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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

This is a whole lot of nothing. These awards are and always have been a way of showcasing great apps on app platforms. They are not "what's the best thing in the world this year that has an app".

ChatGPT is a boring app. It doesn't have a ton of platform integrations, it doesn't show off the capabilities of the platforms, it doesn't push any boundaries on what an app can be. The product might be great, but that's not the point.

This is my personal opinion based on years of following Apple's awards, I don't have any inside info in my role about this and this is not my employer's opinion.

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To be honest, I really wish ChatGPT did have much tighter platform integrations. Every time I ask Siri a question and she fumbles it (which is most of the time), I long for a chatgpt smart speaker. "I found some web results" is siri speak for "I'm way dumber than chatgpt and can't solve this simple problem".

But Apple - and Google I imagine - don't let 3rd party apps replace siri / "hey google". Apple and Google docking points because chatgpt doesn't have a lot of platform integrations feels like a very petty move.

https://www.macstories.net/ios/introducing-s-gpt-a-shortcut-...

This isn't just about "replacing Siri", to do that successfully, Chat GPT would need almost root-level access to your device. Things like constant background microphone usage, the ability to work on the Lock Screen, make calls, send texts etc without an extra prompt, get access to intents from third-party apps, all of this would either require separate APIs (which come with compatibility promises and hence lots of deliberation) or the ability to run apps unsandboxed, and would have serious privacy implications either way.

edit: With that said, if Chat GPT came before iOS, I'm pretty sure Apple would have had to design iOS with that use case in mind and get these APIs exposed somehow, maybe even through a direct integration with OpenAI or Anthropic.

Sure; but on reflection I don’t really care about chatgpt being able to make calls and play / pause apple music. I just want a way to invoke chatgpt with my voice from a locked phone and go straight into a chatgpt conversation. ChatGPT’s strength is open ended questions, storytelling and synthesis of information. Not its ability to set an oven timer.

Now, that would definitely still take some work from Apple. Right now as I understand it the device listens for “Siri…” all the time using some on-device ML. They’d need a way for that to work with chatgpt and hand over to the audio stream. And have a chatgpt conversation from a lock screen without breaking sandboxing.

But all of that would definitely make my phone a much more useful device. I won’t hold my breath though.

> don't let 3rd party apps replace siri / "hey google"

I think it's reasonable that they don't let you replace the logic behind their branding – it would be quite a serious issue if ChatGPT started giving offensive results when you ask "Hey Siri".

Whether they should allow replacing the voice assistant entirely is an interesting question. On Android OEMs can of course do this, and have done so with mixed success, see "Bixby".

The issue with LLMs is that they are slow. People expect a response immediately, so much so that Amazon Alexa built much of its popularity as a kitchen timer over the alternative because it's just fast.

I think it's a much more reasonable argument that the reason Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Bixby, and Cortana (not sure if that exists anymore?) don't use LLMs is not that Amazon/Apple/Google/Samsung/Microsoft are asleep at the wheel, but that LLMs are not suitable yet. I'm sure this is coming, but I'm not surprised none of them have it yet.

Agree - the ChatGPT app is nothing special and even has issues with layout constraints.

Not sure why this is news, ChatGPT is an interesting service but their app is barely a thin layer over their API. So why would it deserve the mention?

I mean, do we need to give say Google, "App of the year" every year because they're the most popular search engine?

For some reason you still cannot edit your chat turns in the mobile app. I frequently refine my prompts and the way I ask questions as part of using GPT-4, since the way you phrase your prompts to the model is pretty important (and revising your question by sending a new chat turn can poison the context with the original question/response) and not being able to do this on mobile really kills a lot of the utility of the app for anything other than 1-2 turn quick, simple questions.

I think a strong argument can be made in the other way. I went running the other day and had a long conversation with ChatGPT. That sort of experience is absolutely pushing boundaries...but I can see that they aren't the boundaries that Apple wants to celebrate at this moment. Apple has set a pattern of rewarding beautiful, self-contained, cohesive, through-designed, snackable experiences. A technology that challenges the notion of a smartphone itself is basically out-of-bounds.

If anything, ChatGPT even without platform integrations, make Apple/Google/Amazon look bad because the quality is so much higher than their assistants. It also doesn't showcase any of the platforms in particular, it doesn't try to be the "$platform killer app" of anything.

I think it's understandable that these platforms aren't giving ChatGPT any awards. It is not helping to make the platform stand out against other platforms.

> I think it's understandable that these platforms aren't giving ChatGPT any awards. It is not helping to make the platform stand out against other platforms.

I agree, but I think the crux of my point is that this is because ChatGPT the app doesn't stand out from a platform perspective, rather than because advertising ChatGPT would go against the platform goals.

Essentially I have no real reason to question the integrity of the awards processes here, because they seem to be awarded for the same reasons as they always are, and that ChatGPT just doesn't tick the boxes they're looking for.

I'm not naive enough to think some exec hasn't been happy with the convenience of this, but it seems a little conspiracy-theory like to assume malice here.

You've had that exact experience in tonnes of apps, probably with an equally good or better interface. It's a completely serviceable chat interface.

The revolutionary part is that you're chatting with a language model running on a server rather than a human. But that doesn't make the app impressive, it makes the back-end impressive. App of the year isn't about celebrating impressive back-ends.

> I went running the other day and had a long conversation with ChatGPT. That sort of experience is absolutely pushing boundaries...but I can see that they aren't the boundaries that Apple wants to celebrate at this moment.

Messages and WhatsApp are better designed and the communication experience is better.

I agree that this is what Apple rewards, but your suggestion about ChatGPT sounds to me like an argument for the award of "best thing in the world with an app", not an argument for ChatGPT winning the app store awards.

Both on have a “most downloaded” section. At least the AppStore does have at #1 (Top Charts/Free).

Indeed, and these awards have never been just the most downloaded app of the year.

Edited: Both have a “most downloaded” section. ChatGPT is at #1, at least on the AppStore under Top Charts -> Free.

>ChatGPT is a boring app.

Fake take.

No one believes this. Or at least no one who is both honest and intelligent.

This is mere mental gymnastics to explain this away. I'd take a hard look at what is going on in your brain to cause these kind of apologetics for Google and Apple. Its kind of scary to see from the outside.

ChatGPT is a single input with a submit button. An app being boring and it also being useful aren't mutually exclusive. But you're naive to think the app itself is an exemplary example of an application for the platform.

And your reply is incredibly hostile and aggressive. Before you suggest to others they should "take a hard look at what is going on in your brain" — you may want to take your own advice.

To be clear, by this I mean "ChatGPT is a boring app". ChatGPT is obviously not boring, but in terms of the app technology, it's a simple interface, it doesn't have platform integrations. I don't think a thin API client warrants app awards.

I welcome good faith critique and discussion, but feel that you may be engaging in bad faith arguments and taking my points out of context or purposefully misrepresenting them. Perhaps not, perhaps I could have clarified my position, but I hope you understand the point I'm trying to make.

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