My favorite is when you have Siri off but CarPlay on. You can be actively navigating, but say “find me the nearest X” and it’ll say “I’m sorry, I don’t know where you are”

Yeah there should just be a global option when you're settling up the phone called "I want my shit to work and don't care that Apple has my location", and then allow all the relevant apps location access, rather than the piecemeal per-apple-app setting. I mean, as a developer I can understand the difference between the weather app always having my location and apple maps only having my location when open, but what the hell Apple? Just have a button for "make it work" vs "I'm paranoid", and let the paranoid micromanage to their hearts desire. (Not pejoratively, other people have a different threat model from me. I know people who have legitimate reason for enabling lockdown mode.)

Eeeh ... the gap between "full access for all apps" and "lockdown mode" is wide.

Casuals are in there--nontechnical folks for whom "brick breaker deluxe wants to access your contacts" might raise an eyebrow. The stalked are in there--malicious apps that track location of the install-ee are unfortunately not uncommon. The one-device-for-multiple-lives folks are in there (if your work email/contacts are on your phone, it's a good thing that your dating app has to ask permission before acquiring your phone's contacts). So are the forgetful--that periodic "hey, this app has had permissions for ages, do you still want it to have that access?" thing not only helps folks clean up their perms, it reminds lots of folks about services they forgot they paid (or worse, forgot they are still paying) for.

I read it as they meant all Apple apps, not all apps.

Or if these chat apps could hold a conversation as basic as "I don't know where you are, would you allow me access to your gps?"

You would think it's the opposite. "I'll tell you where the gas station is because it's preferable to you looking at a screen in your death can"

Asking “what’s the weather” in the morning gets Siri to yell at you about the phone being locked, or even “I don’t know where you are”.

It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage.

Timers and alarm clocks it is.

"What's the weather in Berlin." "you need to unlock your phone to activate location service services"

Works for me. Turn on "allow Siri when locked"?

If it doesn't know where you are then you might live in a Faraday cage.

Their point is that Siri is not consistent with these things. If you've never had these issues yourself then good for you, not everyone is as lucky.

I have had the same issues myself. The "allow Siri when locked" toggle for my phone is set to on, yet it still often refuses to do stuff like turning my home lights on/off, giving the reason that I need to unlock my phone.

And I've also had the location issue they gave an example of, where asking "what is the weather in Berlin" does not need it to know where you are because you've told it the location you're asking about, so the answer is the same regardless of whether you're asking while in Berlin or Tokyo, yet it still sometimes gets stuck believing it needs location access.

Edit: oops the issue of having said a location in the request wasn't in the comment you replied to, but another reply to it. But the overall point of Siri being annoyingly inconsistent still stands.