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Comment by prox | Hacker News Reader

Your perceptions are wrong from a consumer point of view. They don’t make shiny toys (well they do but that’s not the point)

They make extremely frictionless ecosystems. Everyone on HN loves to tinker I would wager, but that is never going to be your average consumer. Apple knows that.

That is why Linux will never become mainstream, the friction of using it (from installing to daily driving it) is INSANE . No one can use it outside of a select few. Same with Android. Lots of idiosyncrasies when you start digging deeper. I wanted to use Samsung version of Airdrop today. It was a disaster trying to get a picture over to another device.

That’s where Apple shines. Get that and you might make a dent in Apples market share.

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For your Airdrop example, my iPhone has just as many silly UX idiosyncrasies as any Android phone. For example, recently I needed to translate the text in an image on my iPhone and there is no way to do it(from what I know) other than paying for a dedicated app and giving it Photo permissions. On my Pixel (and any Android phone) the same thing can be done by long pressing the image in my web browser -> Share -> Google Lens -> Done.

IMHO, phone OSes are mature enough nowadays that both options can achieve the same things and whether you prefer one UX over the other depends on what you "grew up with".

> I needed to translate the text in an image on my iPhone and there is no way to do it(from what I know) other than paying for a dedicated app and giving it Photo permissions

Save Image => highlight text in the saved image from the native Photos app => click "Translate". No third-party apps involved. All done locally too, no need for internet connection even (after the image is saved, ofc).

For my usecase saving the image would make it more annoying since I would then have to go through every image afterwards and delete it.

Also, I like that the translation is done offline but in my experience the iOS image translation does a much poorer job at OCR-ing East Asian languages than Google Lens.

Google Lens is in the Google app for iOS.

In apps using the native UI framework (UIKit), text in images is automatically locally OCR’d and is selectable. Apps built in third party toolkits like Flutter won’t have this, but that can be worked around by taking a screenshot and selecting the text in Photos.

Lens can be used by going to images.google.com or the official Google app. Nothing is stopping the same share sheet flow you mentioned from being possible but for some reason Google hasn’t added a share sheet extension to their iOS app.

The Google app does have a share sheet extension, I just used it.

Your usage is already in the intermediary stage of interfacing. Still is a bit cherry picking, I stand by the overall assessment that Apple products are greatly frictionless and easy to use, and work together. Anecdotally, older relatives need a lot less help, almost none with their iPads.

All I see is people struggling to make things work on the M series Macs.

It's one of the environments with the most friction the second you do more than what a Chromebook would.

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