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Honest question to HN readers: which Google apps are you using on iOS, and why? I’ve bit the bullet and ditched Google ecosystem last year, moving email to Fas
by iakov 5y ago
Honest question to HN readers: which Google apps are you using on iOS, and why?
I’ve bit the bullet and ditched Google ecosystem last year, moving email to Fastmail, buying an iPhone and the like. The only Google app i still use is Maps - they are vastly superior to everything else, with navigation, public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague) and reviews/recommendations built in. Essentially its a three-in-one application with no adequate replacement.
I wonder if I am missing something good from Google.
- raydev 5y agoGoogle Maps is still better than Apple Maps overall. There are some nice little features in Apple Maps added in the last few years, but my most recent attempt at using Apple Maps navigation led me to an empty lot.
- nicoburns 5y agoI’m still on Photos. I’d like to move to something else, but I don’t fancy being locked into iCloud.
- wodenokoto 5y agoI still use drive and it’s related apps. There are two things that makes them stand out, ux wise: 1. That round button in the lower right corner that has to be there because it’s material, damn the actual need. 2. If a pane has a horizontal bar, it means that pane is dragable - except of course in Googles apps. Then it’s just there to look at. While Google maps is more accurate with data, I find Apple Maps good enough and nicer to look at. I occasionally go to maps.Google as a backup.
- metagame 5y agoIf you're missing "something good" really depends on what you have a need for. They've offered free SMS for years, which is pretty cool, but niche. You sound like you might like trying Waze, which is also owned by Google. I wouldn't recommend using any of it, though. It's Google, after all. Not as evil as they come, but pretty bad.
- simonh 5y agoFor me the main ones are Map, GMail and Drive/Docs. I'm all-in on MacOS and iOS and have been for over a decade, but those three apps/services are essential for me. Search obviously, I tried DDG but it's not quite there for me. I tried Brave a few months ago but it was glitchy and unstable, on MacOS at least. I could probably move to a different email service, but the rest of my family are on GMail and I don't see a strong reason to move.
- robin_reala 5y agoWhy would family be a lock-in factor for GMail? It’s just email.
- gonehome 5y agoTakes an entire day to migrate accounts from online services and apps. The flow for this is very bad, on some sites you have to email support and on others it’s impossible. Even after doing this a year later I still get email to my old account (Uber) even though I’ve updated my email. Some sites you can’t update and there is no support (Stanford medical).
- h4waii 5y agoIf you admin a Google Apps account on your own domain, with family/friends on it, they have to suffer if you want to migrate away.
- Joeri 5y agoDDG for me is 90%, so I use DDG and append !g whenever I don’t get the results I’m looking for. I’d rather have google search as a choice than a default.
- Nextgrid 5y agoWhy use the GMail app over the built-in client?
- redman25 5y agoNot the poster but I use it because Mail didn’t support notifications. I’m not sure if that’s still true. A lot of Gmail specific features tend to work better with their app.
- helloguillecl 5y agoGood question! I moved to IPhone after having to follow the uncertain and complicated upgrade roadmaps of Android Phones. I use Apple Notes and Reminders heavily. They feel stable (of the kind of stability in which you know they won't be just wiped out of the internet) and they just work. I'm considering moving away from Google Drive since I still cannot make sense of their new Google Sync and Backup client. I will most likely stick to GMail since I really like the UX. As other user here points out, GBoard for iOS is wonderful, I can easily type in three languages as a Spanish speaker who speaks to his German SO (mostly) in English. I use Apple Music and it is very good, nice to have an alternative to Google Play Music, which of course doesn't exist anymore.
- drukenemo 5y agoIs GBoard useful still if you don’t grant Google full access to the keyboard inputs?
- tinus_hn 5y agoIf you want to use Notes and don’t want to trust Apple, you can store the notes on any IMAP server you like. I don’t know if it is possible to store Reminders outside of iCloud, I don’t really use it.
- k8sToGo 5y agoWhen I still had iOS I mostly used Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.
- jikbd 5y agoI use Gboard because it treats me as an adult, allowing me to type expletives.
- scary-size 5y agoMaps and Keep (for a single shared shopping list)
- aix1 5y ago> public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague) Give Citymapper a go if you haven't already. I find it vastly superior to Google Maps for public transport here in London. (And I work at Google so, if anything, am probably biased the other way.)
- wruza 5y agoMoreover, when I see “material design” it puts me off, because it reminds me how I hated my ex-android, playing button “wave” animations but not doing an action. Google ui is flat in all senses, and feels like a low-effort work stretched to the size of idea. Idk why they started to implement that ui for iphone, when it clearly had its own.
- jsemrau 5y agoGoogle Maps in Japan is unusable. Many times it directed me which might have been the shortest way but through micro-streets that are really difficult to navigate instead of the more efficient 2-lane.
- 2ion 5y agoTo be fair, Japan has specific digital service offerings in a lot of niches that outdo most of internationally aligned competitors with their eyes closed.
- beebeepka 5y agoCare to share a few examples? Visiting Japan has been on my list for many years. Still hasn't materialised.
- 2ion 5y agoIt's just many things piling up. transit.yahoo.co.jp for long and short distance public transport, maps.yahoo.co.jp instead of US map services, tabelog.com for restaurant reviews, navitime for car navigation etc. Note that the desired functionality is often available only in Japanese. If the sites have international/English versions, often you get a lite version at best and a dummy version without much content in the worst case. You can observe that for example already when you research the Narita Express rail service; the JR pages in English always have less detail and info than the JP ones. A good thing about Japan's online services is that a lot of them are not "apps" they're web sites and the apps just containers for the web sites, on Android more often than not anyway, as Japan is iPhone country. So you get the same services from your desktop as on your smartphones, and many service websites still have proper, fully featured mobile web versions, as opposed to many Western online services making their mobile web versions increasingly unusable, pushing apps, like .e.g. reddit. Also JP web is much more pleasant than Anglo web in my opinion; they have stuck with a combination of "tables tables everywhere", hypertext links, and dead-simple HTML markup plus colorful icons/ads/banners in plain image formats from the late 2000s which is very easy to read, e.g. https://www.jreast.co.jp/ltd_exp/guide/#price_area2 https://www.jreast.co.jp/ltd_exp/guide/#price_area2 Easy to read, easy to use.
- pell 5y agoOnly Maps. But ditching Maps has been really difficult for me. It's just vastly better than the competition here where I live.
- nicoburns 5y agoI still use Google Maps. But CityMapper is excellent in urban areas (where available), and organic maps is great for walking directions.
- cameronh90 5y agoFor me personally I use pretty much all the Google apps. Drive, Docs, Keep, Maps, Home, Gmail, Duo, Search, Photos... The reason is I have an iPad, Pixel, Windows desktop, MacBook Pro and Linux laptop. Google's ecosystem is the only one that works well across all operating systems, and Google Home has by far the best voice control.
- dmitriid 5y ago- Google Maps. It's still the best maps app even though the quality of information they display and suggest has gone downhill. - Google Photos. About a magnitude of magnitudes faster than Apple Photos when uploading/syncing/sharing/literally anything with photos than Apple Photos which are always stuck in some limbo with no indication of what is happening.
- zaphirplane 5y agoWith the same uploaded quality ?
- dmitriid 5y agoNot the same, but this still doesn't explain why Apple Photos is so dog slow and has so few indicators as to what's going on. Apple Photos: Uploads stuck? Check. Sharing photos taking up to three hours to show up on the other person's device? Check. Weird formats when sharing (qt/mp4, downsized jpegs/pngs/hvecs) with no controls? Check. And so on and so on. Google Photos has its quirks. But man is experience so much better.
- tkgally 5y agoI have over a dozen Google apps installed on my iPhone and iPad, but there are only three I use enough to have an opinion about: Gmail, Maps, and YouTube Music. Gmail and Maps work well enough for me, and I have no complaints. I much prefer the street view navigation on the Apple Maps app in areas where it’s available, though. YouTube Music, which I mainly use on the iPhone, is sluggish and buggy. Album covers, for example, are often slow to load, and sometimes the wrong covers appear next to songs in playlists. I only stay with it because I have a bunch of playlists left over from Google Play Music, which I was satisfied with, and because I encountered annoying technical problems with both Spotify and Apple Music when I tried them a few years ago.
- kiryin 5y agoOnly tangentially related, I know, but I see google maps quite differently. First and foremost I want to admit that I have no good comeback to the public transport schedules, that is a good feature. But regarding mapping and navigation, google maps does not treat you like a human being. It's essentially a catalogue of advertisements, much like google search. It's optimized to guide you to the "nearest pizza place" or what have you, and at least in my area, if you're not looking for a vaguely defined place to spend money and already know your destination you're screwed, quite ironically. Everyone I've talked to around here struggles with it and has developed the strangest procedures to trick gmaps into showing the route they want to see. I personally use OpenStreetMap and it works very reliably, admittedly after I reconstructed some roads and added some labels to places I visit. Luckily there are many active editors around here, so even when I'm going to visit a new area 99% of the time I get where I want without issue.
- mdpye 5y agoWhich OSM app do you use?
- avianlyric 5y ago> navigation, public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague) Have you given Apple Maps a go recently? In cities where they’ve done the big transport updates (I think Prague is one of them), I’ve found Apple Maps to be far superior to Google Map. Live transport times, accurate station entrances and exits (great here in London where stations can have half a dozen entrances spread out over half a square mile). Incredible walking and cycling audio instructions, which make good use of cycle paths, and provide instructions using traffic lights as landmarks (e.g. go through the next lights, then turn right). Reviews etc are a bit crap still, POI data isn’t as good. So the directions to your destination are great, but actually telling Maps what your destination is sometime frustrating. Additionally I’ve noticed a view map errors that result is silly routes, but I suspect Google Maps has the same, i just didn't have the local knowledge to notice them.
- sofixa 5y agoI don't know if you can say superior when Google Maps does all those, maybe bar the last one: > Live transport times, accurate station entrances and exits (great here in London where stations can have half a dozen entrances spread out over half a square mile). Incredible walking and cycling audio instructions, which make good use of cycle paths, and provide instructions using traffic lights as landmarks (e.g. go through the next lights, then turn right).
- avianlyric 5y agoI think Apple Map’s implementation is substantial more polished than what Google has. So while the top level feature list might be very similar, Apple Maps just works better. This is of course my opinion, but if you haven't used Apple Maps in a while, I strongly encourage you to try it for a week. I think you’ll be impressed with how well it works today.
- manigandham 5y agoIn areas with good Apple Maps coverage, it provides instructions that are more helpful and usable while driving with a simpler interface than Google Maps. For complex routing and overall features, Google is still far ahead.
- cpursley 5y agoNot sure about the EU but Yandex maps is surprisingly good (yeah, I know - Russian). But at least you don't send your data to Google.
- jensensbutton 5y ago> and why? Because ease of use.
- viktorcode 5y agoGoogle translate. I was a Lens app user since iPhone 4. Then Google bought it and incorporated into the translate app. So, I installed it solely for the purpose of using lens functionality.
- tinus_hn 5y agoThis functionality is built-in to the camera app from iOS 15 as Live Text. You might have to turn it on both at ‘General/Language and Region’ and then in the Camera settings.
- jeffbee 5y agoLive text translate is a pale shadow of what Google translate can do.
- tinus_hn 5y ago> for the purpose of using lens functionality.
- jeffbee 5y agoNot sure what you are getting at. Isn’t the whole point of the google word lens feature that it translates foreign languages and replaces the text with your language in the image in real time?
- tinus_hn 5y ago> I was a Lens app user since iPhone 4. Then Google bought it and incorporated into the translate app. So, I installed it solely for the purpose of using lens functionality.
- satvikpendem 5y agoYes, the lens functionality for translating text
- thrower123 5y agoGmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Google Calendar The old Google chat app was better than the current one, but c'est la vie
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tinus_hn 5y agoCitymapper has great public transport navigation in many areas including Prague. Apple Maps is becoming better every day, especially for navigation, the place where it lacks is the poi database. OpenStreetMaps also has a large poi database. Even though it isn’t as feature filled as the database used by Google Maps, at least you can be sure your app isn’t hiding a restaurant because they didn’t pay for an ad. Which is what happens if you use Google Maps.
- dade_ 5y agoNo, I’d be done with Google, but nothing competes with Maps, and Earth. Apple maps isn’t cross platform, so useless to me anyway. My nest was just replaced with Ecobee. I still use their search and news, but web only. I am open to switch when I find something better. And Google Home, because I have a Chromecast so my friends can share content, music from android phones. I look forward to the change, I find Google’s Material design to be a big visual improvement over what was, but more frustrating to use.
- statictype 5y agoI use Google Calendar because when meetings get changed or updated I would like to know about it at once and not after 15min or 30min or whatever time it takes the default calendar app to get its act together. I also use Google Sheets on iOS because it’s significantly more useful than Numbers. Google apps and services + iOS is the sweet spot for me. iPhone is significantly better than Android for me as a hardware device and OS. But Google apps for productivity are miles ahead of anything Apple has.
- jorvi 5y agoYouTube - sadly no alternative Google Maps - Apple Maps still borks up way too much
- gman83 5y agoI have an iPhone and use almost every Google service available instead of the Apple one. Why? Not because the app is better, but because I'm also using Linux & Windows, as well as a Android tablet. With Google services at least I'm not locked into one platform.
- scrollaway 5y agoSame story here. I'm very irritated by Google Contacts not being available on iOS. What do you use there?
- zaphirplane 5y agoI’m pretty sure Google contacts are synced into iPhone contacts if you login to gmail
- symlinkk 5y agoYou can just sync the native iOS contacts app with Google
- manigandham 5y agoiOS/iPadOS centralize accounts in system settings. You can toggle what services and data you want synced: mail, calendar, contacts, notes. Your google/gmail contacts are natively synced with your phone's contact list. No separate app needed. Go to Settings > Mail > Accounts > [account name] > toggle services
- jeffbee 5y agoSome that haven’t been mentioned by others: Google Pay, because it has an integration with my city’s parking meter system that is better than that system’s official app, Google Authenticator, and Google PhotoScan.
- jeromegv 5y agoDid you try the “Transit” app for public transit?
- benrapscallion 5y agoWaze