[downer70]

Fair enough, maybe the development team for this particular component is much larger than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm being naive about the head count at work behind the scenes on a project like this.

It's not really good news either way though. In my mind this would have been a smaller team, tasked with pulling the data over and then working on it to construct recognition scores, and passing a message back to prompt the user. This would have been a smallish team of 20 or 30, to do it quick and dirty.

For on-device processing, the project grows much more complicated, not just to develop, but also to test and prove end-to-end. So time and human resources are both more costly. And so too, come trade-offs. Network bandwidth, versus device battery/procesor/memory resources.

But all of this to push the envelope and solicit the user to expose more data to a for-profit service. Is it really something more convenient? Another nagging reminder, to do something the user doesn't need much prompting for?

The more weight thrown behind these sorts of projects the more curious the motives become.