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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately I think it's pretty obvious why they were acquired, so 99% skeptical of their future. They were probably acquired because:

1. They realized just owning the software platform is very limiting (For example they can't compete with Apple no matter how good they are. Just look at Google maps. Thousand times better than the default Apple maps but will never be #1 map app on iOS because people always choose the default). Also, now even Google is moving towards owning their own hardware platform. As a VC funded company I think this is the best timing to exit. Otherwise it's all downhill from here.

2. Samsung wants to fight with Google/Apple/Amazon/MS and needed a weapon (because, you know, people say AI is the future nowadays).

So at best these guys will be integrated into Samsung phones to differentiate Samsung's hardware. I don't see them becoming the "open platform" that they envisioned at all.

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> Just look at Google maps. Thousand times better than the default Apple maps

No it isn't, they are basically the same for 90% of users.

Map data and quality varies depending on your location.

I wish apple gave me a fair choice. I do prefer Google maps but i keep also using stupid apple maps because it keeps coming up.

I agree but but worry at this point that it would be viewed as conceding to Google. My problem with iOS has always been the forced integrations you cannot decouple.

As pointed out by another comment here [1], Google doesn't give you a "fair choice" in these things (beyond the ability to install competitors' offerings as separate apps) either:

> Google's MADA agreement forbids OEMs from making anything but Google Now/Voice Search the default digital assistant on Android devices with Google Play.

> Google is telling it's hardware partners for Google Home and Google Cast they're forbidden from supporting competing digital assistants.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12649533

Yes, but at least on Android you can change your defaults.

On iOS, you cannot.

Ah yes, iOS doesn't let you do that, but third-party apps can choose to open stuff in the Chrome/YouTube/etc. apps if they want to.

I'm sorry but thats not good enough.

On Android I can make a new email client, and overnight it can become the default email client for everyone that installs it.

On iOS I would need to convince most large apps to allow me as an option before it would work.

Not being able to do this is basically the last thing keeping me off of iOS at this point.

Thank fuck.

Open some app: Would you like me to be the default for X? Me: no thanks.

Next day:

open some app: Would you like me to be the default for X? Me: ahhh, NOT AGAIN.

Or have we forgotten how annoying it is that browsers all seem to do that all the damn time.

It doesn't need to follow Windows or Android's UX, but it should be allowed.

Something like a settings menu where you can control the default apps for many "intents" (that's the android terminology, not sure what else to call it).

Choose an app for email, sms, "instant messaging", browser, navigation, phone, etc... Don't let individual apps change anything, and if you want don't even let them prompt you to change something. That last part can be enforced by appstore guidelines.

If apple does this, i'd switch overnight. And as someone that is about as far away from the apple ecosystem as you can be, i'd probably end up using many of the apple "things" over time. Let their first party apps stand on their own. I have no qualms with having theirs be the default, and it honestly doesn't even bother me if they aren't un-installable, but let me change my defaults!

> Open some app: Would you like me to be the default for X? Me: no thanks.

This is NOT how it works on android and WP

Android asks once, right after a new app is installed that has the ability to be default handler for that action. There's a slight annoyance factor here, but its taken care of quickly and its a lot easier to see this menu pop-up than dig through settings to manually handle what app controls what.

Meanwhile on my ipad, I feel like Apple is making all the choices and I just have to deal with it. This is the biggest difference between Apple and Android for me. My Android devices have the apps I like and 'just work' when launched or whatever. Apple forcibly opens the Apple apps and I need to run down my screens of installed apps to find what I actually want to run.

I don't know how in this day and age I can't choose my default handlers of a product I own.

That's literally the opposite of how it works.

1. Install email app.

2. Click on email link in other app.

3. Select email client if more than one installed

4. Click select for now / remember my choice.

5. If you clicked remember email links from all app will start that client.

> On iOS, you cannot.

You can remove almost every default app from iOS 10, including Maps.

... And then not be able to set another app as default.

I hope the recent EU probe into this [1] would help the situation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12618092

So, will Samsung no longer develop on Android if they seem to be moving into the AI assistant space themselves...?

I'm not talking about the content. Talking about the user experience. It does suck, and I'm not even an Apple hater.

I have given up on using the default map for searching anything. Of course the map content itself is the same, but what good is a mobile map if you search for a coffee shop around you in New York and it gives you some grocery store in Scandinavia? I would be forgiving if this happened rarely, but to me it happened very often. I have 4 iDevices and they all have the same problem. This never happens with Google maps.

While this is a war of anecdotes, I can safely say this has never happened to me. If I search for coffee shops around me, I see...coffee shops around me. The new redesign of maps for iOS 10 has -- at least to me -- a much better UX than the current Google Maps app does, also.

To pile on: all of you guys reside in the US. Google Maps its data is much more up to date compared to Apple Maps in most of the world. Navigating in SE-Asia with Gmaps is a breeze. Apple Maps constantly sent me to places, only to have the current address owner (and Google Maps) tell me that the business I was searching for moved. Same in Europe. Doesn't hurt that Google Maps has public transit integrated pretty much around the globe. Apple Maps currently only has that in 10 cities.. screw that noise.

Yup, outside of the US is definitely where Google Maps data shines. Obviously just another anecdotal experience, but I've had Google instantly find places in Italy that Apple said didn't exist or gave a location very far from what we were looking for.

I just checked, Apple can't find me transit directions from my city (a single one stop train ride from London) and a major London train/tube station. Nor can it find me bus directions around my city. I don't remember when Google added this stuff, 5+ years ago?

On the other hand in Tajikistan Google Maps is beyond awful, even in Dushanbe. It regularly placed pins kilometres from real location. Openstreetmap on the other hand was mostly fine.

All of them are far from perfect, but vastly better than what we had before.

It's not just outside of the U.S. I live in Manhattan and this happens to me all the time.

Apple Maps is absolutely way behind in non-US cities; I happen to like Apple's UX more, but I wouldn't recommend anyone switch if Google is better in their area. I'm quite aware I'm in the area that Apple is arguably strongest in, although they're pretty good around all of the US now. People also have an idea of How Much Apple Maps Sucks that's somewhat frozen in time -- for instance, while their transit is way behind Google's, they're in 33 cities now, not 10. (And their transit maps tend to be more detailed than Google's in my experience, giving you specific exits from larger transit stations to take.)

At any rate, sure, Apple Maps isn't as good yet. They launched years after Google Maps and with a much smaller team. (There are some interesting politics behind that, from what I've heard; just say that the fiasco of the Maps launch is the primary reason Scott Forstall is no longer with the company.) The team now numbers over 1000, from what I've heard, and I expect the gap to continue to close -- but it's going to continue to take a while.

And I ask Google Maps to direct me home and it points me at Home Depot.

Frankly both Apple Maps and Google Maps could stand some UI improvements. Google Maps won't shut up, throws up some bizarre progress bar even on mute, has mystery meat navigation, and replaces the map with some giant material design-style empty space when it decides I've "arrived" (even if I haven't).

Apple Maps used to make it hard to pan around, but that's been fixed in iOS 10. Instead now it has terrible bugs in landscape mode, and has adopted the "you've arrived, now you don't need the map any more!" behavior.

If they just let the map be a map...But anyways I'm old enough to remember pulling over to pull out the giant paper map in San Francisco, so I can't get too upset. Either one has made my life so much better.

> And I ask Google Maps to direct me home and it points me at Home Depot

On iOS? You can tell Google your home/work addresses in settings, I ask for directions/transit home multiple times most weeks and it works. On Android they can figure them out, but on iOS they don't have enough permissions and you'll have to tell them - but when you do this works.

Google could request permission to access my contacts, which would give them access to my contact card, which has that information...

Instead they want me to sign into Google and it wants that info to then be stored on Google's servers.

In my experience, Apple Maps is almost a decade behind Google Maps in many places outside the U.S. and a few other countries. Google Maps beats Apple Maps not only in the map content, but also by having live traffic indications and turn-by-turn navigation. They're not even in the same league to compare elsewhere.

I get live traffic indications and turn-by-turn direction from apple's maps. The first version sucked, but that's like complaining about windows ME it's not really relevant any more.

Tell that to my Uber drivers who always take me to bizarre places due to Apple Maps directions.

> Samsung wants to fight with Google/Apple/Amazon/MS and needed a weapon

More likely, Samsung doesn't have the internal chops to build a Cortana/GNow/Siri but has a corporate mandate to have a Samsung version of anything Google does on Android. If you have ever used a Samsung phone, you'll see there's both a bundled (by contract) Google suite of apps and a matching Samsung suite of apps.

I don't think this is a sign of them moving to Tizen or picking a bigger fight with Google or Apple, but a continuation of what they've been doing for several years and something of a non-issue and non-news. I imaigne, like most Samsung apps, it'll be ignored for the superior Google equivalent.

Personally, I'd like to see them leave Android for Tizen. We really need more competition in the mobile space. Shame Samsung isn't serious about leaving Android. The few times I've helped someone with a Samsung phone have been frustrating and confusing. There's just too much Samsung junk on there fighting for your attention.

Ironically, I got a contact from a recruiter at Viv recently, and my main concern was that I didn't see how they could succeed unless they were bought by someone else. Either "intelligent assistants" are going to be a fad, or they're going to be a built-in feature: in the first case, the point is moot; in the second, standalone assistants like Viv was will go the way of standalone grammar checkers, i.e., either get bought and integrated or wither away. I agree that the open platform idea just wouldn't be viable; Viv would have to be so much better than Siri or Google Now that users would be willing to not just download it but use it in preference to the fully-integrated AI that came with their device.

Samsung doesn't strike me as a great place to end up, but I suspect they were the only place to end up, practically speaking. It'll be interesting to see if they can really compete against Google Now, though.

 won't let another map be the default. It doesn't matter if you have google maps installed, if you click an address apples maps open.

That depends on the application (and website) in which you're tapping the address. In some cases that will be Google Maps, if installed, in others you'll be presented with open-with options, in others still it will be Apple Maps.

Apps on iOS have to hardcode every other third-party handler that they want to work with besides Apple Maps. If an app presents you with open-with options for maps, that's because the developer took the trouble to add extra codepaths for Google Maps, HERE Maps, etc.

That's good clarification, thank you.

> Thousand times better than the default Apple maps

"Better" is subjective. I used Google Maps since it was released on iOS. I recently switched to Apple for a perceived privacy benefit.

> Also, now even Google is moving towards owning their own hardware platform

Microsoft is also taking the same approach with Surface tablets, Surface books and upcoming Surface phones

Sadly, Microsoft threw in the towel in the consumer space, and is now in enterprise-milking mode. Just look at the wording on the products.

They've been actively chasing away customers. Google is giving unlimited photo storage to Pixel phone buyers. Last year Microsoft took back the 15 GB it had given to Lumia phone buyers.

Surely their business model always involved something like this. If they were as good as claimed, Google, Amazon, or Apple would buy them, if only defensively. Samsung, with its wannabe status in software platforms seems to me like the best you can do if you're not quite as good as you hope (I'm giving Samsung credit they may not deserve, perhaps they have been utterly hoodwinked).

> If they were as good as claimed, Google, Amazon, or Apple would buy them

Or maybe they needed money, but going with those companies would mean acquihire with 100% certainty, and Samsung offered more "free" terms.

I hate that this comment turned an article about Samsung into an Apple maps bitchfest. Why do people feel the need to whine about barely related things in these articles? Does no one listen to you outside of here?

1. Agreed. It's literally the reason we're building our own hardware. You can't build the future on the current hardware platforms produced by the major players. We're working on the shift.

> because people always choose the default

Tell me about how everyone uses IE on windows.

You can tell Windows you want to use a different browser, and that choice will typically be respected (when opening links from other apps, etc).

On iOS, you cannot do that for maps. If an app implements a "View this on a map" feature, I don't believe you have any way of changing which app that link opens in.

Sure, you have the freedom to install whatever app you want. And that freedom begins and ends with manually launching the app; third-party links will still open with Apple Maps.

In Facebook I can open addresses in Google maps.

Presumably because FB went out of their way to implement that. I wonder if they can detect that G Maps is installed, or if that option is always offered. Either way, I can say that many other apps (eg. Yelp) do not have this option.

IIRC both Google and Facebook have to work together for that to happen.

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