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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

I switched from android to iOS 7 years ago and I’ve actually been debating going back just because of how bad iOS is at AI. And every other facet of my life, I am finding ways for it to save my time on an almost daily basis. And yet on iOS, just finding something from a text Message is still a nightmare.

Siri seems to rarely get better and sometimes actually get worse.

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Same problems on Android. Google Assistant was better in 2016 than it is in 2026, and the Gemini assistant is a joke. They can’t even integrate with their own music app (YouTube Music) properly.

I switched to iOS this year and I’ve been learning that the grass is not much greener. I do miss uBlock Origin. Maybe my next stop is GrapheneOS or a similar degoogled ROM…

There is a uBlock Origin Lite extension for Safari available in the App Store. Technically not as powerful (hence the “lite” in the name) but it’s perfectly blocking all ads for my usage.

Siri got nerfed a few years ago. “Here’s what I found on the web” is now the default answer. It used to pull answers from the search results

It’s the keyboard for me. I don’t remember making as many typing mistakes when I was on an Android phone. It’s also infuriating trying to “select all” for copy or move the cursor to beginning with the spacebar motion. I swear it’s like I’m using a phone in a dream sometimes.

For me it's all the above and lack of multiple-item clipboard. It's incredible how much time it saves on a phone...

Did iOS ever get OCR based copy/paste?

Pixels have had it for years but I think it's in every android phone now; from the app switcher you can press and hold and the system will OCR the text and allow you to copy it.

Because so many things _still_ don't make that easy to do on mobile.

It’s a system wide iOS feature and has been for a few years now

I don't think iOS has it from the app switcher, but pretty easy to take a screenshot and immediately select from it. (Or selecting from older screenshots or photos you open.)

Yes some of the best "AI" features Apple has implemented are related to picture search : you can describe what you want to find and it will consistently find it, even inside of videos with highlights or the moments you're looking for. Much less supposedly sexy than the SIRI AI / Apple Intelligence hype, but also much more useful

Yup. I switched to iphone very briefly, and the typing experience was so bad that I returned it for a full refund.

> And every other facet of my life, I am finding ways for it to save my time on an almost daily basis.

Can you give a couple of examples?

> And yet on iOS, just finding something from a text Message is still a nightmare

This has been a problem on iOS since the dawn of time and has nothing to do with AI

Nope, it got markedly worse since AI. You used to be able to search for string literals, so if you remembered one obtuse phrase from a group chat, you could pull it up instantly. Now this 'intent' search will try to search for what it thinks you want, not what you typed. AFAIK, there is no way to search for literals anymore, thanks to AI.

Yeah it went from bad to worse somehow.

AI has just made it worse, both directly (search doesn’t function like standard search anymore but also nowhere near ChatGPT) and by comparison.

I can go ask Gemini questions that require it to get information from several emails at once like “which x vendor had the lowest price”. Im assuming it can do the same with my texts or, if not yet, it will soon. I had zero such faith with Apple.

I will wait until the fall and see if this looks like the germ of something actually useful before deciding if I’m going to switch.

no, you don't understand - iOS has no AI because Apple cares about your privacy!!

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