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Sadly that is not the case with the ridiculous 30% fee on app purchases. That is one of those silent cartels. They did not meet and decide "Let's both take 30%!", but both of them decided not to undercut the other side, because they both want those 30%. So they eliminated competition and the EU just started to do something against that. That took a while.
Sadly it’s not the case.

The 30% fee was implemented at the introduction of the iOS App Store, before Apple had a monopoly within the “App Store” market.

Because of that fact Apple cannot be accused of taking advantage of their monopoly.
 
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"Buy an Android phone" - does not help iPhone sales at all. Leaving a 450 million people market (or loosing it) seems like a really bad business dicision.
For those who don’t speak multiple languages, they might not even realize that Apple doesn’t even support automatic language switching.
I daily juggle three languages and Apple is not doing a good job to help me.
 
"Buy an Android phone" - does not help iPhone sales at all. Leaving a 450 million people market (or loosing it) seems like a really bad business dicision.

I daily juggle three languages and Apple is not doing a good job to help me.

I don't know how Android works this week but last time I checked you couldn't even switch manually between spell checker languages in the Android keyboard...

Apple has at least discovered that you can activate multiple spell checkers at the same time in the latest ios versions.
 
Siri doesn’t support multiple languages. My phone is set to English, but I speak several languages. Last week I was in Greece, and I speak the language. So how am I supposed to say a street name? Siri doesn’t support Greek at all, and with my phone in English, how exactly am I supposed to give it directions? I had to type street names using latin characters. In this case, Siri is completely useless.
I'm sure if I were in your shoes I'd feel the same way.
 
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About 4-5 years ago, there were several job listings on LinkedIn for Greek translators and linguists to work on Siri - it wasn't just a rumour, it was official. It never came to pass, evidently. Useless!

Same story with the Polish language. There were job listings, rumors about Siri speaking Polish soon - nothing happened. Makes sense, since they’re shifting toward LLMs and the old language processing models are basically obsolete now. But man, Apple is so slow at rolling out features outside English-speaking countries. I’ve pretty much lost hope that most European countries will ever get proper native voice assistant support. So it’s good to hear they’ll let us move to competitors’ solutions without having to ditch the whole ecosystem.
 
Lucky people in the eu getting a voice assistant that’s actually competent.

Done in my family have pixels / android and I’m jealous of them being able to use Gemini to go all sorts of useful things and have a useful conversation with it.

Meanwhile Siri feels 10 years behind.
 
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Same story with the Polish language. There were job listings, rumors about Siri speaking Polish soon - nothing happened. Makes sense, since they’re shifting toward LLMs and the old language processing models are basically obsolete now. But man, Apple is so slow at rolling out features outside English-speaking countries. I’ve pretty much lost hope that most European countries will ever get proper native voice assistant support. So it’s good to hear they’ll let us move to competitors’ solutions without having to ditch the whole ecosystem.
I don't think Apple decided not roll out European Siri languages for almost 15 years because of LLMs. They simply abandoned Siri almost entirely as a project and didn't put in the resources. Now they're facing the consequences and it's very entertaining to watch.
 
I don't think Apple decided not roll out European Siri languages for almost 15 years because of LLMs. They simply abandoned Siri almost entirely as a project and didn't put in the resources. Now they're facing the consequences and it's very entertaining to watch.
Apple have 3 faces:
1/ Great HW and OS provider universally accepted and available
2/ Mediocre (as least as far as market share is concerned) global content provider
3/ Services provider focused on large markets only with "popular" official languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, etc.).

They give up not crucial markets to alternative providers (it's not uncommon here where I live to install Google and Meta apps straight after iPhone activation. Hardly anybody uses Apple Music, iMessage, Siri, Apple Maps, etc.).

I think Apple would open AI Assistant interface to competition anyway as:
A/ providing such complicated solution for all countries is beyond their abilities
B/ providing such complicated solution for all countries is beyond their strategy (point 3)
 
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Apple have 3 faces:
1/ Great HW and OS provider universally accepted and available
2/ Mediocre (as least as far as market share is concerned) global content provider
3/ Services provider focused on large markets only with "popular" official languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, etc.).

They give up not crucial markets to alternative providers (it's not uncommon here where I live to install Google and Meta apps straight after iPhone activation. Hardly anybody uses Apple Music, iMessage, Siri, Apple Maps, etc.).

I think Apple would open AI Assistant interface to competition anyway as:
A/ providing such complicated solution for all countries is beyond their abilities
B/ providing such complicated solution for all countries is beyond their strategy (point 3)

As a consumer, I agree with point (1). However, regarding point (3), if you allow me, I kind of doubt that Apple truly focuses on “popular” languages. I believe they offer the bare minimum with software that feels incomplete and underdeveloped.

For example, in my experience, their Translate app is terrible even between major languages like Spanish-German or Spanish-French. It even makes serious mistakes between Spanish (Castellano) and English. I could go on, especially when it comes to Siri and its ability to understand various “popular” languages.

Siri can’t detect when I’m speaking Castellano(Spanish) to give me accurate directions as my phone is set to English. There are just so many issues.

iMessage is terrible for people who speak multiple languages. I had it set to announce notifications. It works okay for English and Spanish, but when the message is in Greek, it starts spelling out each character—K-a-l-i-m-e-r-a-m-a-l-a-k-a :cool:. There's no way to disable this just for Greek, so I had to turn off announce notifications for iMessage entirely.

I could go on and on.....

Apologies for the rant...:)
 
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This would be amazing. Siri is just so bad. Got a HomePod for one of my daughters and just spent weeks laughing at how terrible Siri is. Got her an Alexa speaker now. In the open market no one would chose Siri.
 
As a consumer, I agree with point (1). However, regarding point (3), if you allow me, I kind of doubt that Apple truly focuses on “popular” languages. I believe they offer the bare minimum with software that feels incomplete and underdeveloped.

For example, in my experience, their Translate app is terrible even between major languages like Spanish-German or Spanish-French. It even makes serious mistakes between Spanish (Castellano) and English. I could go on, especially when it comes to Siri and its ability to understand various “popular” languages.

Siri can’t detect when I’m speaking Castellano(Spanish) to give me accurate directions as my phone is set to English. There are just so many issues.

iMessage is terrible for people who speak multiple languages. I had it set to announce notifications. It works okay for English and Spanish, but when the message is in Greek, it starts spelling out each character—K-a-l-i-m-e-r-a. There's no way to disable this just for Greek, so I had to turn off announce notifications for iMessage entirely.

I could go on and on.....
Just please notice that I didn't use any adjective in point 3. The fact that Apple is focused on "popular" languages for services doesn't mean that they doing it great. The difference is that for e.g. Siri quality of service for Spanish is poor (as you claim, I don't know Spanish) whereas there is no service for my language at all.

Still, conclusion is that weakest part of Apple is services. Google, for one, shines here (e.g. in my country it's popular as ..).
 
Just please notice that I didn't use any adjective in point 3. The fact that Apple is focused on "popular" languages for services doesn't mean that they doing it great. The difference is that for e.g. Siri quality of service for Spanish is poor (as you claim, I don't know Spanish) whereas there is no service for my language at all.

Still, conclusion is that weakest part of Apple is services. Google, for one, shines here (e.g. in my country it's popular as ..).

You're right, and I didn’t mean to disagree with your point in my reply.
 
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Yeah like they informed everyone that Siri secretly recorded and this was given to an external contractor :D or like when Siri is overwhelmed again with the question about the current month and forwards it to ChatGpt (which is known for perfect privacy ;) )
Yeah, but the difference is they weren’t selling that data to advertisers. Those contractors are working on behalf of Apple so basically Apple. It’s just like the iPhone is made by Foxconn but most people say it’s made by Apple. yes, they are getting sued because of this that’s only because of unintentional activations. Like every voice assistant, it’ll hear something on TV or in a conversation that sounds similar and activate.

As to forwarding questions to chat, GPT, that should be only on the newer iPhones and it should give you some sort of warning. I don’t have a newer iPhone so I don’t know how that works


You can laugh as much as you want. will not make Siri any better.

I would pay to swap Siri with Alexa on my phone.
I don’t think anyone will argue that Siri is the absolute worst and biggest pile of 💩, Apple has. They need to get rid of it and start again.
 
I’ve never understood the criticism of Siri. Sure, it doesn’t have the breadth of knowledge of Google but it never once fails to set a reminder or a timer. Directions in Apple Maps are concise and the on-device help feature genuinely useful.
HA, Apple Maps, it almost got me to go down the wrong way of a one way street in NYC. Good times
 
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