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Comment by Irregardless | Hacker News Reader

There's no doubt Apple is playing catch-up with Android these days. Siri was their only real innovation in the last 3 iPhones, and Google leapfrogged it within months.

Meanwhile, Apple is still trying to implement a decent notification system, their auto-correct is garbage, there's no file manager, you can't set a default browser (or default anything, for that matter), there are no widgets, no app shortcuts, no custom keyboards, managing settings is a nightmare, and you can't side-load apps without jailbreaking. That last one is especially bad thanks to their cryptic app approval rules and the fact that their app store is the least intuitive to navigate -- if what you want isn't in the top 10 and you don't know the exact name, forget about it.

But hey, at least you get the privilege of spending a fortune on chargers and adapters. And other people with iPhones will think you're cool for owning one, right?

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Key Pieces of history in the Siri vs Google Voice Search

- Siri is a commercial spinoff of a DARPA AI project called CALO which was primarily designed to help the military handle information in the form of MS Office documents/Outlook email. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-appl...

- CALO was an almost 10 year project run out of SRI but executed primarily at Stanford,Berekley and the University of Washington. Many PhD's and post docs on the west coast in Machine Learning cut their teeth on some element of CALO. It's influence is pervasive throughout the Valley.

- Apple does not have in-house voice recognition technology and instead licences technology from Nuance.

- Nuance is essentially a holding company for all the commercial voice recognition technology from the 90's and 00's except what MSFT picked up from the TellMe acquisition and what Google developed under Mike Cohen.

- Mike Cohen is a Nuance co-founder who nurtured voice recognition tech at Google for many years before leaving in 2011 but Google's current voice recognition technology is largely the result of research products he ran.(http://9to5google.com/2012/05/23/manager-of-speech-technolog...)

To Summarize. Siri and Google Voice search share a common lineage. Google is better position to improve the technology because they are not relying an existing vendor and acquisitions for key pieces of technology but instead they have been gestating internal groups specializing in both semantics and voice to text internally for many years.

Amazing history, thanks!

    Siri is a commercial spinoff of a DARPA AI project

Interesting example of how a substantial innovation (like Siri) yet again does not come from a private company, but from a R&D or such funded project without a short-term capitalist adgenda. Also I'd bet that this fact is largely unknown; this I'd understand is also characteristic. -- No wonder we're having problems getting public funding for "actual" new tech.

Google has a structural advantage over Apple and MSFT in natural language.

Apple has plenty of cash to buy Nuance to integrate Voice Recognition technology but lacks the management bandwidth.

Microsoft Research has done a lot of path breaking work in natural language recognition but MSFT management seems to be actively hostile to their R&D group.

Google has natural language features in all their core product areas and management that prides itself on dog fooding their own R&D.

I'm a Google shareholder for these reasons.

Calling Siri innovation is revisionist history. Google had voice search nearly a year when Apple launched Siri. Also, Apple bought Siri, they didn't invent it.

Based on the interactions I've had with Siri/Google search (I have an Android) there haven't really been any innovations in the space since Google introduced voice search. It's useful, but imperfect.

If you want to be picky about that sort of thing Google bought Android, they didn't invent it.

They probably bought it, but it's Google who brought Android to the state it is today.

Just look how Android was when the G1 launched - and that's 2 years after Google acquired them.

If you really want to be picky about that sort of thing, Android wasn't even a pseudo-Blackberry OS-looking, D-Pad-controlled OS when Google bought it.

In other words, anything notable about Android today was created at Google, from the kernel up to the UI to the frameworks to all the little features all these Android "switchers" are raving about.

The things that make Siri as useful as it is (which for the record IHMO is not very) is tight integration with iOS contacts, calendars and text messages for instance - all things not in the product when Apple bought it and all things which may ultimately enable the sort of integrated experiences people are saying are great with Google Now.

Seriously, when Apple bought it Siri was interesting and pretty cool, but it's a different beast now. The parallel between it and original Android is fair - they're both evolved versions of something which was acquired.

That may be, but don't use a myth to posit your position. The Android that Google acquired is a grain of sand of what it is today. Anything remotely notable or worthwhile out of Android came out of Google.

FWIW, Siri is great and I currently use an iPhone.

Except perhaps the most important thing - the idea?

Possibly worth looking too at what I was originally doing - refuting the idea that Android was a major Google innovation where Siri was merely an acquisition.

Even if you say that Google have reworked Android to the extent that it's essentially new, the same is largely true of Siri if you look what it was when Apple bought it (small scale, movie tickets and restaurant bookings). The only difference is one is three years on, the other is ten years on.

What idea? Android? Android was essentially an unknown brand when Google bought it. It certainly wasn't a technology (or at least a technology that has any similarity to Android today).

It was a mobile operating system. That seems pretty similar to me.

Siri is not "voice search". Siri was very much an innovation when it was originally released as a standalone app, and was still ahead of the game when Apple bought it and integrated it.

Google certainly may be ahead now, but to compare Siri to plunking what you say into a Google search box is just wrong.

Sure, it was innovative back before Apple bought it, but what Apple did to Siri was basically dumbing it down to the level of plunking things into a Google Search box.

Google Now really has improved things a lot.

The most useful parts of Siri for me are time and location-based reminders, locating friends, and alerting me when a friend goes somewhere. All of this was in Apple's version of Siri, and as far as I know isn't duplicated by tossing text into Google.

Google had voice tasks (initiation reminders, text messages, emails, navigation requests) before Siri was released. The only difference is they are pretty strictly keyword initiated ("Navigate to X", "Text Y Z"), whereas Siri can parse natural language for tasks (or at least appear to; it may well just have a bunch of hardcoded variations).

Siri isn't about voice search. It's about voice-initiated tasks. Sometimes that's search, but sometimes it's a reminder, or a calendar appointment, etc. The innovation is in that distinction and in the context awareness. [1] And that truly is innovation. Regardless of where it came from. If/As Siri is expanded, it's going to become a Big Deal.

And Google's going to deliver something similar. Something beyond literal transcription and voice search, because what Siri presents really is an innovative improvement.

And as to the question of Apple buying Siri vs developing it -- where does that argument end? How could we possibly apply it fairly and objectively? Shall we wave off all of Android as Google's innovation, simply because Google bought it? How many improvements and integrations would it take to (dis)qualify an innovation as being fairly creditable to the current owner? How could we even know what the new owner 'created' vs what these acquired firms had in development at the time of purchase? Does Apple's SoC line count or not count, given they bought PA Semi, but we have no idea what they did pre- or post-acquisition? How in the world is anyone outside capable of knowing? It's essentially impossible for an outside party to fairly apply in a comparison between two companies.

The selective application of that qualifying logic winds up looking like nothing more than making excuses for whatever doesn't fit our preconceived positions.

[1] Being able to refine/adjust a command without restating the entire thing: e.g. the whole example of "make an appointment for 1 tomorrow" "here's your appointment, shall I create it" "wait, make that 2". To say nothing of the detection of things like scheduling conflicts in the first place, where the conversational context-awareness truly shines. i.e. It's not just simple input, it's an 'intelligent' exchange in the pursuit of the task.

Google search is also about voice-initiated tasks. Back in late 2010 /early 2011, when voice search was launched, I pulled out my phone and said "Navigate to <friend's name>." It automatically pulled my friend's address out of my contact book and started turn-by-turn navigation.

Obviously there are things about Siri that are different and better suited to certain tasks. I'm not saying Google search is better, I'm not even saying Google search is a great innovation to come out of Google. I'm just saying Siri is a bad example of something ground-breaking that Apple created.

> "Navigate to <friend's name>."

That's like claiming Wolfram Alpha isn't distinct from Google, because Google will occasionally hazard a guess at a canonical answer (if you formulate your search query precisely correctly).

Sure, Google does attempt such things some times. And it's genuinely useful if you know the syntax to make it happen more-often-than-not. But that remains qualitatively different from what Siri (and Wolfram Alpha) are doing.

> "Siri is a bad example of something ground-breaking that Apple created."

Only when you beg the question of whether it makes objective sense to try to parse out the parentage of technology as some qualifying factor.

> "their auto-correct is garbage"

The last three people who switched from iPhone to Android asked me what was wrong with Androids auto-correct and why it didn't "work". They ended up having to install a third party keyboard to get anything they could stand to interact with.

yes, but they could install a 3rd party keyboard.

Yes, but that they needed to was my comment. Personally, even as a mobile developer, customizing my phone is not my hobby. I'd prefer a new foreign car that has certain limitations to a used Jeep that I can extend in any way I want.

> I'd prefer a new foreign car that has certain limitations to a used Jeep that I can extend in any way I want.

Are you sure about that?

Absolutely. I need my phone to work, be simple and reliable, not require much/any maintenance. Similarly, I prefer a nice car with a warranty that I don't have to worry about or have any hassle with. A jeep might be cheaper, and when it runs slow I could install something to fix it, or if I don't like the steering wheel I could personalize it easily... but, for something I use every day and depend on, I just want it to be there and not have to deal with any complications. I'm ok with the one-size fits all steering wheel, the research driven interface on my stock radio, etc etc.

But you need specific skills to customize your Jeep. On Android it takes 30 seconds and no skill to install the keyboard you want.

It's not a very hard thing to do, I'm sure as a mobile developer you don't mind installing apps other than the ones that come with your phone. A different keyboard is just another app to fulfil a need, go to the Store, click install, new keyboard. Done.

Not really. Parts are cheap and most are bolt on. It's just a matter of preference, which is why all of these droid vs apple discussions are circle jerks.

The ability to customize a Jeep is not a mainstream selling point. Whether it is easy or not is irrelevant for most consumers.

Touché

Which is nice, but it's a bit like someone saying "this road is an accident black spot" and you replying "yes, but it's near the hospital".

No, it's a bit like saying "yes, but you can go around it using this free four-lane highway that works great."

It's still a shame that your Google GPS told you to take the dirt road though.

In this increasingly strained metaphor the problem is that all the road signs (that is a normal person's default) still point to the black spot.

Google should just buy Swiftkey. It's pretty great, and I love its Flow (Swype-like) feature, too.

Just buy Swype! :-)

Then you'd miss the SwiftKey prediction options, which allow me to tap out common sentences in a breeze, and the multiple active languages, a huge plus in countries with multiple languages. :)

Autocorrect is one of the most common complaints I see about the iPhone. Whether it's professional reviewers or normal users, there seems to be a consensus that the stock Android keyboard and autocorrect have now surpassed their iOS counterparts.

I'm not sure what your friends were doing or which phones they had, but as others have said, Android at least offers you the ability to switch keyboards if the stock keyboard doesn't fit your personal typing style. If the stock iOS keyboard doesn't work for you, tough luck. No keyboard will work for 100% of the population, so the ability to customize it is a clear winner in this situation.

I am an Android user, and I complain about the autocorrect (and keyboard) frequently. Maybe the iPhone would be the same for me, but others appear to breeze through typing on the iPhone, while I encounter a constant stream of backing up to fix typos, etc.

And regarding third party keyboards, how about Google do a good keyboard that doesn't require installing a third party app? Is that too much to ask? It seems like an important enough feature to do right instead of abdicating responsibility to others.

Which phone are you using? I have a Nexus with the stock 4.1 (Jelly Bean) keyboard and it corrects everything as expected -- proximity errors, misspellings, contractions, hyphenation, capitalization, etc.

Android also shows you a list of potential matches for what you typed, and you can add new words to the dictionary on the fly just by selecting the word you've entered from the list. Not to mention it only takes a single backspace to undo a bad autocorrect on Android.

> And regarding third party keyboards, how about Google do a good keyboard that doesn't require installing a third party app? It seems like an important enough feature to do right instead of abdicating responsibility to others.

No keyboard will please 100% of smartphone users. The only way to make everyone happy is to let them pick the keyboard that suits them best.

I have a S3 and have all kinds of auto-correct issues I didn't ever have on my iPhone4. For example, it will auto-correct numbers. I will input something like 5 and it will default autocorrect to a phonenumber e.g. 5605432760 that begins with a 5.

Just the other day I tried to type in "damn" and it was constantly auto-corrected to "Damon". Never had anything like this happen on iOS.

If it was the Galaxy that was Samsung's fault. It was the most infuriating autocorrect I've ever seen. If you hit space then back spaced to correct a word you typed it tried to autocorrect your correction but not the whole world.

I have an iPhone and iPad and one of my top 3 complaints is how garbage the auto correct is. It's not just auto correct, it's how you have to hit the tiny [x] on the suggestion to dismiss it. The [x] is to small, its not near the keyboard, and on some web sites, clicking but missing can have unexpected results.

I also have a bunch of incorrect spellings that I have accidentally added - I can't edit remove these though.

I've been seriously considering getting an Android and this along with not being able to change the default email client and browser are the main reasons.

Really? I've not had any issues with the autocorrect. I agree that dismissing the auto correct can be annoying sometimes. I intend to hit the X and instead hit the word, so it corrects to that. However, I can type complete nonsense, a row off, and it figures it out. My coworker tells me his android won't correct "sre" to "are" (as my iPhone will) because it assumes the first letter is correct. This is a top of the line android device (not sure what the model is though).

> My coworker tells me his android won't correct "sre" to "are" (as my iPhone will) because it assumes the first letter is correct.

Strange.

I just tested this on my two-year-old HTC phone with android v2.3.4 and it corrected "sre" to "are" just fine.

Any chance your coworker is using a non-standard keyboard (either by choice or vendor caprice)?

Given Steve Job's iconic quote about the stylus, it's rather sort of ironic that the autocorrect UI (eg. close x) on the iPhone is better-suited for use with a stylus than a fingertip.

I'd have been more tempted to get behind your argument and take it on it's merits until the final line. If you're still hammering on the "it's cool" line to put the device down, you're completely ignoring the fact that there's plenty of people who own an iPhone and think it's the right choice for them. Whilst being completely and utterly uncool.

Don't know if I'm doing something wrong with Android, or whether it's just because my phone is currently restricted to ICS, but I find the notification system appalling compared to iOS.

On iOS, I get a notification and (if I choose to make it appear there) it pops up as an alert on my lockscreen which then goes into a list of alerts since I last unlocked my phone. If any of them interest me, I swipe over it from the lockscreen and it takes me straight into that app.

With Android, I get nothing on my lock screen at all. What I do get, once I've unlocked my phone, is a little icon at the top telling me that the app wants to tell me something. I then have to pull the notification window down to see what it wants to tell me, at which point I can tap it to get into the app.

I have installed "iPhone Notifications" on my Android phone, which helps a little - at least I get a pop-up message on my lock screen - bit it's still some way behind what I'm used to on iOS.

Custom keyboards - thank god for that on Android. I found it almost impossible to type on the stock keyboard, whereas I've rarely had a problem with the iOS one.

As for settings, again I personally find iOS much clearer on this.

Everything is clearly not rosy in the iOS camp - I certainly miss widgets/live desktop when I'm using my iPhone for instance, but many of the other "issues" you list are subjective at best.

> there's no file manager

Is there one on Android?

Generally not by default, but that can vary by manufacturer. You can just download one of the many available from the Play Store.

Anecdotally my Droid Razr came with one.

I don't know if phones ship with one by default or not, but there are several in the app store. Personally I really like ES File Explorer, since it also lets me browse smb shares.

Depend on your phone model. Mine came with free version of a file browser with some functions (batch files operation, etc) disabled, with IAP to unlock those functions.

Default will depend on which phone you get, but there's no shortage of great free ones in the market (Astro and ES File Explorer, for example).

Also, Android phones work just like a USB drive if you want to drag and drop files then access them from another computer later. You can store anything you want and create your own folders, unlike the iPhone where you can only sync certain media types through iTunes. That's what I was referring to with the file manager thing, but I'm not sure how to say that succinctly...

"The Android phone functions as a standard USB hard drive." Also, it's not just a sandboxed area, like on my previous "feature phone" (store whatever you like on it, but the phone's OS won't do anything with it), but the real SD card in the phone, directly.

Which everyone wants of course. Except me. Or my girlfriend. Or my parents. Or my sister. Or in fact, everyone I know with one.

A feature that you think is critical is a feature that is critical for you. The refrain that iOS suffers from a lack of file exploration or drag and drop of any kind of content is based around the assumption that everyone wants that. Most people don't.

I can understand your point, but too often this sounds like an extremely weak excuse: "So iPhone doesn't have this feature? Good! I didn't want it anyway!".

I personally see having more options and choices as a great thing even when I don't personally need those options.

Even if I think the default android keyboard is the greatest touchscreen keyboard in existence, I still think it should be possible and easy to use another keyboard app instead.

Choice is great, my argument wasn't that choice is bad because that's silly. My argument was saying that a feature that a lot of people have no use for is a really big negative against a platform is an incredibly bad point. It's a feature that has inherent personal usefulness for the user, if there's a strong majority that don't have need of that then it's not a negative against a platform when it's functionality for functionality sake.

But the iPhone isn't just lacking in one or two options. It's a very locked down platform in several ways. I have a hard time applying your argument of "a lot of people have no use" when it comes to something as fundamental as being allowed to run an app or browser that Apple does not like.

Okay so here's choice. You can have chocolate or steak, what you can't expect is that the steak is made of chocolate. There's choice. Apple has presented a product with specific guidelines and won't budge, your choice is "Does this product do everything I want it do/or nearly everything" if the iPhone fits that then that's a fine choice, if it doesn't then you can go choose something else.

It's Apple's party, and they'll approve if they want to. They just don't, because they don't think it's what the majority of their customer base wants.

But now the game has changed from "most people don't need this" to "if you bought Apple you get Apple".

The latter does not deflect the original criticism thrown at Apple here, they are overly restrictive to the point where it's bad for their users.

I think that is a valid point to raise against Apple without meeting a blanket "You bought their product and that's just how they roll". Under that, no company can be criticized for anything, ever.

My mother kept asking me why I made her pay for "a device which can't replace a floppy disk". I'm an android user but I thought the limitations of the iPhone were actually a plus for my mother. It took me some time (and some fiddling with some "approved apps" to make things "work" for her) to understand that those small things could be real deal-breakers when not available.

> Except me. Or my girlfriend. Or my parents. Or my sister. Or in fact, everyone I know with one.

Yet Astro file manager has 35 million downloads. Perhaps you and your peers are not a representative sample.

You're also skewing the point, which is it's a nice option but not a necessary requirement for a large percentage of the user base. Unless 35m is a significantly large percentage of Android users, it's still not something that's an essential feature of a smartphone for a large amount of people.

My point is that tens of millions of people think you should be able to manage files on your smartphone, but Apple makes that impossible without jailbreaking and Apple apologists routinely argue by implication that because they don't feel they need it, it's not necessary.

For starters I'm not an Apple apologist. I use Apple products but I'm fairly critical of them. You don't have to be an apologist to have a specific opinion, and it's reductive to consistently frame counterpoints as "just another Apple apologist excuse". That's often what's bandied about, from both camps. So for the purpose of this discussion apologist, sheeple, iSheep, fandroids and so on should be verboten.

Second, if file management was a feature that people were crying out for in droves they'd either not be buying into iOS or they'd have created such a furore that Apple would have implemented it. Apple has responded to platform criticism by implementing the functionality as iOS has matured, they've just cherry picked what they're implementing to deliver the functionality that has a benefit to the most people. Aside from the obvious missteps like Newsstand or Passbook anyway.

If people want to manage files on a smartphone that's fantastic, there's a platform for them. Why is it a negative point that there's a platform that has a different opinion? It's not, there's a wealth of choice from smartphone players now.

Not quite - it shows that they think you should manage files on your Android phone. iOS is designed to hide files, but Android has always had it as an option, which is represented in its interface.

Back when I used Android (owned a Nexus One which broke), I had to manage files all the time, because the individual apps didn't do a good job of it. Instead of having a centralised place for photos, I just dragged photos to /sdcard from my computer, and looked at them that way. When I had to put music on my phone in a hurry, I did the same, and navigated to them in the file manager instead of having it in the music app. I had a bunch of Markdown files that were there, too, whenever I synced manually. Now I can do all that without having to worry about where the files are, using iTunes and iCloud.

Since then, every time I've seen someone have to open a file manager, it's to do a job an app could have done. That's why Apple doesn't want to include one - it gives users more functionality, but makes app developers lazy. It's the same reason they haven't decided to include a stylus: it's technically more precise, but would just cause developers to think "don't worry about finger click targets, the user has a stylus".

Well let's broaden this, there is no concept of files on the iPhone, and yes, you DO need them.

Example: try attaching an excel sheet you received from a friend to another email.

Example: the powerful Android "share" mechanism --the sole reason I have several iPads but switched to Android for real work (ie on my phone). Share is not limited to a bunch of "friend-aware" apps, but every app can register themselves as a "handler" for particular data objects (files), e.g. "picture" "pdf document" etc, and when you hit "share" all of these are shown in a list. No more circuitous nonsense where you have to open a file in goodreader or save it to dropbox first, so you can access it with another app, which speeds up things tremendously.

I think it's pretty safe to say that moving data from one app to the next is something everyone needs.

Honestly, "Share" is one of the most brilliant features Android has. Great example of something potentially minor (built-in "social sharing") becoming massively useful through extensibility.

Okay but the concept of files versus the specific application of a file manager are different things. I completely agree that iOS needs to expose file representations better between applications, but I think the very notion of a file manager is still utterly redundant for a large percentage of new smartphone owners.

Apple added basically the same functionality in iOS 6, but it seems like many apps don't support it yet.

> Which everyone wants of course. Except me. Or my girlfriend. Or my parents. Or my sister. Or in fact, everyone I know with one.

Even my mother has a problem with that on her iPhone. I installed her Dropbox and hooked up some of her apps on the same phone to the same account so that apps can share common data. Otherwise you have apps that take pictures and you can't mail out those pictures etc.

My girlfriend, who on the whole loves her iPad, absolutely hates iTunes for and photo and video syncing. She would be much happier simply dragging her nicely organized folders over to the iPad rather than fighting iTunes.

If you ever need to move a file of any kind from one location to another, Android makes it easier than iOS. The fact that my grandmother's cat prefers Meow apps over the ability to transfer files doesn't change that.

My sister wanted to copy a video file from my laptop to her phone. I had it up on the laptop's webserver. No can do; there is no 'save' option for a link or file system for it to go to. To get it there as best as I could tell I would have to get it to her desktop first, and then she would physically have to bring her phone there and wire it up to sync with iTunes. Maybe iCloud could have helped?

i recently re-installed ES File Explorer and was floored with how much work went into it! i've used it years ago so i could see the difference. it is now also an app manager, ftp client, bluetooth/network explorer.. and it's FREE! i'm also not seeing any ads. how can they afford to put so much work into this app?

I'd start by checking their privacy policy.

There's a 'Downloads' folder on Android, which at least covers most use cases.

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