> Google paid close to 3 billon USD to stay the default search provider on iOS
And yet... they purposefully have ipad mini google search results only show in a crappy 'mobile' format, vs the regular way it used to ('normal desktop' for safari). It's bizarre, has been broken for years. Doesn't matter if they're "default", we've moved to yahoo and ddg for ipad searching. :/
I know the iPad in Portrait and probably the iPad Mini in both orientations resolve to what is considered a "small" screen by Material Design guidelines. It could be that Google's search result display are based on the size of the screen you have and the iPad Mini just may fall under what they categorize as a mobile device.
iPad is the iOS sideshow in sale numbers by far -- no reason to prioritize it. And, more cynical, using the parent comment's reasoning: iPad _is_ a competitor to Google's Chrome OS in education, so maybe they don't want it to work too well.
Can you imagine being the programmer on that project?
It is probably based on browser user-agent detection that doesn't distinguish between iPhone/iPod Touch iOS Safari and iPad iOS Safari. It is not necessarily an active act of malice nor even anything more than "cleaning up" some of the user agent code.
This seems extraordinarily unlikely, google pays a lot of attention to user agents.
I don't think they'll tell engineers to make the experience bad. I used to work for Google, and it doesn't strike me as the place where that would work. More likely is that there just isn't anyone responsible for this; whether that's due to iPad being too small to be worth the opportunity cost of putting someone one it, or due to the more cynical interpretation.
Re:I miss Windows Phone
by refulgentis on Saturday April 07, 2018 @04:04PM
(#16782583)
Yeah, it would totally suck to have strangers attacking your ethics instead of considering the small tap targets on iPad minis.
> no reason to prioritize it
no reason to explicit fuck it up, except... oh yeah, competitor to your own tablets.
Have you tried to Request Desktop Site? It work fine for me on my iPad and iPhone, so I don’t see a reason why it won’t work on iPad Mini. Granted, it is annoying that you can’t set Safari to always load the desktop version by default and you have to force the desktop mode every time you open a new tab, but it is better than nothing.
I haven’t used an Android tablet in a long time, but I think those load the mobile version as well.
And lastly, I’ve never had a problem with the mobile version — I actually prefer it on touch based devices.
you have to 'request desktop site' for each search.
Yeah, that’s a pain.
There is a reason Google paid close to 3 billon USD to stay the default search provider on iOS. They had several opportunities to pull their apps from the platform, but they never did. It’s not random. They acknowledge that Apple is not in direct competitior as far as their core business is concerned — unlike Microsoft. They can still be the primary search provider on iOS, but Microsoft would never let that happen on Windows Phone/Mobile thanks to Bing. In fact, there was no way to set the search engine to Google in Edge for a while - and the OS wide search never offered a choice.
Allowing Windows Phone/Mobile to flourish would have meant allowing Bing to grow - something Google can’t afford. As long as Apple doesn’t become a threat to their core business, I don’t think they are going to pull their apps. And even if they do, iOS has become too big to die like Windows Phone/Mobile.
And let’s not forget, the organisations charged with preventing monopoly will slap Google with antitrust lawsuits all over the world.