'd say it's a very Appley name! :)
+1; The value isn't in the device, it's in the ecosystem.
Siri isn't going to integrate with my Nest, Apple Maps isn't going to have a fleet of vehicles driving around to confirm mapping data, and Google Now has the ability to digest information from both existing Google users and the web.
Can Apple create a better platform backend faster than Google can meet them at design/UX?
Google has traditionally been too attention-starved to stick with a product long enough to get the design/UX perfect.
That's not to say Google has never created a truly beautiful product. Rather, the problem seems to be that Google isn't hooked directly to the hardware sales, so hardware design is left to third parties. Except for the handsets Google sells directly.
In the end, I think this strategy will win for Google, because there is so much more effort being invested into the creation of Android devices. I'm not saying quantity = quality, but rather that "good enough" trumps "perfect."
In the meantime, Xiaomi is a good example of trying to get Android to "perfect" -- and it's very telling that they mod it extensively (in MIUI).
I think a bigger deal than "good enough" trumps "perfect" is that "good" (whether "good enough" or "perfect") isn't objective, its subjective, and more options means you are more likely to find something that meets your preferences.
What makes you think Apple won't release a SiriKit in the future ?
> Apple Maps isn't going to have a fleet of vehicles driving around to confirm mapping data.
Neither does Google in most places. And Apple, Google, Microsoft etc all rely on third party data providers for most of their map data. Surely they would be confirming the data.
> Can Apple create a better platform backend faster than Google can meet them at design/UX?
The issue is not what Google itself does. It's the ability of Google to influence the ecosystem to come along with it. That has always been the problem.
> Neither does Google in most places. And Apple, Google, Microsoft etc all rely on third party data providers for most of their map data. Surely they would be confirming the data.
Apple Maps has been out for two full years now, and it hasn't improved at all where I live, and the benchmark for demonstrating improvement is quite literally "find almost anything at all".
Admittedly, I'm in Iceland, but Reykjavik is a world capital, and a city with a bit over 200,000 people, so it's not like we're trading pelts over here either. And I don't think anyone understands how shockingly bad their maps are here. I've done quite a bit of testing with them, and if you search for a city in Iceland, you have pretty good odds of finding something (maybe 80% accuracy). If you search for a point of interest, it drops to maybe 40%. Everything else is 0%. Literally 0%. There's one fucking highway in the country, and if you look for directions between the two largest cities, it says "No results found". Way more than half of the searches I've tested just pop up that message in a UIAlertView, and it's exactly 100% of the searches for directions. I work at a university with 4000 students, and we're not on the map at all. It points you to a dozen high schools in the city instead.
Open street maps supposedly provides their data, but OSM is quite good here. Somehow Apple turns correct data into "No results found", and that's been true since launch day.
Apple doesn't have any recent OSM data. All of their input dates from 2010 or earlier, before they adopted a newer copyleft license. Apple is now relying on a scattered bunch of different providers for map data.[0]
Google supports iOS pretty well. They don't support Windows Phone at all, but I've heard a lot of Android users complaining at various points that iOS gets the app updates quicker than Android does for some Google apps.
And there's probably a lot of overlap between Apple's customer base and Nest's. I'm not saying they won't do it, I really just mean I don't know how likely it is :-)
> The issue is not what Google itself does. It's the ability of Google to influence the ecosystem to come along with it.
For the high-end Moto X and Nexus devices relevant to the author's thesis, this will happen soup-to-nuts shortly after the L release is launched. For the other devices, the downloadable apps will get the new UX through the support libraries, but the system apps will still have the old UX.
The thing is, most of Google's services are available on iOS as well. And IMO Google's apps are as good on iOS or even better than they are on Android. You can get the best of both worlds by using iOS with Google's apps and services.
You can't make every address link open in the superior maps app or every tweet open in the superior twitter app or every link open in the superior browser app. While iOS may have closed the gap in finally having these apps, actually using them is a frustrating experience.
True, but Google needs to keep their own platform as large as possible. What do we say around HN about building your business on someone else's platform?
The conventional wisdom around HN nowadays, as I understand it, is to be wary of building your business on someone else's platform. Lots of companies in the Twitter (and to some extent FB and Craigslist) ecosystem have found this out the hard way. The Apple ecosystem too, if you include app store shenanigans, as some wallet makers learned during the bitcoin interregnum.
I don't recall a lot of people here demanding a Federal Bureau of App Store and API Software Licensing and Regulation. Besides, if it existed, the FBASASLR would ban bitcoin wallets even more aggressively than Apple did. :)
I'm guessing it was a reference to "net neutrality" which is a legislative attempt to prevent near-monopoly internet providers from capturing excess profits from web services.
Ah, that makes a bit more sense. But I've never heard of anyone calling AT&T or Verizon or Comcast a "platform" that a developer might choose to build a business on.
BTW even if you like the ideas of Net neutrality, it makes sense to look very carefully at the methods of bringing it about that are being proposed at the FCC.
Daniel Berninger at VCXC.org earlier this week put it better than I could:
"The communicating public needs a 'voice' in the future of communication, but expanding FCC authority over IP networks via Title II does not achieve this goal.
"First - Internet access is not 'slow' - we near a one million fold expansion of bandwidth from the days of 300 baud modems.
"Second - The advocacy for FCC regulation reflects a theory of regulatory virtue not achieved in practice.
"Third - New regulation of IP networks threatens the Moore Law driven forces responsible for progress to date."
Until iOS's market share starts shrinking to a small percentage of the population, and Google will give them the Windows Phone treatment. And then a subpar Google experience on iOS might push iOS users to Android. It's just a matter of getting the timing right.
It's just as likely to push people away from Google services.
The majority of people using iOS are not financially invested in the google ecosystem - they're more likely to be using the free services like search, email, maps, etc.
If a google service doesn't work well on the $700 phone you've just bought that runs 5 years worth of purchased apps, are you really going to abandon all of that because of a free service?
No, you're going to find a service that works better on the device. There are very few if any things where google is the only provider or even the only good provider of a service.
Personal preference I guess. I switched from a Galaxy Nexus to an iPhone 5S, and I'm sorely disappointed with app functionality on iOS. Looking forward to jumping back to Android in short order.
How so specifically? While i like many of the features of android, the UI guidelines google gave to devs for a long time sucked pretty bad. L looks to fix that, but it's taken a long time to get here
eBay on Android is feeble compared to the iOS one, particularly layout-wise. They are making very very very slow attempts to improve the Android version though, from what I can tell.
Google is integrating Nest with Google Now this fall ("Google, set the temperature to X degrees") although after thinking about it I realized that Google Now is available on iOS (just not constantly available as it is on Android devices enabled to listen constantly for the cue.
But thanks. I didn't know about the Nest integration. I'm not sure I personally find it real compelling... but I know plenty of people that seem to really like Google Now. Different strokes I suppose.
No problem! I'm hoping for Google to roll out Google Now support into the Nest devices directly, so it can pickup my voice throughout my house (thermostat, nest protects) and respond accordingly (a la Startrek).
Apple will be royally screwed if smartwatches catch on. I feel that way for two reasons:
1) Watches are a fashion accessory and one does not fit all. There's no way they'll be able to compete with the variety of devices that will be running android wear.
2) A proper smartwatch will need to be smart and Apple doesn't have the data nor the personnel to compete with Google on the machine learning side.
(1) Counterpoint: Apple has much better taste than other OEMs. They've hired designers from Burberry and Nike to assist with wearable design. Design is a core competency for Apple. Others can't claim the same thing.
(2) More data gets you a couple of percentage points on accuracy. It doesn't make Google Now infinitely better in perpetuity than Apple's offering (Siri + whatever is next). Apple is also investing heavily in building out Siri/Maps/NLP.
More data gets you way more than that, but it's not just the data anyway. Google has the personnel who are able to make use of that data. This isn't the kind of stuff you can easily outsource, you need a superb research team. (Source: I'm a professor in machine learning). As far as anyone knows, Apple doesn't have one. They do fantastic product research, and it shows, but they're at least a decade behind the knowledge contained inside of Google, and increasingly, Facebook, Baidu, and a few others. And worse than that, the gap is widening, not shrinking.
What does more data get you beyond accuracy? I think it opens up certain model classes -- like online regression -- which have proveably low error rates with lots of data, but my argument is that you don't need "the entire web," as another commenter suggests, to be good enough at, say, speech recognition. I could definitely be mistaken though...
I agree that quantitative research must be a core competency -- I'm a ML engineer at a company that's heavily invested in its research team -- and it is most certainly not one of Apple's focii. What's stopping Apple from building that competency by acquihiring the talent, though? This is no different from what Google has done over the years...
At some level, it all boils down to increasing accuracy, but the point I was making was just that doing that seems right not to be best accomplished with loads of data. If you look at the deep learning work that's been big lately, you have models with millions of free parameters. By necessity, you need a lot of data in order to constrain a model that big.
Even speech recognition has gotten a big boost recently from taking a "simple model with massive data" approach.
I'm not convinced that these approaches are sufficient to give you some sort of human-level AI. I'm pessimistic on the timeframes for that in general. And I'm sure there are areas where they fail, and maybe someone else comes along with a better idea, but Apple's not working on that either.
Certainly, they could acquire their way to competency, and I'm certainly not going to chime in with the proverbial "Apple is doomed...DOOOOOOOOMED". The only thing really stopping them is interest. But it takes a while to ramp up from getting results from a research team into making those results into a product.
(1) Right now they do but it's only a matter of time before Samsung or HTC partner up with Prada, Rolex, Omega or any other major brand and come out with a line of watches that appeal. The point is that we might get one or two apple watches a year if we're lucky and in the same time frame we'll be getting around 30-50 different android wear devices. Android wear will be available in a ton of different shapes and sizes, and there's no way that the top watch brands won't want to get in on the action.
(2) Data is everything in machine learning and google has the whole web. Google knows me better than my mother, girlfriend and brother combined. Android, youtube, search, gmail, drive, maps, calendar, hangouts and shopping express are enough to tell them who I talk to, where I live, what I eat, where I'm going and what I read.
A couple of percentage points is huge when your accuracy is above 90%. Apple doesn't have anyone as good as Geoff Hinton, Peter Norvig, nor Jeff Dean. There's no way they'll be able compete on AI with google.
(1) Google has partnered with Diane Von Furstenberg on Glass and...there isn't a whole lot to show for it. Glass has ~zero mindshare among fashion-forward people. I cannot stress the importance of design as a core competency.
(2) You're the second person to respond with "data is everything" in machine learning, but it's more complicated than that. While Google has Hinton working on deep nets and Kevin Murphy on knowledge representations, this cutting-edge work represents something closer to MS Research or Bell Labs. These models take years to affect production.
My experience is that "a couple of percentage points" above 90% actually matters little--the marginal cost of obtaining those points is enormous (many many hidden layers in your convolutional net really slows it down) with little real-world benefit (a user can't tell the difference between 90 and 95%--they'll just think of the product as "really really good").
I believe Apple can approach the point where their NLP/speech tech is "good enough" relative to Google.
We've heard exactly the same thing about the iPod, iPhone, iPad. If you measure being "royally screwed" on market share then sure Apple will never do as well as Android.
But if you measure it on actually making money than Apple will be just fine.
The companies that are royally screwed are the LG, Samsungs of the world who are having their margins eaten by the Chinese.
Is Google Voice Search really better than Siri? It seems much less able to handle things like followup or anything that requires context. "OK Google" is much more likely to just give me a web search, while my wife's iPhone seems to more often give helpful spoken results.
Currently, on my MotoX, I can do all common tasks like calendar entries, reminders, calling people. emails, text messaging, searching for information etc. etc. The kickers here are:
I can do all this WITHOUT TOUCHING the device.
I do all this in my Indian accented English (Siri is useless to me and my entire extended family for this reason alone).
This device came out more than a year ago.
I bought this device for half the price of an iPhone 5s unlocked.
The real question is, can Apple come up with a real Google Now competitor, deeply integrated with their devices, before this window of opportunity in the wearable devices blows by them.
Out of interest, is it quicker to do these things by voice than just using the phone with your hands? I always try texting by voice and when it gets it wrong (often!) I find myself just using the phone normally and am reluctant to use the voice features again.
I've been using Siri for years. Texting is occasionally hit or miss (although simple things like "On my way" or "Be there in 15" are reliable), but there are a ton of things that are way quicker than typing (and completely reliable). "Directions home", "Movies playing near me","Open app X","What was the last Tigers score","Call Amy",most Google searches...
Maybe it's my flat midwestern accent, but I find that Siri gets it right almost all the time with these things, and I find it way more natural and fast than hunting for an app icon, especially while driving/walking/biking.
Texts and emails are not 100% accurate of course, especially given my accent and given that proper nouns can be problematic. But it's still faster for me to start these activities by voice and just fill in the corrections. Searching for trivia (to settle random arguments etc.) is always, always faster with the OK Google interface.
For almost any activity on the phone, hunting for an app icon and finding the appropriate context in the app (e.g. searching for the correct contact to send the message to) etc. are usually the most time consuming and frustrating activities. Those are nicely bypassed (with a very high level of accuracy) by the no-touch interface of the MotoX.
Creating calendar entries and setting alarms etc. are two other activities where natural language queries are pretty much the best UX compared to any screen based UI on any device. Google Now has extremely high accuracy in recognizing these tasks.
I use voice to set alarms ("set an alarm for 5:30") and to open up Pandora when I'm driving. Both work great. Texting is a little more hit-or-miss but it's normally pretty accurate. I try not to text and drive anyway, even if it's done by voice.
Google's Voice Search seems like a Siri competitor to me - I can set alarms, request directions, call someone, etc. etc.
The thing is, I never do. Neither Siri nor Google Voice Search have ever seemed that useful to me because I'm usually in a public setting (an open office included) where I don't much feel like chatting away to my phone. Google Now is a much, much better implementation of this 'smart information provider' concept.
Google Now's "just give me appropriate information without me even asking for it" is probably the most badly marketed "magic" technology in the consumer technology space. It's hard to even describe it to people who have never experienced it. But suffice it to say, more than once, I've warned other people (usually non Android users) about their pending flight delays or cancellations before they knew about them simply because I had an email with their itinerary in my mailbox.
I've been using Siri for years and I get the trepidation, but it's really not awkward to do voice commands around people. In social situations, I look at it as simultaneously letting people around me know what I'm doing with the phone while I do it. Instead of saying "OK, let's see a movie. Here, I'll open Fandango and see what's playing around here." (or just pulling up the phone without telling them, which I'd regard as weirder, personally), I say "Yeah a movie sounds fun 'What movies are playing nearby?'" and we're immediately looking at movie times together. YMMV, but I find breaking eye contact for 15 seconds a lot more socially intrusive than a 2 second voice command.
I also find Siri works find with a low voice that nobody notices if I'm around people but not socializing (eg the open office). It just sounds like I'm taking a quick, quiet call at most.
The situation you're describing is one where the other people around you care what you're doing. In the vast majority of situations that isn't the case. The guy sitting next to me at work does not want to hear about me planning to see a movie later on tonight.
(By way of background, I'm working on developing http://recent.io for both iOS and Android. Currently I switch between an iPhone 5 and a Nexus 5 and expect to buy both the iPhone 6 and the Nexus 6/X rumored to be coming out this fall.)
>with the iPhone 6 Plus (a very Microsofty name, it must be said)...
Except for the Apple II Plus, the Mac Plus, the LaserWriter Plus, the Apple IIc Plus, the Apple III Plus[1]... In reality I'd say it's a very Appley name! :)
[1] Yes, there actually was such a critter: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA31434