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Comment by tkinom | Hacker News Reader

Agree on all the items.

Not just Apple, I see similar issues with Google.

Google's Youtube IOS app has issue playing video correctly. It can't even buffer the segments correctly.

Google latest Android Map crashes all the times 1-2 minutes into the navigation, extremely dangerous when I have to restart the navigate while driving. I can't depend on it at all.

I have to roll back to the default factory install older version google map to make it work. Lately I see the older stable version start crash more often, probabaly cause by the "update" on the server API side.

It will be a very scary world if this type of SW development processes are applied to tomorrow's "self driving car".

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> Google latest Android Map crashes all the times 1-2 minutes into the navigation

I haven't had these issues, but I have had significant issues with its performance. 15+ seconds to initialize. At least 3+ seconds needed to swap between transit options. Moving to navigation mode feels sluggish. And this is on a Nexus 6, with no issues with other apps.

When I choose "walk" as the navigation mode it puts an Uber route on there, which when selected gives me an ad to try Uber for the first time. I don't have Uber installed on my device. I don't want to take a fucking Uber, I want to see how long it'll take me to walk somewhere!

I get the feeling that something happened in the Google org responsible for maps. It was always a snappy app that was useful to me. Now it's slow and appearing to be an avenue for ads on the device that I bought directly from Google. Unacceptable.

That Uber ad was seriously misleading and annoying when I was traveling last month. I wanted to walk across the city. WALK. I get directions, it gives me a route and a time, it seems quicker than I expected, but not by too much. Start moving and look at it while I'm going and realized they wanted me to get in a car. The time it would've taken a driver to get to me, I'd have been halfway to the destination on foot.

Don't insert ads into an app in a way that misleads users. You'd be pissed if you opened a book, started reading at Chapter 1 and found that the first 3 chapters you read were just a tease of another book, yours starts on Chapter 4.

Yeah, Google web apps must have some scary Javascript bloat going on. I remember when GMail was lightning fast; now it takes 5-10 seconds just to load the first page of my inbox and chat windows.

I've switched to the Basic HTML version full-time. It's way, way faster, even having to reload the entire page for most actions (remember when the whole point of AJAX was faster webpages?). I miss a few features, but it's not even close to being worth using the many-times-slower interface and associated higher system load to get those back. Some of those features (inline "track this package" links in Amazon emails in the mailbox view, for instance) shouldn't require javascript/AJAX at all, but are simply absent, which is frustrating, but again, it's still worth it.

Plus I can, you know, close the tab. One of the worst things about these enormous "javascript applications" is the high startup time (remember how much we hated Flash intros with loading screens?) that leads to leaving the tab open, which means that tab's disgustingly-high memory use is a constant rather than only occasional cost (I'm looking at you, Asana!)

All iOS issues with Google software, I suspect, have more to do with Apple being dicks to Google than with Google fucking up. Remember, Apple is really trying hard to rid iOS of all Google programs. Remember Apple Maps?

I don't think it's just Apple's fault. Every time I try to use the Youtube app on my iPhone, I can never find the things I'm looking for, because they seem to ignore all of Apple's interaction guidelines and implement the Android UI instead.

The other day I was trying to send a link to a friend: instead of clicking the standard share icon, you have to click the arrow (that looks like an email forward?), which pops up a non-standard share UI instead of the standard sheet. Never mind the fact that to dismiss a video you have to first swipe it down (minimizing it into some bizarre picture-in-picture frame), then slide it off from there, instead of using a "Back" button/gesture like every other app in iOS.

Got any actual evidence for this? Yes, I remember Apple Maps; I worked on the team. Apple Maps was the result of Apple being smart and not wanting to be beholden to Google Maps forever; eventually you have to roll your own.

And yet, here we are five years later, and Google Maps is still on the iPhone, shows no evidence of leaving, and Google's iOS apps are ALL still present and better than ever, and Google is still the default search bar in Safari. Meanwhile, Apple Maps is a great product too and has been worked on and polished for several years. "Remember Apple Maps" betrays a mindset where you read one article a few hours after it was released, half a decade ago, and you have no updated impression of the product at all. Apple Maps is, in fact, rock-solid for me right now. It is, in fact, now superior to Google Maps for transit directions, and in some other ways.

So really, I'm not sure what you are talking about, at all.

I wouldn't be so sure. I run Google apps on Android, and although I'm not sure the situation has gotten worse, it definitely hasn't gotten better. I can concur that navigation will crash without warning mid-route, maps will suddenly decide I'm somewhere very, very far away (and change the results list to "match"), and so on. It's not unusable by any means, but it could stand improvement.

Back when iOS 6 was released with Apple Maps and no YouTube, Google could be forgiven for problems with their replacement apps, as Apple had somewhat surprised them with the timing of the removals. That was three years ago, though. In the present tense, it's hard to imagine what you mean; it's not like iOS has some library to inject crashes into Google apps, or Apple is preventing updates to those apps from being published on the store (as ruled out by the frequency of updates).

There's the fact that iOS currently doesn't allow replacing the system hooks for Maps and Safari with Google Maps and Chrome (or any other store apps), but that's not the type of problem the parent was complaining about.

If you look at YouTube on android, I see evidence that they are f'ing up there in how advertisements are presented.

Put yourself on 144p quality. Watch a few videos till you get to an ad. It seems like they disregard your preference and pump up to 4k for your ad, which sucks when it takes 2 minutes to download a 30 second advertisement.

The crash issues I had with google map was on Android. I check the reviews on Google Play Store, it is not just me or my Android devices, almost everyone had that crash issues at that time.

I can't figure out how Google can release any software like that.

Google can't blame IOS/Apple for that.

I suspect some of those crashes are hardware related.

Anecdotal for sure, but Google Maps has been solid for me on Nexus devices.

Anecdotal * 2 = still anecdotal, but my 1st gen moto g has never given me any problems with Maps, other than being a little laggy from time to time.

Samsung?

Rock solid for me on my OnePlus One, too. I've used it for some fairly long driving trips as well, where it's been running for a few hours.

No. Google has the same access to things as any other developer. It's Google, full stop.

> Google's Youtube IOS app has issue playing video correctly. It can't even buffer the segments correctly.

Do you have t-mobile? T-mobile started throttling everyone's videos. I had problems similar to the one you describe and had to turn off tmobile's throttling 'feature' in order to get youtube to work correctly.

youtube for IPad is terrible:

1. it has no back button. sometimes I watched video a, then from the recommend list there is video b and video c I select video b, then the recommend list update if I want to see video c, I have to search again

2. there is no sound volume button, each time I have to use the button in ipad

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