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Comment by hart_russell | Hacker News Reader

+1 to Apple's track record for user privacy.

I do not regret switching from Android to iOS (even if siri is woefully behind the voice assistant game)

According to Moxie (https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1158852855291269120), this isn't a positive for user privacy.

Also autocomplete. I had a samsung phone running android that was almost omniscient in knowing what I wanted to type or keeping track of what I had just been reading or searching for and giving me suggestions based on that (like if I had been reading about a restaurant and then went to send a text to my wife it would give me prompts about the restaurant, which is exactly what I wanted). iOS autocomplete is woefully subpar in comparison.

Just install SwiftKey. The native iOS keyboard is absolutely appalling, I don't wish it upon my worst enemy...

Why is it appalling? Can you be more specific?

That even today many European languages don't even have a basic dictionary. I'm not talking about the "guess the next word" feature. All I want is a dictionary that could suggest a correction to a misspelled word.

Use two languages at once? No way! I guess they need to invent a new chip or something.

Swipe to type? Hehe.

The keyboard in itself is fast and good but it lacks features.

The state of auto-suggest and auto-correct for anything but English (or maybe French, German, not a speaker so I don't know) is appalling. Auto-suggest is either not even an option or if it is it takes you to type almost the full word before suggesting something sensible. The auto-correct is way worse though. It sometimes suggests corrections to a wrongly spelled word even on basics like pronouns and such. But also let's not forget iOS/macOS don't even have all languages of the EU (when speaking of Europe) available as a system language. For the world's largest tech company it's beyond me why can't they put a team of 1-2 people per language to take care of properly localizing their software.

Those teams existed, but were disbanded and those people are now drawing up new emojis.

Typing in two languages works since iOS 11 (IIRC). I’m routinely typing in either English or Italian without ever manually switching language

But only two languages are supported, with no easy way to type in three or change the character set of the keyboard, which one can do with one swipe on SwiftKey Android.

One of the main reasons, in addition to lack of dual-SIM, I realised switching to iOS simply wasn't worth it for me.

Having a private number for my SO, closest friends and select high-retainer-fee clients to reach me 24/7 while also having an easily discoverable public phone number for business hours increased my response time when it matters while simultaneously tuning out the noise and anxiety of being constantly connected.

On iOS you can switch the keyboard with the small “globe” key between the “123” button and the dictation button on the lower left hand side of the keyboard, it’s one key press- assuming you added the keyboard in settings.

That's still too many steps - the trouble with bi/tri-lingual life is you often interject words (places, addresses, proper nouns) in the local language into sentences in any of the other two languages.

Constantly opening and closing settings dialogs gets on your nerves in the long run.

Adding a language to your phone (once) is too much work? Or is a “button” press to swap out the keyboard too much? I don’t understand.

I use English, Swedish accents and Russian with no issue. :s

When I was on android, I could type a message in one language, change who I was talking to, and start typing in another, and the autocomplete would immediately know I had changed language. iOS constantly corrects my first few words before realising. And sometimes the keyboard sets itself to a non-multilingual keyboard.

Does anyone know of a third party keyboard that can support 4 languages? My Android did 3 + Russian just fine but I can't find anything similar for iOS.

> Swipe to type? Hehe

That's finally coming in iOS 13

Wow, Apple is ahead of its competition again.

iOS doesn't even have an Estonian translation after all these years.

I've also switched, after my 1 year old Samsung S8 brick phone dropped to the floor one time too often. I'm not only enjoying the privacy, but also the classic, non-phablet form factor of a brand new iPhone 6s in 2019 and hope it will last me longer. Compared to Samsung's, my typing speed is up, but it's true that autocomplete suggestions are useless.

Have been running my 6s since 2015 - alas, come iOS 13 we’ll likely have to upgrade the hardware or remain with unlatched critical known vulns.

Is it given that 6s won't receive iOS 13? I bought mine because it's the only one still having an audio jack for my car stereo, and the 7 and 8 add nothing for me, except the price. Though maybe it's telling Apple themselves don't sell the 6s anymore.

iOS 13 drops support for iPhones with 1GB of RAM. 5s and 6/6+ are out. The 6S/6S+, the SE, and above are supported.

iOS 13 will be supported on the 6s, just not on the 6/6 Plus (and below).

Use the Google Assistant app for iOS if you need a voice assistant. No hands-free usage (unless you set up a cumbersome Siri shortcut), but it is light-years beyond Siri for practical purposes.

Doesn't that just bring back the privacy issues they switched to iOS over?

What voice assistant features do you miss? I've never used Android so I'm curious.

I can't give you specific examples off the top of my head, but in general use I found the Google Assistant to be much "smarter" and have responses to a wide range of queries

In my experience Google Assistant has better voice recognition and seems to be faster. I've had it recognize things like titles for songs, which are easy to mix up.

Once I had Alexa in my home I stopped asking Siri for anything ever

Siri is probably pissed as fuck. I'd sleep with one eye open if I were you.

This still isn’t reddit.

I use it all the time to set reminders. "Ok Google. At 2 PM next Tuesday remind me to <insert pretty much anything here>".

I use Siri to do the same. Is it an issue of better ASR or NLP that makes the difference for you?

Google assistant is so much better to look up information and understand what you want.

I use Alexa, Siri, and google assistant. And others don't come even close to assistant when it comes to understanding what you mean and the context. Or even understanding what I've said.

You can ask it stuff like "What's the name of the blonde actress from that new tarantino movie" and you will get the result (works on google.com too), then you can ask follow up questions about her.

This also carries over into setting reminders, controlling smart home devices. "Set a timer", "No, you know what, cancel it". It feels like talking to a person. And it sounds more like a person too.

The ONLY reason I use assistant the least of the 3, is the wake word.

Siri works just fine for setting reminders.

"Siri, remind me to buy milk tomorrow." - "Ok. Calling mom" or some other random action is more typical of siri.

This is a really bad example because I do that one myself a lot and it works perfectly well with siri.

Google assistant is better with more context “give me cycling directions to work, avoid going down Lexington”

Anecdotally that has rarely been the case for me or people I know for simple requests like that. At least in 2019 with devices from the past couple of years

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