If you would have told me a few years ago that Google would be the company behind some of the best mobile software in the world – across all mobile platforms — I would have laughed in your face. Google has been the search king for more than a decade and there’s no question that its advertising products are gold, but early versions of Android were… not great.
Fast forward to 2015, however, and Google is the brains behind some of the most beautiful and useful apps on the planet.
DON’T MISS: Stop whining about iOS 8.2
Android has grown to become a fantastic mobile platform, and I almost always have an Android phone in my pocket. Since 2007 and for the foreseeable future, however, my main smartphone is an iPhone.
I won’t go too far into it since I have discussed this matter a dozen times on the site already, but the user experience is far more fluid on iOS than it is on Android, and the third-party apps are better made, better designed and more consistent.
Interestingly, many of those fantastic third-party iOS apps are made by Google.
I would gladly lose any of the Apple-made apps on my iPhone in favor of alternatives from Google. In many cases, in fact, I already have. And I dream of the day when Google finally finishes the job and completely takes over my iPhone 6, iPhone 6s or iPhone 7 — whenever it finally happens.
I never use Safari anymore, opting instead for Chrome and, even more frequently, the Google app.
The Google app brings plenty of Google Now functionality to the iPhone as well, and I’m not sure I could last very long without Google Now at this point.
For mapping and navigation, I use Google Maps or Waze. While Apple’s own mapping app has gotten much better since its disastrous launch, it still can’t approach Google Maps.
I use the Mailbox app for email instead of Apple’s Mail app, though I can’t wait to switch to Inbox once Google adds Google Apps support more widely. Mailbox is fantastic on the iPhone, but the Mac app is a crashtastic mess.
Often times, I use Google Play Music rather than iTunes Radio or Beats to stream songs, and I use Google Drive and the related productivity apps over Apple’s own productivity suite.
And now, as of Tuesday, I can finally add the fantastic new Google Calendar iPhone app to my list. It makes Apple’s calendar app look sad and dated by comparison.
The number of superior Google apps on my iPhone is growing constantly, and I hope to soon dump even my iPhone’s default Phone app in favor of Google Voice, if Google ever updates the app, or Hangouts if Google ends up dumping Voice into that service.
Google has become frighteningly efficient at working its way into Apple’s iOS ecosystem. It may soon get to the point where an iPhone sale is just as valuable to Google as the sale of an Android handset. How evil!
Personally, I can’t wait. Google’s mobile software is terrific and now, I can enjoy it alongside the rest of the best mobile apps in the world on my iPhone.
