I miss more on iOS because if that. The eight things I cared about are mixed in with the 94 that I don’t.

I feel like this would result in so many broken phones that most companies would not want to enter this market. Wouldn’t be surprised if you could find something on Alibaba or Amazon, but I doubt it’s much of a market.

That all depends on Apple’s ability to run it effectively, and they have basically no demonstrated ability to do that.

App Review is an absolute joke. Listen to last week’s Accidental Tech Podcast. One of the hosts is developing an IMDB competitor app, and he’s been rejected three times as of that episode. One rejection was for playing copyrighted video without permission – in an app that doesn’t have any code that can play a video. One was for not having a link to his T&Cs in a field in the app store that can’t render links. And the third was for displaying copyrighted media in his screenshots (maybe? no one really knows), and that media was the cover art for movie and TV shows. None of those even pass the sniff test. We all know that you’re allowed to show the cover art for a movie in an app that has information about movies. We all know that’s Fair Use, but beyond that, a third grader knows that literally everything in the world that presents information about movies does it. At the exact same time that all this is happening, Apple happily published some scammer’s app called “Threads” and let it collect 300,000 people’s information who thought they were downloading the actual Threads app from Meta.

It’s always been this way. I personally wrote the original iPhone app for a large US retailer in 2008 – the first year the App Store existed. App Review’s only purpose then was to detect your use of private APIs, usually because that would let you build things Apple didn’t want you to build. That’s the only purpose it serves today, 15 years later. Everything else is random noise that just punishes you unpredictably for no reason. I had an update of that app rejected once for using our own company logo as the icon. They don’t catch obvious scams. They never have. The people doing these reviews know nothing or are given so little time that the way to game their metrics is to just randomly reject sometimes without analysis. Unless they change something, it’ll just be a thing that scammers fill out however they want with no consequence to them at all, and a random 5% of legitimate developers will waste a few weeks arguing over when it’s applied to them with no logical basis in reality.

I think there are probably some ways to cross over a bit, but really, LLMs aren’t necessarily aimed at the kind of things we want a virtual assistant to do today. Siri falls down mostly on its ability to correctly do things quickly and reliably. Generating 5000 words of convincingly human sounding explanations isn’t what I want from a thing I quickly trigger on my phone. What I want is very short or no reply accompanying the action I wanted to take. Call this person. Start navigation to an address. Turn on the lights. Play the version of a song I like from this specific live album. Some of those things are things Siri really sucks at today, and none of them are likely to get a lot better with an LLM in place. Maybe playing music benefits from a more robust understanding of the language of my query, but the rest of it are things where the suckage is more that Siri takes 8 seconds for the server to respond or just inexplicably decides that today it doesn’t know how to turn on a light.

At this point it feels like a great LLM would let Siri fail to respond to a much more varied set of ways for me to ask my question in English, but that’s not really the target we’re shooting for here.

You could do it with custom development work – write your own iOS and/or Mac app that uses Apple’s Maps API, but this becomes a fairly substantial software project that you need a programmer to create. It’s not doable just using the Maps app on your device as a user.

It’s more, “oh, that video clip looks like shit, and every time anyone on this chat likes something, everyone gets spammed a repetitive long-form explanation, and we can’t add Jimmy to the chat because it’s SMS now and AT&T limits it to 10 people, and …”

In the bad old days, SMS was incredibly limited. Apple came out with iMessage, which was both a full IP messaging client with rich features, but seamlessly fell back to SMS, and that was amazing, because a lot of the people you wanted to talk to only had SMS. Google briefly had a similar thing, but whoever ran that product lost the weekly pistols at dawn match that Google uses to set corporate strategy, and hangouts lost SMS integration, which meant you needed two message apps — one for IP messages that was good and a separate one for SMS that sucked. And they were completely separate — no shared threads or history or anything. And then hangouts was killed anyway to make room for chat, or meet, or duo, or allo, or jello, or J-Lo, or Oreos, or who the fuck knows anymore-oh. And so for several years, if you wanted the only thing anyone in the US ever wanted from a messaging app, you had to get an iPhone, because Google kept killing their apps every year like, “hey guys, our new app still can’t talk to your mom, but we integrated the “hot dog or not” feature from Silicon Valley into it, and isn’t that amazing?”

Now, it doesn’t matter, because no one is limited to SMS anymore. Everyone could be on whatever IP platform. But Google still picked a fucking standard built by the phone company with crappy baggage attached like requiring a phone number to use it, and anyway, they’re so late that everyone already picked iMessage. Even if RCS was as good, no one wants to change a bunch of stuff to be no better than when they started, and RCS also still isn’t as good.

The green vs blue bubble thing is just a shorthand way of talking about it. The average person either doesn’t care or cares because mixed-platform group chats have lots of rough edges and limitations, so if you’re the lone Android user, it feels like your fault.

Anyone who seriously escalates this stuff to being a real life problem is crazy, but it is more than just the color of the bubble.

In their defense, why should they have to care whose fault it is that messaging sucks on Android? They just want a pleasant experience, and iMessage has been the best experience for Apple users for like 15 years. It’s also as much Google’s fault as Apple’s, if we want to get nitpicky about it. I wouldn’t spend a lot of money implementing the protocol Google wants either, because Google will abandon it and back three competing new ones before your next good bowel movement.

I’m saying the very idea that you need to ever even think about this as a defense against the enemy is the hobby. There’s only a battle to be fought here if you want there to be, and most people don’t want that. The impact on their lives is not actually tangible. Ad tech doesn’t really hurt anyone. No one likes it, and at best, it feels a little gross, but feeling vaguely icky is not the kind of tangible impact that reliably drives people to action. What happens to you when Facebook or Google bundle you into anonymized groups of eyeballs and promise advertisers that they’ll show you ads relevant to the profile they’ve built of you? Nothing really. If you think about the way they built that profile by tracking your every move online, then yes, it feels creepy, but that’s it.

I’d also say that those health issues are much more practically impactful than Instagram showing you ads for luggage when you’ve bought a plane ticket.

Caring about ad tech is a hobby. It’s as good a hobby as any other, but that’s what it is.