What makes you think Apple won't release a SiriKit in the future ?
> Apple Maps isn't going to have a fleet of vehicles driving around to confirm mapping data.
Neither does Google in most places. And Apple, Google, Microsoft etc all rely on third party data providers for most of their map data. Surely they would be confirming the data.
> Can Apple create a better platform backend faster than Google can meet them at design/UX?
The issue is not what Google itself does. It's the ability of Google to influence the ecosystem to come along with it. That has always been the problem.
> Neither does Google in most places. And Apple, Google, Microsoft etc all rely on third party data providers for most of their map data. Surely they would be confirming the data.
Apple Maps has been out for two full years now, and it hasn't improved at all where I live, and the benchmark for demonstrating improvement is quite literally "find almost anything at all".
Admittedly, I'm in Iceland, but Reykjavik is a world capital, and a city with a bit over 200,000 people, so it's not like we're trading pelts over here either. And I don't think anyone understands how shockingly bad their maps are here. I've done quite a bit of testing with them, and if you search for a city in Iceland, you have pretty good odds of finding something (maybe 80% accuracy). If you search for a point of interest, it drops to maybe 40%. Everything else is 0%. Literally 0%. There's one fucking highway in the country, and if you look for directions between the two largest cities, it says "No results found". Way more than half of the searches I've tested just pop up that message in a UIAlertView, and it's exactly 100% of the searches for directions. I work at a university with 4000 students, and we're not on the map at all. It points you to a dozen high schools in the city instead.
Open street maps supposedly provides their data, but OSM is quite good here. Somehow Apple turns correct data into "No results found", and that's been true since launch day.
Apple doesn't have any recent OSM data. All of their input dates from 2010 or earlier, before they adopted a newer copyleft license. Apple is now relying on a scattered bunch of different providers for map data.[0]
Google supports iOS pretty well. They don't support Windows Phone at all, but I've heard a lot of Android users complaining at various points that iOS gets the app updates quicker than Android does for some Google apps.
And there's probably a lot of overlap between Apple's customer base and Nest's. I'm not saying they won't do it, I really just mean I don't know how likely it is :-)
> The issue is not what Google itself does. It's the ability of Google to influence the ecosystem to come along with it.
For the high-end Moto X and Nexus devices relevant to the author's thesis, this will happen soup-to-nuts shortly after the L release is launched. For the other devices, the downloadable apps will get the new UX through the support libraries, but the system apps will still have the old UX.
What makes you think Apple won't release a SiriKit in the future ?
> Apple Maps isn't going to have a fleet of vehicles driving around to confirm mapping data.
Neither does Google in most places. And Apple, Google, Microsoft etc all rely on third party data providers for most of their map data. Surely they would be confirming the data.
> Can Apple create a better platform backend faster than Google can meet them at design/UX?
The issue is not what Google itself does. It's the ability of Google to influence the ecosystem to come along with it. That has always been the problem.