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Comment by iakov | Hacker News Reader

Honest question to HN readers: which Google apps are you using on iOS, and why?

I’ve bit the bullet and ditched Google ecosystem last year, moving email to Fastmail, buying an iPhone and the like. The only Google app i still use is Maps - they are vastly superior to everything else, with navigation, public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague) and reviews/recommendations built in. Essentially its a three-in-one application with no adequate replacement.

I wonder if I am missing something good from Google.

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I have an iPhone and use almost every Google service available instead of the Apple one. Why? Not because the app is better, but because I'm also using Linux & Windows, as well as a Android tablet. With Google services at least I'm not locked into one platform.

Same story here. I'm very irritated by Google Contacts not being available on iOS. What do you use there?

I’m pretty sure Google contacts are synced into iPhone contacts if you login to gmail

iOS/iPadOS centralize accounts in system settings. You can toggle what services and data you want synced: mail, calendar, contacts, notes. Your google/gmail contacts are natively synced with your phone's contact list. No separate app needed.

Go to Settings > Mail > Accounts > [account name] > toggle services

You can just sync the native iOS contacts app with Google

For me personally I use pretty much all the Google apps. Drive, Docs, Keep, Maps, Home, Gmail, Duo, Search, Photos...

The reason is I have an iPad, Pixel, Windows desktop, MacBook Pro and Linux laptop.

Google's ecosystem is the only one that works well across all operating systems, and Google Home has by far the best voice control.

> navigation, public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague)

Have you given Apple Maps a go recently? In cities where they’ve done the big transport updates (I think Prague is one of them), I’ve found Apple Maps to be far superior to Google Map.

Live transport times, accurate station entrances and exits (great here in London where stations can have half a dozen entrances spread out over half a square mile). Incredible walking and cycling audio instructions, which make good use of cycle paths, and provide instructions using traffic lights as landmarks (e.g. go through the next lights, then turn right).

Reviews etc are a bit crap still, POI data isn’t as good. So the directions to your destination are great, but actually telling Maps what your destination is sometime frustrating. Additionally I’ve noticed a view map errors that result is silly routes, but I suspect Google Maps has the same, i just didn't have the local knowledge to notice them.

I don't know if you can say superior when Google Maps does all those, maybe bar the last one:

> Live transport times, accurate station entrances and exits (great here in London where stations can have half a dozen entrances spread out over half a square mile). Incredible walking and cycling audio instructions, which make good use of cycle paths, and provide instructions using traffic lights as landmarks (e.g. go through the next lights, then turn right).

In areas with good Apple Maps coverage, it provides instructions that are more helpful and usable while driving with a simpler interface than Google Maps.

For complex routing and overall features, Google is still far ahead.

I think Apple Map’s implementation is substantial more polished than what Google has. So while the top level feature list might be very similar, Apple Maps just works better. This is of course my opinion, but if you haven't used Apple Maps in a while, I strongly encourage you to try it for a week. I think you’ll be impressed with how well it works today.

I use Google Calendar because when meetings get changed or updated I would like to know about it at once and not after 15min or 30min or whatever time it takes the default calendar app to get its act together.

I also use Google Sheets on iOS because it’s significantly more useful than Numbers.

Google apps and services + iOS is the sweet spot for me.

iPhone is significantly better than Android for me as a hardware device and OS. But Google apps for productivity are miles ahead of anything Apple has.

For me the main ones are Map, GMail and Drive/Docs. I'm all-in on MacOS and iOS and have been for over a decade, but those three apps/services are essential for me.

Search obviously, I tried DDG but it's not quite there for me. I tried Brave a few months ago but it was glitchy and unstable, on MacOS at least.

I could probably move to a different email service, but the rest of my family are on GMail and I don't see a strong reason to move.

DDG for me is 90%, so I use DDG and append !g whenever I don’t get the results I’m looking for. I’d rather have google search as a choice than a default.

Why would family be a lock-in factor for GMail? It’s just email.

Takes an entire day to migrate accounts from online services and apps. The flow for this is very bad, on some sites you have to email support and on others it’s impossible.

Even after doing this a year later I still get email to my old account (Uber) even though I’ve updated my email. Some sites you can’t update and there is no support (Stanford medical).

If you admin a Google Apps account on your own domain, with family/friends on it, they have to suffer if you want to migrate away.

Why use the GMail app over the built-in client?

Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions my own.

I love Gmail. I've also been an iOS user since day one, and 99% of the time I prefer apps that feel like iOS apps.

I use the Gmail app instead of Mail, even for my personal email, because Gmail has a number of concepts and integrations with other parts of Workspace that don't neatly jibe with the native Mail app. iOS wants to treat labels as folders, which is an approximation. Responding to Calendar events isn't the one-tap, in-place experience it is in Gmail.

The Gmail app also does a few key things a lot better: search is way more sophisticated and reliable; Smart Compose is really brilliant and makes me faster, particularly at knocking out more 'trivial' emails.

The one thing I really miss about iOS mail that Gmail doesn't support is VIP contacts. Gmail has a way of marking emails as 'high priority' and only notifying on those, but its classifier doesn't really match my expectations. As a result, I've just turned off notifications for email. I check it a few times a day. Probably healthier, but esp when I'm waiting for an email from a critical contact, VIP would be awesome.

Not the poster but I use it because Mail didn’t support notifications. I’m not sure if that’s still true. A lot of Gmail specific features tend to work better with their app.

I still use drive and it’s related apps.

There are two things that makes them stand out, ux wise:

1. That round button in the lower right corner that has to be there because it’s material, damn the actual need.

2. If a pane has a horizontal bar, it means that pane is dragable - except of course in Googles apps. Then it’s just there to look at.

While Google maps is more accurate with data, I find Apple Maps good enough and nicer to look at. I occasionally go to maps.Google as a backup.

Good question!

I moved to IPhone after having to follow the uncertain and complicated upgrade roadmaps of Android Phones.

I use Apple Notes and Reminders heavily. They feel stable (of the kind of stability in which you know they won't be just wiped out of the internet) and they just work.

I'm considering moving away from Google Drive since I still cannot make sense of their new Google Sync and Backup client.

I will most likely stick to GMail since I really like the UX.

As other user here points out, GBoard for iOS is wonderful, I can easily type in three languages as a Spanish speaker who speaks to his German SO (mostly) in English.

I use Apple Music and it is very good, nice to have an alternative to Google Play Music, which of course doesn't exist anymore.

If you want to use Notes and don’t want to trust Apple, you can store the notes on any IMAP server you like.

I don’t know if it is possible to store Reminders outside of iCloud, I don’t really use it.

Is GBoard useful still if you don’t grant Google full access to the keyboard inputs?

- Google Maps. It's still the best maps app even though the quality of information they display and suggest has gone downhill.

- Google Photos. About a magnitude of magnitudes faster than Apple Photos when uploading/syncing/sharing/literally anything with photos than Apple Photos which are always stuck in some limbo with no indication of what is happening.

With the same uploaded quality ?

Not the same, but this still doesn't explain why Apple Photos is so dog slow and has so few indicators as to what's going on.

Apple Photos: Uploads stuck? Check. Sharing photos taking up to three hours to show up on the other person's device? Check. Weird formats when sharing (qt/mp4, downsized jpegs/pngs/hvecs) with no controls? Check. And so on and so on.

Google Photos has its quirks. But man is experience so much better.

Google translate. I was a Lens app user since iPhone 4. Then Google bought it and incorporated into the translate app. So, I installed it solely for the purpose of using lens functionality.

This functionality is built-in to the camera app from iOS 15 as Live Text.

You might have to turn it on both at ‘General/Language and Region’ and then in the Camera settings.

Live text is a joke in comparison to Lens, unfortunately. It's clear that Apple is a few decades behind on translation technology, their implementation is worse than Translate from when I was in school.

Live text translate is a pale shadow of what Google translate can do.

> for the purpose of using lens functionality.

Not sure what you are getting at. Isn’t the whole point of the google word lens feature that it translates foreign languages and replaces the text with your language in the image in real time?

> I was a Lens app user since iPhone 4. Then Google bought it and incorporated into the translate app. So, I installed it solely for the purpose of using lens functionality.

Yes, the lens functionality for translating text

Ah, so they are using the translation app solely for the translation functionality.

> public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague)

Give Citymapper a go if you haven't already. I find it vastly superior to Google Maps for public transport here in London.

(And I work at Google so, if anything, am probably biased the other way.)

Citymapper has great public transport navigation in many areas including Prague.

Apple Maps is becoming better every day, especially for navigation, the place where it lacks is the poi database.

OpenStreetMaps also has a large poi database.

Even though it isn’t as feature filled as the database used by Google Maps, at least you can be sure your app isn’t hiding a restaurant because they didn’t pay for an ad. Which is what happens if you use Google Maps.

I have over a dozen Google apps installed on my iPhone and iPad, but there are only three I use enough to have an opinion about: Gmail, Maps, and YouTube Music.

Gmail and Maps work well enough for me, and I have no complaints. I much prefer the street view navigation on the Apple Maps app in areas where it’s available, though.

YouTube Music, which I mainly use on the iPhone, is sluggish and buggy. Album covers, for example, are often slow to load, and sometimes the wrong covers appear next to songs in playlists. I only stay with it because I have a bunch of playlists left over from Google Play Music, which I was satisfied with, and because I encountered annoying technical problems with both Spotify and Apple Music when I tried them a few years ago.

No, I’d be done with Google, but nothing competes with Maps, and Earth. Apple maps isn’t cross platform, so useless to me anyway. My nest was just replaced with Ecobee. I still use their search and news, but web only. I am open to switch when I find something better.

And Google Home, because I have a Chromecast so my friends can share content, music from android phones.

I look forward to the change, I find Google’s Material design to be a big visual improvement over what was, but more frustrating to use.

Not sure about the EU but Yandex maps is surprisingly good (yeah, I know - Russian). But at least you don't send your data to Google.

Did you try the “Transit” app for public transit?

Only Maps. But ditching Maps has been really difficult for me. It's just vastly better than the competition here where I live.

I still use Google Maps. But CityMapper is excellent in urban areas (where available), and organic maps is great for walking directions.

Moreover, when I see “material design” it puts me off, because it reminds me how I hated my ex-android, playing button “wave” animations but not doing an action. Google ui is flat in all senses, and feels like a low-effort work stretched to the size of idea. Idk why they started to implement that ui for iphone, when it clearly had its own.

Only tangentially related, I know, but I see google maps quite differently.

First and foremost I want to admit that I have no good comeback to the public transport schedules, that is a good feature.

But regarding mapping and navigation, google maps does not treat you like a human being. It's essentially a catalogue of advertisements, much like google search. It's optimized to guide you to the "nearest pizza place" or what have you, and at least in my area, if you're not looking for a vaguely defined place to spend money and already know your destination you're screwed, quite ironically. Everyone I've talked to around here struggles with it and has developed the strangest procedures to trick gmaps into showing the route they want to see.

I personally use OpenStreetMap and it works very reliably, admittedly after I reconstructed some roads and added some labels to places I visit. Luckily there are many active editors around here, so even when I'm going to visit a new area 99% of the time I get where I want without issue.

Which OSM app do you use?

Google Maps is still better than Apple Maps overall. There are some nice little features in Apple Maps added in the last few years, but my most recent attempt at using Apple Maps navigation led me to an empty lot.

Some that haven’t been mentioned by others: Google Pay, because it has an integration with my city’s parking meter system that is better than that system’s official app, Google Authenticator, and Google PhotoScan.

Maps and Keep (for a single shared shopping list)

Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Google Calendar

The old Google chat app was better than the current one, but c'est la vie

I’m still on Photos. I’d like to move to something else, but I don’t fancy being locked into iCloud.

When I still had iOS I mostly used Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.

YouTube - sadly no alternative

Google Maps - Apple Maps still borks up way too much

If you're missing "something good" really depends on what you have a need for. They've offered free SMS for years, which is pretty cool, but niche. You sound like you might like trying Waze, which is also owned by Google.

I wouldn't recommend using any of it, though. It's Google, after all. Not as evil as they come, but pretty bad.

> and why?

Because ease of use.

Waze

I use Gboard because it treats me as an adult, allowing me to type expletives.

Fucked if I know why you can’t type expletives on your iPhone - seems to work fine for me.

I added a contact whose name was all the expletives and now it ducking allows me to swear.

You can type them, but not by gliding.

Ah. Didn't appreciate that. To be fair, it took Apple so long to implement this I've never learned to use the feature.

This seems to have changed now.

As of iOS 15, gliding is able to type expletives for me if they’re added to the “text replacement” list.

Google Maps in Japan is unusable. Many times it directed me which might have been the shortest way but through micro-streets that are really difficult to navigate instead of the more efficient 2-lane.

I’ve noticed that Google Maps has this really strong desire to rat run. It really likes taking tiny roads, and making excessive turns to reduce your transit time by a few seconds or minutes.

Unfortunately it usually ends up being slower, because the tiny road aren't faster, Google just has very low accuracy speed data for then.

Apple Maps on the other hand tends to prefer simpler routes with fewer turns. In London this means Google will take you down a maze of backstreets, which frequently have turn or modal restrictions (specifically put in to prevent Google Maps style navigation) Google doesn’t know about. Whereas Apple Maps tends to stick to main thoroughfares, which are always quicker and much less stressful to use.

For me the classic example is driving from east to west across London. Google maps will insist on taking the wiggliest route that’s entirely 20mph speed limits. Apple Maps will suggest heading out east to a ring road and looping back west to your destination. A longer (slightly slower) route, that about a billion times easier to navigate.

To be fair, Japan has specific digital service offerings in a lot of niches that outdo most of internationally aligned competitors with their eyes closed.

Care to share a few examples? Visiting Japan has been on my list for many years. Still hasn't materialised.

It's just many things piling up. transit.yahoo.co.jp for long and short distance public transport, maps.yahoo.co.jp instead of US map services, tabelog.com for restaurant reviews, navitime for car navigation etc. Note that the desired functionality is often available only in Japanese. If the sites have international/English versions, often you get a lite version at best and a dummy version without much content in the worst case. You can observe that for example already when you research the Narita Express rail service; the JR pages in English always have less detail and info than the JP ones. A good thing about Japan's online services is that a lot of them are not "apps" they're web sites and the apps just containers for the web sites, on Android more often than not anyway, as Japan is iPhone country. So you get the same services from your desktop as on your smartphones, and many service websites still have proper, fully featured mobile web versions, as opposed to many Western online services making their mobile web versions increasingly unusable, pushing apps, like .e.g. reddit. Also JP web is much more pleasant than Anglo web in my opinion; they have stuck with a combination of "tables tables everywhere", hypertext links, and dead-simple HTML markup plus colorful icons/ads/banners in plain image formats from the late 2000s which is very easy to read, e.g. https://www.jreast.co.jp/ltd_exp/guide/#price_area2 Easy to read, easy to use.

Really? Are you aware of any alternative that actually works well?

I've been trying to move to OSM but so far i haven't found any usable alternative that actually gets and has good coverage of Japanese addresses in Kanji/hiragana as well as romaji. Apple Maps is way behind Google here (and I find Apple Maps otherwise quite usable in Europe).

Apart from in-car navigators (with terrible UI, at least the ones I tried so far) I'm not aware of even domestic alternatives that are usable. All my Japanese friends use Google Maps.

You might want to explore https://www.navitime.co.jp/

IMO, best dataset at the expense of a very Japanese-style UI.

It's interesting to hear that. Here in the UK I find GMaps way better than Apple maps in a number of ways. Apple maps has a frustrating habit of sending you to anything but the proper entrance to large venues or places of interest, it's become something of a running joke with my wife who insists on using it when driving.

It goes to show how these companies are much less monolithic than we might sometimes assume.

I assume you’re talking about driving. To me Google Maps has worked well when walking around Tokyo, particularly when finding small, hole in the wall ramen shops off the beaten path. I haven’t used it in the city for driving but it’s worked well when going to rural onsen locations. And I prefer it to the rental car’s built in navigation system (which is almost always a Nissan Note).

There is one time it really screwed up. I like walking along those micro streets, lots of interesting stuff to see in neighborhoods. My wife and I were pushing out baby in a stroller and Google maps route sent us along a path that included a giant steep flight of stairs! It wasn’t a big deal by there was no mention that the rout would be in accessible to people who couldn’t climb stairs.

I found Google Maps worse than Apple Maps in both Japan and South Korea, it's kind of crazy that's the case given that Google has had such a lead. It makes me wonder whether Google is investing much into these products anymore.

How do you make Apple maps work with kanji and romaji addresses at the same time? Half the time I'm driving somewhere, I have to painstakingly translate addresses before the search finds it (and even that's not 100%)

Utter rubbish with public transport too. Quite often it will suggest the slowest lines to a destination.

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