"Hey Siri, make a Facetime call to Bob Smith." "Which Bob Smith would you like to call? [email protected] or [email protected]?

How at this point does Siri not have even the most basic of logic to know that it's literally the same person. That's Apple's OWN service.

Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their devices no matter how bad the software is.

And while I'm ranting... the thing I hate most of about all of these services is they don't have a profanity mode. In the privacy of my own home I have AN EFFIN' HUGE POTTY MOUTH. I love to curse. I LOVE IT. The fact that I can't get one of these services to talk to me like a middle school student is extremely disappointing. I don't want to be politically correct when I'm talking to a virtual assistant in a private setting. I want to say "Hey goognizzle, are there any good mother f***ing movies opening near me this weekend?" and get Samuel L. Jackson style "Here's the mother f***ing movies opening on mother f***ing Friday at the 5 mother f***ing theaters closest to mother f***ing you."*

Edit: TIL how to faux curse on HN. To type display "f***ing", I need to type out "f\*\*\*ing".

The day Siri will work equal to/better than other competing systems, it will be used as a main reason for which you should buy an Apple device. The day before that, it will still be something that users actually don't want.

EDIT: and to be a bit more clear that I'm serious with this, it actually makes sense. If a feature doesn't work well, you find ways around it. And if you are used to an ecosystem, maybe you don't even know how well another ecosystem works. And finally, if that ecosystem works for you well enough - or that device - you probably really don't care about that missing feature.

Apple (and Amazon) get many things right, and actually seem to pay a tiny bit of attention to user needs. So it's really not worth playing with the google stuff because you end up in these weird nonsensical hells - everything is amazing, and then they just drop the ball in a key corner.

For example, my google work calendar is EASY to integrate with Alexa along with my personal calendar. Fantastic, what's my schedule today works great. Google - falls flat on its' face for this, despite being a paying customer of their Gsuite. Their approach is just full of excuses here, and ignores that this desired interaction works well on their COMPETITORS devices but not theirs.

Just one (of many) examples. They have some sort of eventually consistent backend more often for stuff so you also get weird states that you can't delete things, changes take longer to "flow through" etc.

My guess is that Apple management doesn't see voice assistants as the "next big thing" to differentiate themselves from the competition. I think VR/AR is where they are focusing and Siri is on life support.

> Siri is especially bad when compared to Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, both of which are light years ahead.

Followed by a statement about the entire ecosystem, of which only a tiny amount is Siri.

> Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their devices no matter how bad the software is.

Apple makes money selling devices to people.

Google makes money selling people to advertisers.

As a result Apple's maps and ML assistant aren't as good as Google's which harvests way more of people's data.

I'm perfectly fine with this trade off. Lots of things iPhones do are even presented at as the data never leaving your phone at keynotes/press releases, and ads. A bullet point notably missing from Android phones. I deliberately use Apple's admittedly worse maps application whenever possible because I know it's not telling Big Brother about me when I know Google maps is.

I would agree that Apple is significantly better on user privacy than Google or Facebook but that does not mean that the NSA isn’t sucking up all your data from Apple Maps.

Claiming that Apple isn’t “telling Big Brother about me” is at best naive and at worst dangerous misinformation that could put activists and whistleblowers at risk of having their location data harvested by the US war machine.

To say Apple is benign is ridiculous. To say they're better on privacy than google is just true.

This isn’t even really a criticism of Apple, it’s just the reality of the world that we have created since 9/11. I don’t believe any company that operates at Apple’s scale can keep its infrastructure totally private and secure from abuses of user privacy by the state. Especially if that company has infrastructure or employees in countries like the US/UK/China that are notorious for having extrajudicial/illegal/secret/unaccountable surveillance programs.

Totally agree with you on Google, they are the worst by far on user privacy. And we shouldn’t really expect anything different from a company that derives almost its entire revenue from advertising/data AND has been deeply connected to the intelligence agencies from Day 1.

I’ve never used anything non-Apple nor have I used any non-phone voice assistant, so I’m not in a position to compare, but as long as it calls the people that I want, sets timers and alarms as needed, and routes me to my city of choice, why would I care?

>I’ve never used anything non-Apple nor have I used any non-phone voice assistant

You're coming at it without experience. If you try the google and/or amazon version, you may still find Siri acceptable but I can absolutely guarantee you will not be surprised anymore when people call Siri shitty, because companied to amazon and google, it is.

"I'll switch to Android when I can rotate my screen animate the rotation instead of blanking out"

They got it immediately.

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For those not familiar with Android, your app's UI is completely destroyed on every single configuration change. Rotation. Plugging in a keyboard. Dark mode.

Then the app has to redraw it's entire state from memory in the new orientation.

To do that tiny little thing I described above you'd have to design your app to disable all built in configuration handling (so now it's on you to handle swapping out every resource when a language change happens, or dark mode is turned on) then hand animate every element to its new position on every screen. Needless to say, that's not done.

It was probably very convenient when they were designing the G1 with it's 192MB of RAM, but to me it's a thing that encapsulates everything wrong with Android as a platform for me to use daily.

I wonder what percentage of daily Android crashes in the world are a direct result of this tiny decision. Or god forbid, the amount of gnashing of teeth in how to write Android apps in a "clean" way that manages with this...

(And yes, iOS has state restoration too, but it's strictly for returning from the background, so it's not nearly as intrusive)

- YouTube

- GMail

- FireFox

- Plex

- RIF (Reddit app)

- Material (HackerNews app)

- Main home screen

- Sudoku game

All of them animated screen rotation just fine, with no blank screen or glitching. Just a smooth animation of the app screen rotating from portrait to landscape (and back).

It's possible that your assumptions are outdated and - by your own admission - should switch back to Android.

I have 5 of them sitting in this room!

You might not notice, but I assure you, they clear the screen then fade back in. The exceptions are apps that have to handle configuration changes anyways like games or full screen video.

It's not always a janky thing, phones have gotten fast enough that the screen redraw is easily hidden behind a half rotate followed by a fade in, but the point is that the hacks are even needed in the first place.

Their approach to configuration changes just adds a massive footgun that trips up plenty of developers. The number of high profile apps with semi-permanent bugs like "I got scrolled back to the wrong part of the page when I rotated my phone!" insane.

A future without that is only coming once we get a replacement for the current UI framework in the form of Flutter or Jetpack Compose (both of which handle configuration changes in new ways)

Having worked in both Android and iOS development, I can assure you that they both have some ridiculous quirks and confusing APIs, but you eventually just learn to deal with them.

> To do that tiny little thing I described above you'd have to design your app to disable all built in configuration handling (so now it's on you to handle swapping out every resource when a language change happens, or dark mode is turned on) then hand animate every element to its new position on every screen.

That's not done in "bigger apps", it's done in apps that have large areas not rendered with normal UI elements, like games, or camera apps

I've done some iOS work too, and while iOS has its issues it "defaults" to making better apps, hands down.

It's not unlike the user side of these platforms, iOS has a more opinionated "default" than Android

Jetpack is trying to fix that but it's "not that much, extremely late"

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But again, this is all missing the forest for the tree here, configuration changes are just a tiny part of the general "backend" choices that add up to a more powerful platform in developing for Android... but a less useable platform as a user