With over $100BN in the bank right now
Perhaps the most famous instance of this is Apple Maps, which (jokes aside) was designed purely to stop Apple being beholden to
Goodbye Google Now
According to 9to5Mac (which has been on a roll), next week Apple will unveil ‘Proactive’ as a key new service built into iOS 9. Proactive will aggregate information across Siri, Contacts, Calendar, Passbook, and third-party apps to create contextually aware information.
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9to5Mac gives the following examples:
“If a user has a flight listed in her Calendar application and a boarding pass stored in Passbook, a bubble within the new Proactive screen will appear around flight time to provide quick access to the boarding pass. If a user has a calendar appointment coming up, a map view could appear with an estimated arrival time, directions, and a time to leave indicator based on traffic.”
If this sounds familiar, it should. This is Google Now.
Since its introduction in 2012, the contextual data of Google Now has quickly become a cornerstone of Android. Its importance can be seen due to the fact Android Lollipop introduced a dedicated Google Now page to the left of the homescreen and its own dedicated gesture (swipe up from off the bottom of the screen) to instantly access it from any location.
Taking it even further, Google Now is also the foundation for the entire Android Wear platform.
Perhaps more to the point, however, Google has also started pushing Google Now on iOS as a key part of its Google iOS app ecosystem. Google apps have also become increasingly interlinked (eg Chrome can be the default browser from results in the Google Search app or Google Maps) which has given Google Now more prominence.
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Consequently it should surprise no-one that Apple saw this coming. It bought third party Google Now clone Cue in 2013 and now it appears time to bake that functionality into iOS 9.
Of course there is another key aspect to launching Proactive on iOS, which is Apple’s greatest ambition of all: killing off Google web search…
Attacking Google Search
Needless to say, Proactive won’t deliver a killer blow all on its own, but its ability to provide iOS users with the sort of instantly usable contextual data that many users will often search for will inevitably reduce the number of times Google search will be needed.
In fact I suspect Proactive may just be the first step in Apple making its own dedicated search engine. So watch this space.
As for the debut of Proactive, we should be able to see just what a good job it does next week when Apple launches iOS 9 on June 8 at its annual Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC). It looks set to be one of the most exciting - and possibly controversial - Apple events in quite some time…
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