The ability to set up contracts between apps at the OS level is my biggest feature wish list item for iOS. The jump in usefulness of the device would be similar to when Apple opened the App store after initially launching with web-apps only.

I can't see this ever happening. Apple's whole shtick is that they make decisions for the user.

Moreover, I don't think that average iOS users actually care. Most of them didn't even realize that Google Maps was replaced by an Apple equivalent. And when Apple Maps doesn't work correctly, they just accept that that's how things are - that's the sort of mentality that Apple cultivates in its users.

No, it isn't a function of Apple cultivating tech ignorance. Apple, Microsoft, and Google make user decisions all the time. It's that most people don't care. They buy a tech product and go about their day. That's the point of consumer technology - make it out of the box ready because most people don't think like us. Maps or Browser or whatever.

Joe User : "Huh, that's different" If it still works they go about their day.

Average Hacker News User: "Dammit, they moved the border padding 1 pixel to the left and the anti-aliasing on the font looks different when I look at it with a magnifying glass at 2 inches from my eyeball. I have to complain on my tech blogs right away about this travesty!"

> No, it isn't a function of Apple cultivating tech ignorance.

Strawman. I never used the word "ignorance." It's more like acceptance of things as they are.

> Joe User : "Huh, that's different" If it still works they go about their day.

> Average Hacker News User: "Dammit, they moved the border padding 1 pixel to the left and the anti-aliasing on the font looks different when I look at it with a magnifying glass at 2 inches from my eyeball. I have to complain on my tech blogs right away about this travesty!"

Reductio ad absurdum, and you totally missed my point. I'm not talking about situations where something has just changed, I'm talking about when something has changed such that it no longer works. In such a situation, Apple users tend to consider that acceptable, such as with Apple Maps or with antennagate. As long as that fruity logo is present, they'll buy just about anything.

XPC[1][2] is a private framework in iOS. I am hoping it will be made accessible before iOS 8 (unlikely).

[1] http://oleb.net/blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-... [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/MacOSX...

I was really disappointed to see it's still private in iOS7.

Same. I am curious to see what sort of marketing treatment the feature will get come iOS 8 (hopefully 7.X), as it potentially blurs the line between apps and could be confusing if used for deeper integration than presenting a modal.

Independent developers are doing a pretty decent job of this on their own with x-callback-url. Without Apple's buy-in, of course, it's not quite the same thing.

http://x-callback-url.com/ has the info.

Unfortunately this article shows that Apple has pretty good strategic reasons to never allow this.

Isn't this possible now? When I click a link in the Gmail app, it offers to open it in Chrome.

It is possible if the app has it's own URL scheme and other app knows about that. Let's say I make an app Foo which supports "foo://" and you make an app Bar. You can ask iOS does any app recognize "foo://" and if so, then open it.

So as it currently works on iOS you cannot say to OS: hey, I want to use this app for http, instead you check if there is an app that handles "googlechrome(s)" scheme, and if yes you can replace your http(s) in URI to googlechrome(s) and then it will open in Chrome instead of Mobile Safari.

It needs to be done in each app, by bypassing the system web browser or maps support. So Google may support it in their apps, but Apple doesn't in the system apps like Siri, Contacts, etc.

Yea I was very pleasantly surprised to see this worked when I switched back to ios from android. It allows me to stay within the google maps, gmail, and chrome ecosystem most of the time.

But that's only from within the Google ecosystem. Click on on a link in a non-Google app and you won't see Chrome as an option.

Well, you actually _will_ in quite a lot of apps these days, which is really a symptom of the problem.

I think Google has an SDK to allow other developers to do this on iOS. Unfortunately I don't think many iOS developers know or care.

> If it weren't for iOS's minuscule market share, this would be justification for a major DoJ crackdown

I wouldn't call a 40% market share (and growing) in the US, the area in which the DOJ has jurisdiction, minuscule.

(1) http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/05/apple-samsung-leng...

Yup. This is the only reason I would be counted as an Apple Maps user--the lack of intents in iOS. If I can copy and paste an address instead of tapping it I will, but if Apple Maps has to open I just copy the address out of it and paste it into Google Maps.

I can't recall the specific cases, but I do remember contemplating why nobody was cracking down on certain corporate entities in regard to anti-trust. To exaggerate wildly: there are laws that only apply to Microsoft. Possibly the law hasn't acknowledged that times have changed.

  > To exaggerate wildly: there are laws that only apply to
  > Microsoft.

Anyone interested enough to do some research already knows why.

Still, I have complaints about Google Maps on iOS (and they're blockers).

1.) You can't select a contact and find them on the map. This is just such a miss I can't imagine why it's not there. Very likely due to non-technical reasons, because it's one of the major reasons I use a map.

2.) No vector maps. Probably the same reason. Offline caching of bitmap data is ok, but offline vectors scale so much better (zooming them doesn't break the map). I've driven out of the country and with no data service Apple Maps does a way better job of caching my map data giving me a "good enough" view of where I need to go.

That said, Google Maps has way way better search, and with a jailbroken phone and the Google Maps default replacement thing it's pretty good, but even with those the two above reasons are why I stick with Apple Maps on iOS (if I can't find something I know is there I'll switch to gmaps).

Both of these are are not true. The search field uses your contacts as a data source (though perhaps it works because I have synced with Google, I can't be sure). The maps are vector.

> The maps are vector.

I guess I'm wrong about that then :). My assumption was based on the fact that when I traveled into areas with no data coverage, I distinctively remember Google Maps having great difficulty with cached map data, while Apple Maps didn't.

(In the hotel prior to driving I would load both maps and directions in both apps, "click through" the directions to give the apps a chance to cache the data, and then go on my way - if I dicked around in Google Maps it tended to just not show anything, or a very very fuzzy view of where I was, whereas Apple tended to show a low-precision (but clear) view of where I was.)

Contacts and history only work if you share them with Google. It refuses to use the local contact store.

What's the user experience around using the local contact store?

It seems to me Google Maps would have to preemptively request permission to access local contacts because it wouldn't know in advance if a particular search should match a contact. And some people might be confused by the unexpected request and not understand why contact search isn't working later (or be confused if they disabled Google Maps' contact access because they didn't make the connection).

I can certainly see how, from Google's perspective, it seems cleaner to use the contact store they know they have access to and is presumably the same one they'd use on other platforms - promoting consistency. Is that ideal for every user? Clearly not. But, in the spirit of the original article, it is probably the way to get contact search working with minimum friction for most users.

Right now, when you tap the search field, Google Maps shows me a message saying that I should log into my google account if I want to use contacts etc.; and my contacts are not synced with my google account anyway, so it would either fail silently to find them, or it would try to sync them - which would require asking for permission to access my local contacts anyway.

If it used local contacts and I had denied it access when it asked on the first startup, it could instead display a message saying so, offering a button to click to request access to contacts again. It would be strictly less complicated for the user.

Chrome also can't cement itself on Chrome because of the anticompetitive browser rules Apple baked into iOS approval policies. That's why Chrome on iOS isn't actually Chrome. It's just a Chrome UI on top of Mobile Safari renderrer with the faster JS engine disabled so Safari itself maintains better performance against all comers.

Ah interesting. That's why it crashes on exactly the same pages that Safari does then.

Yup. Google can't use their shiny new optimized Webkit fork Blink they use on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. They're stuck just using Safari without Nitro like all* other browsers on iOS.

* except Opera which was doing page rendering on a server farm in the cloud to get around the anti-competitive rules.

That DoJ case made no sense to me. Doesn't MS get to set a lot of default applications since you're using their OS? Why is the browser an exception?

This misses the point. The real problem was the question of whether Microsoft was using its position as a major software vendor to warp the web browser market in ways ultimately highly detrimental to user experience. The popular answer is probably 'yes', as a generation of web developers cry out in despair.

The problem is that by bundling this particular application, and by its behaviour with that application (ignoring standards etc.), Microsoft was able to massively distort the web market based on its monopoloy position rather than technical merit. This affected the development of the web for years afterwards - even to this day!

If you agree these problems existed (I don't think it's a controversial opinion...), then the conclusion is precisely that MS should not be able to set the default web browser, because allowing to do so would be ultimately more damaging than giving users a slightly poorer experience when they have to install their own. This is a quantitatively different situation to that of many other default apps, where MS neither wants nor tries to monopolistically dominate a a massive emerging market segment - but if they did, perhaps the same questions would come up again.

Edit: So I guess the summary would be yes, MS does get to set lots of default applications, but this is exactly what the case was about. Should they actually be allowed to do so? Even if sometimes it's okay, what about the times where this lets them dominate for reasons totally unrelated to technical superiority?

How long until we see some kinda law that forces Apple to prompt a user for which browser they would like to use when they first setup their iDevice?

Referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

How long? How about, when Apple controls 95% of the smartphone OS market? When Apple gets a license fee for every smartphone shipped, regardless of whether it runs that Apple OS?

Seriously, I get that a lot of people here don't like not being able to set the default map application on an iPhone, but to liken that to Microsoft's monopolistic behavior is preposterous.

I'll probably get down voted further, but I seriously don't understand the difference. How does market share change the decision? If MS had only 90% share would people have not been frustrated with IE and EU never have acted?

I'm honestly not trying to troll..

What’s not to understand?

They controlled > 95% of the market for personal computers. They then used that position, to try and force consumers to use their specific browser through various means. Because of their massive market share average consumers had very little alternative choice but to buy into microsoft’s system.

Probably when the iOS market share approaches 97.5%, like Microsoft's did right before the EU issued its decision[1].

So long as Google continues to offer Android as a $0 OS I honestly don't see that happening.

[1] http://www.wininsider.com/news/?2248