5 ms·

Siri is especially bad when compared to Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, both of which are light years ahead. Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their

by skrowl 6y ago

Siri is especially bad when compared to Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, both of which are light years ahead. Usual Apple reliance on their fans buying their devices no matter how bad the software is.

c0wb0yc0d3r 6y ago
Is it really reliance? To me it seems like they know their customers will just lay down and take it.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  I write apps for Android and design devices that run on Android for a living. A friend once asked why I have an iPhone, and my response was pretty simple: "I'll switch to Android when I can rotate my screen animate the rotation instead of blanking out" They got it immediately. - 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)
  - schmuelio 6y ago
    I didn't remember how android handles screen rotations so I went and checked, I looked on both my phone and my tablet on a plethora of apps: - 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 It's possible that your assumptions are outdated and - by your own admission - should switch back to Android.
    - BoorishBears 6y ago
      You realize I work on Android devices all day long right? 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)
      - twobitshifter 6y ago
        With limited Android experience I can corroborate the screen rotation stupidity. The latest google wisdom is to use the Model View ViewModel pattern, which can help to work around this issue. If you are using a “view model” its a hack to largely avoid this screen rotation BS, but I don’t expect many Android apps are implemented this way. Keeping up with google is like chasing your own tail.
      - jonas21 6y ago
        I haven't written Android code in a few years, but IIRC, there's an attribute you can add to your manifest that lets you handle the rotation without getting your UI getting destroyed and recreated. This is relatively easy to do and seems to be commonly done, at least for bigger apps. 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.
        BoorishBears 6y ago
        I already covered that: > 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" - 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
dijit 6y ago
Statement about observed behaviour: > 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.
cletus 6y ago
Isn’t it more likely that the quality of the voice assistant isn’t that important to most buyers?
- Grimm1 6y ago
  Anecdata but I've never even bothered to try Siri on mine. I think you're on the money there.
  - Jcowell 6y ago
    In the flip side I use Siri everyday to turn on lights , timers , custom iOS Shortcut commands , Intercom, play music, and to find my phone when I can’t locate it I’m my house.
- molszanski 6y ago
  I think so too. I am pretty sure that data will show it too. Five years ago the NextGen computing platform that will change the world where smart speakers. Now it is almost a niche product.
- darkwater 6y ago
  (gonna be downvoted to death) Usually Apple die-hard buyers tend to minimize the importance of software/features that are not sported by an i-device or that doesn't work well there. When the 1st iPhone was released, the lack of native apps was a selling point "we use the web standards". When apps were introduced, they were again a selling point (and still are to the present day). 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.
  - hnra 6y ago
fastball 6y ago
I was actually under the impression that this is because Apple actually cares about privacy (unlike the other two) and so is not hoovering up everything you say to it and sending it to the cloud, but rather trying to do as much inference as possible on your device.
- NaturalPhallacy 6y ago
  ding ding ding 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.
  - millsmob 6y ago
    Edward Snowden revealed that Apple has been part of the PRISM electronic surveillance program since 2012. 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.
    - NaturalPhallacy 6y ago
      A fair point. But it's also worth noting that Snowden recommends Signal, and doesn't say "don't use it on an iPhone" as a caveat. To say Apple is benign is ridiculous. To say they're better on privacy than google is just true.
      - millsmob 6y ago
        A fair argument but I don’t think it’s really fair to compare Signal to Apple Maps because IMHO while there is a possibility that the NSA is able to somehow intercept my Signal messages on-device prior to encryption occurring; it is almost a certainty that the NSA has some form of back door access to Apple’s infrastructure and is able to access location/search data from Apple Maps. 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.
TomVDB 6y ago
I’m always surprised when people shit on Siri. I use it all the time for simple commands, and it works pretty reliably. 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?
- xnyan 6y ago
  >I’m always surprised when people shit on Siri. >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.
devoutsalsa 6y ago
The thing that makes my iPhone worse is that it's hard to use Google Assistant (haven't tried Alexa) with my iPhone. I can't make Google Assistant the default voice interface. I can say "hey siri hey google", but honestly I'm not doing that. Google Assistant is decent, but it's not amazing. For any non-trivial task, I still have to do look things up manually. 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".

by skrowl 6y ago

c0wb0yc0d3r 6y ago

Is it really reliance? To me it seems like they know their customers will just lay down and take it.

BoorishBears 6y ago
I write apps for Android and design devices that run on Android for a living. A friend once asked why I have an iPhone, and my response was pretty simple: "I'll switch to Android when I can rotate my screen animate the rotation instead of blanking out" They got it immediately. - 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)
- schmuelio 6y ago
  I didn't remember how android handles screen rotations so I went and checked, I looked on both my phone and my tablet on a plethora of apps: - 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.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    You realize I work on Android devices all day long right? 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)
    - twobitshifter 6y ago
      With limited Android experience I can corroborate the screen rotation stupidity. The latest google wisdom is to use the Model View ViewModel pattern, which can help to work around this issue. If you are using a “view model” its a hack to largely avoid this screen rotation BS, but I don’t expect many Android apps are implemented this way. Keeping up with google is like chasing your own tail.
    - jonas21 6y ago
      I haven't written Android code in a few years, but IIRC, there's an attribute you can add to your manifest that lets you handle the rotation without getting your UI getting destroyed and recreated. This is relatively easy to do and seems to be commonly done, at least for bigger apps. 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.
      - BoorishBears 6y ago
        I already covered that: > 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" - 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

dijit 6y ago

Statement about observed behaviour: > 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.

cletus 6y ago

Isn’t it more likely that the quality of the voice assistant isn’t that important to most buyers?

Grimm1 6y ago
Anecdata but I've never even bothered to try Siri on mine. I think you're on the money there.
- Jcowell 6y ago
  In the flip side I use Siri everyday to turn on lights , timers , custom iOS Shortcut commands , Intercom, play music, and to find my phone when I can’t locate it I’m my house.
molszanski 6y ago
I think so too. I am pretty sure that data will show it too. Five years ago the NextGen computing platform that will change the world where smart speakers. Now it is almost a niche product.
darkwater 6y ago
(gonna be downvoted to death) Usually Apple die-hard buyers tend to minimize the importance of software/features that are not sported by an i-device or that doesn't work well there. When the 1st iPhone was released, the lack of native apps was a selling point "we use the web standards". When apps were introduced, they were again a selling point (and still are to the present day). 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.
- hnra 6y ago

fastball 6y ago

I was actually under the impression that this is because Apple actually cares about privacy (unlike the other two) and so is not hoovering up everything you say to it and sending it to the cloud, but rather trying to do as much inference as possible on your device.

NaturalPhallacy 6y ago
ding ding ding 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.
- millsmob 6y ago
  Edward Snowden revealed that Apple has been part of the PRISM electronic surveillance program since 2012. 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.
  - NaturalPhallacy 6y ago
    A fair point. But it's also worth noting that Snowden recommends Signal, and doesn't say "don't use it on an iPhone" as a caveat. To say Apple is benign is ridiculous. To say they're better on privacy than google is just true.
    - millsmob 6y ago
      A fair argument but I don’t think it’s really fair to compare Signal to Apple Maps because IMHO while there is a possibility that the NSA is able to somehow intercept my Signal messages on-device prior to encryption occurring; it is almost a certainty that the NSA has some form of back door access to Apple’s infrastructure and is able to access location/search data from Apple Maps. 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.

TomVDB 6y ago

I’m always surprised when people shit on Siri. I use it all the time for simple commands, and it works pretty reliably. 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?

xnyan 6y ago
>I’m always surprised when people shit on Siri. >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.

devoutsalsa 6y ago

The thing that makes my iPhone worse is that it's hard to use Google Assistant (haven't tried Alexa) with my iPhone. I can't make Google Assistant the default voice interface. I can say "hey siri hey google", but honestly I'm not doing that. Google Assistant is decent, but it's not amazing. For any non-trivial task, I still have to do look things up manually. 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".