Arc Search: Find Everything, Faster (iOS)

I've been loving Arc on my Mac, and this looks like a really interesting take on a mobile browser – search by default, auto-summarisation at the core.

But the setup flow pushes being my default browser hard. I understand that's always going to be their biggest value prop, but the flow lists things that I'll "lose" if I don't set it as my default browser, including auto-summaries, and tab archiving, neither of which have anything to do with being the default browser.

Now maybe the auto-summaries costs them too much, and they need to limit it to only users who have some amount of commitment in the form of being the default browser, but it's still leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

As it happens, I declined to set it as my default browser, more on principle because it pushed so hard without having proven any value, and I still appear to have those features. So either Arc intends to restrict the features in this petty way and this is a bug, or they're happy lying to their users in order to increase growth. Neither is a good look, which is a shame because damn this browser looks nice.