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Re:iPhone 7 by mthoms on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @06:00PM (#12448242)
>Increasingly, Google is treating the mobile devices as just a conduit to access their cloud services

While this is a usage pattern familiar to HN'ers the average user doesn't care too much about cloud services.

Average users care more about things like camera, battery, music, playing games and overall ease of use.

The only critical Google service for iPhone users is search (and maybe Youtube). Both are available from the browser.

Re:iPhone 7 by chetanahuja on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @08:08PM (#12449136)
"While this is a usage pattern familiar to HN'ers the average user doesn't care too much about cloud services"

Umm don't know which world you're living in but Google Now/Search, Photos, Maps/Waze, Youtube, Gmail, Calendar, Hangouts, Drive.. etc. Pretty much every smartphone in the world is running one or more of those services on a daily basis.

Care to name one Apple cloud service that's so indispensable to that many users? Or perhaps, even just to iOS users?

Re:iPhone 7 by mthoms on Thursday September 08, 2016 @02:44AM (#12450783)
Umm don't know which world you're living in but Google Now/Search, Photos, Maps/Waze, Youtube, Gmail, Calendar, Hangouts, Drive.. etc. Pretty much every smartphone in the world is running one or more of those services on a daily basis.

I never said they weren't running one or more of those services. Of course they are. I said that aside from Search and Youtube they weren't critical.

But I also wasn't aware we're calling basic web search, email and other web applications that have been around for a decade or more "cloud services". When did that happen? I guess by that definition (everything is a cloud service!) then you're certainly right - cloud services are indeed very popular.

I'm particularly fond of IMAP "Cloud Email" or as it used to be called "email". That's a good one. There's also "Cloud Messaging" (I've been calling it "texting" but I guess I'm pretty old school).

>Care to name one Apple cloud service that's so indispensable to that many users? Or perhaps, even just to iOS users?

I'm not sure why you're trying to make this an Apple vs Google thing. That's not at all what I intended. But re-reading your original comment I see thats exactly the kind of thing you were trying to stir up. I'm not interested in that type of discussion. Not even a little bit. Goodbye.

Re:iPhone 7 by msh on Thursday September 08, 2016 @01:11AM (#12450434)
Except for search and YouTube I think they can be easily replaced by the average consumer.