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.