[paxys]

I can't believe this hasn't happened yet honestly. Apple Maps has been out for 7 years now. Also a bit troubling if it gains traction, considering Apple has been a lot more heavy handed in keeping content they don't approve of out from their ecosystem.

[banachtarski]

In all seriousness, Apple may do certain things well, but cloud-anything just doesn't appear to be in its DNA. Maps, mail, iCloud, Timemachine, etc. Pretty much every service I can think of is laden with bugs, quirks, actual data loss risk, or is slow enough to be unusable. I'm not even remotely surprised that there is no "Apple search" yet.

[paxys]

They also run the App Store, Push Notifications, iAd, Apple News, Apple Music, Apple TV, Siri, Apple Pay and some of the largest systems for photo sharing, file storage, subscriptions, retail billing and more in the world. Saying Apple is bad at cloud services in general is incorrect.

[jayd16]

The CDNs are fine, push and subscriptions are mercurial at best and you have no choice but to use, and Siri is an example of Apple's cloud weakness.

[stephenhuey]

Mercurial is certainly a step above the antics of Loki, so count your blessings!

[52-6F-62]

Ssssssssmokin'!

[threeseed]

They do have plenty of high-volume services e.g. Siri, Siri Suggestions, Maps, Online Store, Apple Music that haven't had any major issues. And even iCloud is substantially better now than in the early days.

Most of your issues seemed like the old, rehashed ones from nearly a decade ago.

[marmshallow]

Their cloud-based Notes App is simply killer. Sure, it’s a simple app but I have had a flawless experience on it.

Photos is pretty great too, but I’m not sure how it compares to other photo services.

[dmitriid]

And yet they forced you to upgrade all your operating systems an all devices you own with the last Notes update (was it iOS 13?) or you'd lose data.

[stephenr]

You wouldn't lose data. You wouldn't be able to access the new notes on the older devices.

[thetinguy]

Because old notes synced through CalDev which required an iCloud email address

[0xEFF]

Maps is a search problem and Apple Maps has gotten quite good. It’s my go to now after a decade of Google maps.

[squeaky-clean]

Apple Maps is my goto because Google Maps just hates showing street names for some reason. Zoom in so a street takes up 100% of your screen and it still won't display the name many times.

Obviously that's not the only reason, haha, it's gotten surprisingly good a few years ago. Public transit and cycling is better in Google (though nothing beats CityMapper for transit if it supports your city). But for walking and driving Apple Maps is my winner.

[ako]

It still lacks cycling, that is usually the reason fo me to open google maps on my iphone.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

As of the next iOS release that will no longer be the case

[ColoradoDev]

As long as you live in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, or Shanghai and Beijing.

[chipotle_coyote]

That's coming in iOS 14, evidently.

[ColoradoDev]

So I'm using iOS 14 and just tried to pull it up. It has a message stating "Cycling directions are not yet available in [my city]"

A quick google search to see if it was simply because of beta or there is a limited roll out, produced this:

>New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Shanghai and Beijing in China.

[spideymans]

Look for the arrival of cycling in Apple maps upon the release of iOS 14 in the upcoming weeks

[Polylactic_acid]

Just got an iphone last month and apple maps has worked perfectly every time for me. I'm not exactly a maps power user but I haven't seen an issue.

[xenospn]

I find maps much more pleasant looking than Google Maps, and that's a big deal for me.

[fomine3]

Lack of maps.apple.com is still problem for use it for primary map service.

[cromwellian]

define "good", the POI database is still woefully lacking outside the US.

[nardi]

You’re 2 for 4. Time Machine and Mail (separate from iCloud) are not cloud services.

[dylan604]

I thought the same thing about Time Machine. It works really well with a local laptop that I plug in from time to time for this to work. However, is it considered Time Machine when an iDevice backs itself up to the cloud?

Mail is definitely a local app, even if they did screw the pooch pretty badly with that gmail bug they had a few years ago.

[Someone]

“However, is it considered Time Machine when an iDevice backs itself up to the cloud?”

No. Strictly speaking, iCloud doesn’t even do backups; it syncs data. Difference is that, with backups, you can get a copy back if you accidentally throw away a file. You typically also have multiple ‘old’ copies.

iWork apps (1) kind-of have backups in the form of versions that get synced to the cloud (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205411), but I think that’s implemented independently from iCloud’s syncing (You can use it to have multiple versions of a document locally, too)

(1) Third-party apps can use this, too (https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), but I wouldn’t know how commonly this is used

[wlesieutre]

> No. Strictly speaking, iCloud doesn’t even do backups; it syncs data

There’s literally a switch called “iCloud Backup” in Settings though. This isn’t a per-app data sync, it’s the full device restore that you can use if your phone gets stolen, dropped in the ocean, etc.

Although you should consider not using it for privacy reasons and running backups to a local machine instead, since last we heard Apple has the encryption keys and will happily hand the entire contents your phone to law enforcement given a warrant.

[banachtarski]

They have components that run in the cloud, and unfortunately, when I wrote "cloud services" I probably should have written "services that leverage the cloud."

[tonyedgecombe]

I don't think Time Machine does, everything I've seen is local to the machine or across your local network.

[matthewmacleod]

As far as I am aware, neither Time Machine nor Mail have any components that "run in the cloud".

[pwinnski]

I have a vague sense that you're right, that the services team just doesn't perform as well as other teams.

However, Apple operates many services at scales few companies ever reach, and doesn't seem to have outages much more often than those other few companies. So they're clearly doing a lot of things incredibly well, in the if-things-work-you-don't-notice sense.

They don't seem to emphasize their cloud services like Google does, and Apple charges for theirs at a much lower level than Google does, but I'm starting to think my vague intuition is wrong.

[happythought]

My impression from Twitter “new job” announcements in the last 6 months is that Apple has seriously ramped up its kubernetes staff.

[Razengan]

iCloud Mail and Photos have been nigh flawless for me for over 8 years now.

[wlesieutre]

Also of note, Apple Maps in the iOS 14 beta just started accepting ratings and photos at map locations, rather than dumping you out to Yelp reviews. I'm happy with this change.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/26/apple-maps-reviews-inhouse/

[scoopertrooper]

I imagine the release of Apple Maps may have convinced them to go slow with this kind of thing.

[eight_ender]

Exactly this

[azinman2]

There's nothing slow about this, it's already launched. I don't understand why people don't get this -- it even says so at the top of this page: "Products like Siri and Spotlight Suggestions use Applebot"

I don't know why anyone would think that Apple would make a web page search engine like Google. Apple has already launched the Apple version in your phones integrated into the software you use.

[dylan604]

Maybe because they are desperate for a different search provider than Google?

I don't use Siri or any assistant, so I don't seem to use what I'm being averaged into using. Majority opinion here is that Siri is seriously lacking behind the other offerings. Apple won't be oblivious to this. If it is solely due to their back-end search engine, then making that a public search engine website won't do Apple any favors if the results are truly that bad.

[dx034]

Voice assisted search probably won't give you much feedback. With a web based search engine, users provide feedback by ignoring some results and clicking others. Therefore releasing a search engine could help them improving it and deliver results with Siri that people would've clicked on otherwise.

[scarface74]

Why would they be desperate for using another search engine when Google pays them $8 billion+ a year?

[k12sosse]

Because Google makes enough money on ads from Google search to spend $8 billion on making it the default search on iOS devices

[scoopertrooper]

Well they've gone to the effort to build a search index and they have sufficient market power to push millions of user onto whichever search engine they'd like. It's essentially leaving money on the table not to take the final step of popping a web frontend on it and making it the Safari default.

[azinman2]

It already is the Safari default. As you type your search, it gives you a Siri Suggestion. When you type a query into Spotlight, you use it.

Apple isn't an ad-supported business. It's not going to look like Google. It looks the way it's already released.

[arrrg]

They are going slow, though.

That they use their own search for this is not a big headlining marketing feature so they aren’t really evaluated on it.

I do think that’s a direct consequence of their experience with Maps, though I guess their hand was more forced on Maps and they had to tell the world about it.

However, using Siri and search suggestion they can, bit by bit, replace search results from other sources with their own without telling anyone about it. It’s a more careful approach.

[dx034]

Google's results are already pretty clean. Search results are heavily filtered (e.g. copyright, adult content) so I don't think Apple would filter more. If anything, filtering more than Google could deteriorate results.

But the SEO market would certainly change if webmasters suddenly have to appeal to more than just Google to be successful.

[sneak]

I’m confused as to why it’s even happening now. A good index costs a fortune to build and maintain.

How does this benefit Apple? They’re a hardware company.

[yyy888sss]

No, Apple is a 'full-stack' tech company. People buy their products both for their hardware and software. If they were just a hardware company, why would they bother making macOS, iOS, iMessage, Safari etc?

[sneak]

To sell more hardware, obviously. You wouldn’t buy a mac without macOS.

How does a search engine sell more hardware?

[tinus_hn]

Haven’t you heard people whine about how Apple is so much about privacy but they take money from Google to have it as the default search?

They don’t have Google as the default search because of the money, they have it because they think it is the best. Even despite the privacy problems and the control this grants Google.

How does a maps service sell more hardware? Because using their own maps service Apple can completely control the experience.

Now maps was hard and search is much harder still so we may very well never see this released. But even then they can use this as leverage while negotiating with Google, both for money and for control.

[criddell]

> How does a search engine sell more hardware?

Because your claim about them being a hardware company is incorrect.

They market themselves as a privacy focused company. Privacy is all about software and services, not hardware. Search is something they could add to their portfolio to strengthen their privacy stance.

[read_if_gay_]

I would think that they can leverage a custom search engine in more flexible ways than Google to improve UX.

Also, Apples main revenue isn’t hardware but services IIRC. They’re not a hardware company.

[sneak]

You do not recall correctly.

Services are ca. 18% of Apple’s revenue, after years of huge spending and tons of dedicated effort to grow this segment. The fact that it is as high as a fifth is itself a monumental feat.

Hardware sales of the iPhone alone, excluding all computers, AirPods, and iPads, is over 40%.

[sokoloff]

I suspect the profit split is biased more towards services than the revenue split.

[paxys]

The same reason why having a maps product benefits them. They want to have complete end-to-end control over a user's experience on their device, well beyond just the hardware. Having their biggest competitor dictate what happens whenever someone opens the web browser on an iPhone is a massive hole.

[londons_explore]

An index of enough of the web to keep 90% of users happy can be built for ~$10k of storage.

The last 10% quickly gets very expensive tho.

[sneak]

Hard drives are cheap enough that storing the index itself is the least expensive part of building it. Engineer time to make that index usable for a search engine is that much money every week.

[Polylactic_acid]

One of the selling points of apple devices is getting away from google spyware. Every bit of spyware they can prevent the user from being exposed to is better.

[sneak]

Apple doesn’t care at all about the most common types of spyware. Nearly every app in the iOS App Store contains tons of spyware.

Apple’s view is that you consented to this sort of unaccountable invisible tracking by dozens of third parties (against whom you have zero recourse), when you agreed to the TOS of the App Store.

The data is aggregated, sold, and resold again.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/09/data-brokers-tracking/