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Comment by fkdjs | Hacker News Reader

It's the centerpiece for interacting with apps. It's key. In fact, I'm betting it contributed to people confusing android with ios, it's that similar and pervasive. Before they were ripped off the biggest complaint about the iphone was it didn't have android-style notifications. There were many different knockoff apps since people disliked ios notifications so much and apple ended up hiring the lead dev from one of them(mobile notifier) So Apple greatly benefited from ripping off android as this allowed them to close an obvious gap.

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If you asked me, Safari is the centerpiece of the iPhone and always has been. It's even more important than the ability to run third party apps.

It was the first phone browser done right, and is still arguably the best. Outside of the phone operations, I would trade away every possible feature of iOS for Safari.

Notifications is an annoying piece of crap for a lot of people including me. That isn't to say the previous generation of alerts were not worse, they were.

But I highly doubt that many people think it is THE cornerstone feature. For some, like me, it's Safari. For others, it's FaceTime, others the camera, etc.

Looks like there can be multiple things that are important to a phone's operation.

Really? I always found Safari on iOS frustrating to use. Chrome/Firefox/Opera on Android all seem like better mobile browsers to me.

I think Safari still doesn't auto-highlight the text in the search box (my most used browser function besides actually scrolling a page), so annoying to start typing a new search time and realize it's just adding on to the last search time until I hit the x. I guess Safari now at least syncs tabs and bookmarks with the desktop version, but still it's a stretch to say it even competes as a top mobile browser IMO.

I think notifications are only annoying on older iOS versions. In Android they've always been unobtrusive, and with Android 3.0+ (and especially in 4.1) they've got a lot of added useful functionality.

But to get back to the point I would say the defining feature on iOS is proper group texting. So, yeah, that's a lot of quibbling words to basically agree with your point.

Mobile Safari cannot reflow Text on zoom. So it is useless for me.

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