All Articles Tagged google mobile

Those rapscallions at Google sure do seem to be having fun with the iPhone. Not only did they pull a fast one on Apple by using private API’s to work their lift-the-phone-to-activate-voice-search magic, they snuck a little super-swipe activated easter egg in for the rest of us! Says the Google Mobile blog:

One evening in Zurich, after a late night cake run, we decided that our iPhone app, Google Mobile App with Voice Search, could do with a little bling. The result of this is a few extra options hidden below the preferences on the Settings tab. Trust us, they’re down there… it just might take some perseverance to get to the bottom of things. Just keep trying!

Spoiler alert! Tap the cog icon to go to the settings screen, then swipe up over and over again to make the Bells and Whistles menu appear. From there, you can pick a new theme color, choose Chicken or Monkey as a sound, turn on a Live Waveform, and choose to Open Links in App.

Pimping out your Google Mobile App? Tell us your new fav combination!

(Thanks to sting7k in the forums for the spot!)

UPDATE: iPhone dev extraordinaire Erica Sadun investigated over at Ars and found the following: Google is both linking to Private Frameworks and using unpublished APIs. While the latter is likened to jaywalking, the former is apparently a ban-worthy offense. Yikes. Check out her complete investigation for more. And now that it’s public, the question shifts to what if anything Apple will do about it? Cave to Google over a killer feature and betray the confidence of other developers, or yank Google’s app, alienating a huge (if guilty) partner and likely creating another furor among users?

Original post:

Is Google using private (i.e., not publicly available via the official iPhone SDK) APIs to create the silky-smooth “raise the phone and talk” activation for their new Advanced Voice Search feature in the update Google Mobile App? That’s the latest question Daring Fireball’s been looking into, and here’s what they’ve found so far:

If you use something like the command-line strings utility to examine the UIKit framework, you can see that there’s an undocumented (and therefore private to Apple) method named proximityStateChanged. And if one were to strip the FairPlay DRM from the current Google Mobile application binary — which, of course, you wouldn’t do, because you’re not supposed to strip FairPlay DRM, but I’m just saying if one were to do this — a class dump of the application binary would show that Google Mobile does in fact implement proximityStateChanged.

DF posits three possible explinations: 1) No one at Apple noticed the private API usage, 2) Apple noticed but turned a blind-eye, or 3) Apple approved the use of a private API. Citing sources, DF claims #3 to not be the case, and perhaps that’s why Google promoted the feature so heavily, and stirred up interest so high Apple would feel pressure to approve it (though we wonder if Steve Jobs’ Apple ever feels that type of pressure?)

By contrast, DF states #1 is not without precedence, while #2 would be grossly unfair to other developers, and either way, users may suffer if Apple makes changes to their private APIs (which is one of the reasons to keep them private after all).

So what do you think? Which scenario is most likely? And what would you rather, that developers (Google or not) use officially unsupported features if it means better apps but also apps that might just break when the next firmware drops?

Update: The App Store is now pushing out the update. Enjoy!

NOTE: If you don’t see the microphone icon immediately in the top right corner, tap the Settings button at the bottom right, and switch the slider to “Enabled”.

Original post:

Well, it’s definitely later than last Friday, but it doesn’t look like anyone, including Apple, delayed this long: Google’s Mobile App (iTunes link) now includes the much talked about Advanced Voice Search feature… sorta.

According to Jeremy, iTunes isn’t pushing the update yet, and you actually have to delete the app first if you’ve already installed it in order to get the latest, greatest, chattiest version on your iPhone. (Yup, you read correctly, this isn’t a new App, but an update to Google’s existing iPhone search App.)

Of course, I don’t have an iPhone right now, but if you do, try it out, ask it just how tall Everest really is, and let us know what kind of response you get!

And for you privacy advocates out there, is the coolness factor of this enough to give Skynet, er… The Matrix, um… Google access to your voice ID?

(Thanks to Trevor, Josh, Craig, Bob, for sending this in!)