As I type this 30,000ft up on business travel I am both floored and scared of Google’s Now service.
Imagine a personal assistant that reads your emails, lets you know when to leave for airport, shows your itinerary (on nice clean UI Cards), time back at home, only your favorite team’s sports scores and so on. Well welcome to Google Now
But at what point does Google’s default app, take that too far and become a Microsoft monopoly?
Here are my 2 problems with Google now as a developer, not an end user.
1) It comes on devices out of the box. Lets say I create Plane tracking tool as clean as Google’s. It isn’t competitive as one is already on the device and mine would need the user to go to the market, find it, ok the permissions then download and lastly sync to their data (email, calendar, etc)
2) Zero setup. So if someone can read all your emails, yes all of them – even the ones you delete right away, they can learn a lot about you. So lets look at Google’s unfair advantage here in two parts. They are getting the best data on you, but even worse its instant with no setup. Since your Gmail address is the manifest that starts the whole Android OS ball rolling – they have all your emails to parse data from without any setting up. Other apps have at least one extra setup of syncing to your data. Backend API call, asking end user for login/PWD credentials, single sign on with social site, etc. Either way more work for the end user because the device, OS and app market are all owned by one digital god monopoly.
I love Google Now as a user and am the biggest Android fan boy (literally just ordered my Glass today).
But as an enterprise app developer, just know that if your app does the same thing Google Now does – you better get very disruptive very quickly.
–Mobility Bad Boy, Daniel DiMassa
(dont agree? Tweet me your thoughts)
