> Google's MADA agreement forbids OEMs from making anything but Google Now/Voice Search the default digital assistant on Android devices with Google Play.
> Google is telling it's hardware partners for Google Home and Google Cast they're forbidden from supporting competing digital assistants.
On iOS, you cannot.
On Android I can make a new email client, and overnight it can become the default email client for everyone that installs it.
On iOS I would need to convince most large apps to allow me as an option before it would work.
Not being able to do this is basically the last thing keeping me off of iOS at this point.
Open some app: Would you like me to be the default for X? Me: no thanks.
Next day:
open some app: Would you like me to be the default for X? Me: ahhh, NOT AGAIN.
Or have we forgotten how annoying it is that browsers all seem to do that all the damn time.
Something like a settings menu where you can control the default apps for many "intents" (that's the android terminology, not sure what else to call it).
Choose an app for email, sms, "instant messaging", browser, navigation, phone, etc... Don't let individual apps change anything, and if you want don't even let them prompt you to change something. That last part can be enforced by appstore guidelines.
If apple does this, i'd switch overnight. And as someone that is about as far away from the apple ecosystem as you can be, i'd probably end up using many of the apple "things" over time. Let their first party apps stand on their own. I have no qualms with having theirs be the default, and it honestly doesn't even bother me if they aren't un-installable, but let me change my defaults!
This is NOT how it works on android and WP
1. Install email app.
2. Click on email link in other app.
3. Select email client if more than one installed
4. Click select for now / remember my choice.
5. If you clicked remember email links from all app will start that client.
Meanwhile on my ipad, I feel like Apple is making all the choices and I just have to deal with it. This is the biggest difference between Apple and Android for me. My Android devices have the apps I like and 'just work' when launched or whatever. Apple forcibly opens the Apple apps and I need to run down my screens of installed apps to find what I actually want to run.
I don't know how in this day and age I can't choose my default handlers of a product I own.
You can remove almost every default app from iOS 10, including Maps.
I have given up on using the default map for searching anything. Of course the map content itself is the same, but what good is a mobile map if you search for a coffee shop around you in New York and it gives you some grocery store in Scandinavia? I would be forgiving if this happened rarely, but to me it happened very often. I have 4 iDevices and they all have the same problem. This never happens with Google maps.
Frankly both Apple Maps and Google Maps could stand some UI improvements. Google Maps won't shut up, throws up some bizarre progress bar even on mute, has mystery meat navigation, and replaces the map with some giant material design-style empty space when it decides I've "arrived" (even if I haven't).
Apple Maps used to make it hard to pan around, but that's been fixed in iOS 10. Instead now it has terrible bugs in landscape mode, and has adopted the "you've arrived, now you don't need the map any more!" behavior.
If they just let the map be a map...But anyways I'm old enough to remember pulling over to pull out the giant paper map in San Francisco, so I can't get too upset. Either one has made my life so much better.
On iOS? You can tell Google your home/work addresses in settings, I ask for directions/transit home multiple times most weeks and it works. On Android they can figure them out, but on iOS they don't have enough permissions and you'll have to tell them - but when you do this works.
Instead they want me to sign into Google and it wants that info to then be stored on Google's servers.
All of them are far from perfect, but vastly better than what we had before.
At any rate, sure, Apple Maps isn't as good yet. They launched years after Google Maps and with a much smaller team. (There are some interesting politics behind that, from what I've heard; just say that the fiasco of the Maps launch is the primary reason Scott Forstall is no longer with the company.) The team now numbers over 1000, from what I've heard, and I expect the gap to continue to close -- but it's going to continue to take a while.
No it isn't, they are basically the same for 90% of users.