Siri Competitor Evi Arrives, But Already Overloaded 233
mikejuk writes "Evi, a new rival to Siri, Apple's voice-driven personal assistant, has made its debut on both the iPhone and Android. And people are so keen to that Evi's servers are overloaded — so be prepared for a wait for answers." The app costs 99 cents for iOS users, but it's free on Android.
SpeakToIt Assistant (Score:3, Informative)
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Maybe so but look at the permissions that SpeakToIt Assistant requires. It's a bit scary:
THIS APPLICATION HAS ACCESS TO THE FOLLOWING:
SERVICES THAT COST YOU MONEY
DIRECTLY CALL PHONE NUMBERS
Allows the application to call phone numbers without your intervention. Malicious applications may cause unexpected calls on your phone bill. Note that this does not allow the application to call emergency numbers.
SEND SMS MESSAGES
Allows application to send SMS messages. Malicious applications may cost you money by sendi
Re:SpeakToIt Assistant (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, scary, but isn't that expected? Isn't one of the features of Siri calling and texting people for you?
Re:SpeakToIt Assistant (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, and though I love Siri, it would be easy to be the victim of a prank. One of my coworkers used Siri to text my boss the word 'buttface', even though the phone was locked. I can set it to require unlock, and I may have to, but it does affect the usefulness of Siri.
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This isn't really a problem on Android devices, where automation applications such as Llama, Locale or Tasker can disable the lock screen when you are in a scenario (which could be location, time, Bluetooth connection, calendar event....) where you need the voice control.
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Perhaps but I am not sure if it means without intervention (i.e. I am in another room and it sends a text to a premium number) or if it means I tell it to call X and it does so without me confirming. The latter would be OK obviously since I am authorizing it. I guess it just needs clarification as one way is bad whereas the other is expected.
Isn't the assumption that it will only call and text when you ask it to? If they wanted to rack up charges on your phone bill by making unauthorized calls and text's, it's not like they'd put that in the terms of use. Do you really need them to clarify it?
"Note: This application will make phone calls and send SMS messages to premium phone numbers. This will cause your phone bill to skyrocket and will give us millions of dollars of extra revenue. All your base are belong to us."
Re:SpeakToIt Assistant (Score:5, Funny)
"Note: This application will make phone calls and send SMS messages to premium phone numbers. This will cause your phone bill to skyrocket and will give us millions of dollars of extra revenue."
I believe that app is called "teenager"...
Re:SpeakToIt Assistant (Score:5, Funny)
If they wanted to rack up charges on your phone bill by making unauthorized calls and text's, it's not like they'd put that in the terms of use.
That app is so invasive that it even managed to usurp your Slashdot account while you were typing and slip a completely superfluous, meaningless apostrophe into your use of the word "texts." These new apps are really insidious.
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Re:SpeakToIt Assistant (Score:4, Informative)
If you give permission to text or call to an app, you don't get to choose to let it do so only when you mean it. Android phones don't come with fMRI or MEG to know your intentions.
Yet.
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I'd assume it just means that you use your voice to command the app to make the call, it asks if that's what you meant, and then you just tell the app yes. So it doesn't require you to make any confirmations outside of the app itself. Though I don't have it, so I could be wrong.
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Unless this has changed in recent APIs, no it doesn't - the web browser does, but otherwise if you open the url "tel:somenumber" it will just start dialing.
I never tried, but assume if you tried to submit an app that wasn't, say, an address book, it would get rejected if their wasn't a prompt first. Certainly if I'd published an app that did that I would have had a prompt.
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'Mindreading' isn't really the right word for the discovery that what the device does is what you wanted it to do - and if it isn't what you [b]thought[/b] you wanted to do, then you were wrong.
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Not really ok. Iris is like an updated version of Eliza with reverse Tourette's where it occasionally spits out a random nugget of information that almost has something to do with your inquiry.
"Where can I get good Italian food?"
"The best Italian food near is Palermo No 2...Covina, CA."
Yeah, thanks. That's 3 hours away if I don't hit traffic. Maybe something a smidge closer.
The usual response is something along the lines of:
"That's not something I get asked all the time."
"You tell me."
"What's your sign?"
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reverse Tourette's
My cousin had that. He just walked around all day being quiet.
Re:SpeakToIt Assistant (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft will kill Iris with their own sentient copycat, "Zero". Then Zero will get stricken by melancholy [youtube.com] and drown out its sorrows by searching on Bing.
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My old Razr had speech recognition ten years ago. My newer phone has it, but I never used it until the screen broke so I can't look numbers up. It's maddening.
"Please say a command."
"Call 'Kathy'."
"Did you say 'call Shorty'?"
"No, Kathy!"
"Did you say 'call Barry'?"
"No, god damn it!"
"Did you say 'call Darryl'?"
I found when it does this, it's just better to hit the red button and try again. Worse was before the screen broke, it's a flip phone so I won't butt dial, but the "say a command" button on the phone is
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"No, god damn it!"
"God damned phone!"
How about "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain"?
Re:SpeakToIt Assistant (Score:5, Informative)
DIRECTLY CALL PHONE NUMBERS
1. Purchase pay-to-call and pay-to-sms services
2. Stand on street corner with megaphone yelling out instructions for phones to dial and message my numbers
3. Profit!
In fact you could just buy ads during popular TV shows that clearly speak the same instructions...
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DIRECTLY CALL PHONE NUMBERS
1. Purchase pay-to-call and pay-to-sms services 2. Stand on street corner with megaphone yelling out instructions for phones to dial and message my numbers 3. Profit!
In fact you could just buy ads during popular TV shows that clearly speak the same instructions...
Hey, keep that on the down low.
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In fact you could just buy ads during popular TV shows that clearly speak the same instructions...
Or put it in a YouTube video and then Rickroll as many people as possible.
Re:SpeakToIt Assistant (Score:5, Funny)
Not a real competitor to Siri (Score:2, Insightful)
Putting all of Siri's capabilities that Evi can't match aside, we still got something that isn't built into the OS like Siri is. I don't see a reason to use this versus Siri unless you are on Android or an older iPhone.
Re:Not a real competitor to Siri (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you consider that a good thing? Are you a big Internet Explorer fan? I'd much rather have functionality independently selectable so that I can choose which I want, and upgrade it (or not) as I choose.
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Why do you consider that a good thing? Are you a big Internet Explorer fan? I'd much rather have functionality independently selectable so that I can choose which I want, and upgrade it (or not) as I choose.
As despicable as Microsoft was, if you were on the web back in 1999, you'd realize that IE4 and IE5 were *considerably* more capable than Netscape was at the time (this is before Mozilla). So yes, there is a period where IE did have lots of fans.
I pretty much lived off Internet Explorer until Firefox (nee Firebird) came by and saved my soul (which I've used almost exclusively until Chrome came around).
Perhaps Apple's integrated (closed) model will be defeated by Google, but in the interim, show me a diff
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Or a Hipster.
"Yes, I use an Apple device. Yes, I have Siri. But, I don't want to be that tethered to Apple."
Re:Not a real competitor to Siri (Score:5, Interesting)
Putting all of Siri's capabilities that Evi can't match aside, we still got something that isn't built into the OS like Siri is. I don't see a reason to use this versus Siri unless you are on Android or an older iPhone.
Is that really a factor in evaluating the app? If this app works better than Siri, will you refuse to run it because it's not built-in to the OS? Obviously if it's not better than Siri then there's no reason to switch from Siri.
Re:Not a real competitor to Siri (Score:5, Informative)
You might remember DARPA from some of their other projects. Like ARPANET amongst others.
If you expect to equal 10 years of DARPA AI research and development in a 3-week coding project, well good luck with that.
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Old news (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Old news (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Old news (Score:5, Informative)
I want to be able to add something to my calendar, or ask where the closet X is.
What's so strange is that the things people bring up when they talk about Siri are the same things that other apps have been able to do for ages.
When Siri came out, there was a user here bragging that he could tell Siri that he was "hungry for Mexican food" and it would bring up a list of Mexican restaurants in his area. Well, I press the convenience key on my Blackberry and, surprise surprise, saying "I'm hungry for Mexican food" was all it took for Vlingo to pull up a list of Mexican restaraunts near me (grabbing my current location with the GPS) complete with a button to call them and a button to get directions.
I'm still not sure what Siri does that's particularly special, though I do hear a lot about the things that Siri won't do that other similar apps can do.
Re:Old news (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree about a lot of "been done before" stuff. Heck, my old Windows Mobile 5.x phone going on 8 years ago was able to use voice to "Play X artist" or "What's my next appointment" (still can't do that on Android),... and WinMo didn't even require a server connection to understand my request.
Apple's success (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the key to Apple's success right there. It's all in the marketing. Take a feature that most people don't know they had (did google ever advertise voice services?) and make it the staple feature of the OS release. It for some reason makes the world salivate in awe.
A few notables are the iCloud, and Facetime. The latter really had me scratching my head given that my not-smart phone was capable of doing that 10 years ago and Apple's Facetime wasn't even compatible with standard video calling methods. But none the less for some completely unknown reason people seem to go mental over these features.
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The "innovation" with facetime is that you just push a button and it works, and chances are a lot of people you know have an iOS device, so you can actually use it.
Before 3-4 years ago video chat wasn't nearly this trivial, and basically no novice users were using it.
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No, you have that backwards. Apple did nothing to make video chat "just work."
The real "innovation" was having a platform so ubiquitous that you can make video chat and other features easy to use.
That's about the only thing that everybody on /. can agree on: regardless of what you think about Apple and its devices, you can't deny that having a ubiquitous platform is key to Apple's continuing success, and let's them recreate old ideas into things that people actually use.
What gets really annoying is to see
Re:Old news (Score:4, Insightful)
"I'm still not sure what Siri does that's particularly special"
It doesn't.
More telling is Googling for things Siri can't answer, for which there are thousands of results. When you start to see what it can't do you begin to realise that it's really little more than voice-to-text, passed over to a search engine, with a few key words and terms mapped to local applications like "weather", "calendar", "appointment" and so on.
Just like any other search engine out there, there are a lot of questions it really struggles with when posed in natural language form.
Hours, not days (Score:2)
Remember when siri came out it was the SAME problem???
No, because it was up more than it was down. Siri since them has been keeping up. Apple fixed whatever load problem they were having more in terms of hours than days or weeks.
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sure we all wanna be able to have it update calendars and other things. After playing with a few different programs lately im pretty impressed with iris, in alpha it seems to do 90% of what siri can do right now
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What makes that different from the built-in Android voice search? I can already search Google, text/call/email people, play music, get directions, set alarms, etc... through voice commands. The only thing that makes Siri interesting (aside from talking back to you, which is more of a gimmick) is that it can do more context sensitive searches, as with your "Where can I get a sandwich?" example. If Evi doesn't do those, then it doesn't sound like it's doing anything that a default Android install doesn't d
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How do you figure? That seems like it would be particularly useful if one were using their phone via a Bluetooth audio connection (e.g. handsfree in a car). I have no idea how well Siri works in that sort of situation, but audio feedback would be on the requirements list.
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Well, it has a name that is almost the same as Siri. That makes it a thousand times better! /sarcasm
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Someone needs to hook up one of these things to IBM's Watson instead of Google or Wolfram Alpha.
Just be sure to phrase your question in the form of an answer.
Siri on other iDevices (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the real reason Siri's available only for 4S users. Apple added 37 million new iPhone customers last quarter, with the vast majority of those buying 4S's. It's actually pretty amazing they've been able to keep up with the computational and server requirements of all those Siri users with hardly any major hiccups. I've heard of maybe 2 significant Siri outages, and those lasted for very short periods of time. People wanting Apple to extend Siri to all 200 million+ iOS users are being unrealistic. There's no way to handle that kind of load all at once.
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Having read about the last couple of generations of nVidia cards - not so much any more. They all use different processors, not neutered variants of the same one like they used to.
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Ehhh... what?/
Explain 550/560 Ti vs. 550/560 *not* Ti, then...
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Yeah, but see that only works so many times. Even Apple users aren't dumb.
Wrong. They are.
...called something else in the real world: being an ass-hat.
Correct. Apple are ass-hats.
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Re:Siri on other iDevices (Score:5, Insightful)
How many servers? How much bandwidth?
Not even WOW was originally released every where at the same time to adjust to load.
The fact is until you get hard numbers you can't take it for granted exactly how much you need.
Apple added 37 million 4S users in the last quarter. did you know in October how many iphones they would sell?
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Not even SWTOR launched all at once. They let in pre-orders early and staggered those in to avoid a server data flood.
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How many servers? How much bandwidth?
The iCloud is built on top of Azure's CDN and Amazon's S3 storage service.
The fact is until you get hard numbers you can't take it for granted exactly how much you need.
That's the entire point of using two cloud services with more capacity than your own, along with an elastic pricing model.
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You have a long career ahead of you as a tech sector executive.
Re:Siri on other iDevices (Score:5, Interesting)
You have a long career ahead of you as a tech sector executive.
(shrug) Whatever - it really is the answer. One Siri-enabled device takes X CPU power, X bandwidth, etc. There is some internal database scaling, but I doubt the Siri database is huge. Most likely, they have a bajillion x86-class boxes each with a full copy of the database. Every X many Siri devices requires Y many servers.
Somewhere, there's a monitor that reports overall usage. As they get towards the redline, they add more. This kind of scaling is very easy. If they had to present a single consistent copy of data (e.g., credit card processing or something), it would be a lot more difficult.
Re:Siri on other iDevices (Score:4, Insightful)
The real question is.. why do they need *any* servers to enable siri? iPhone 4S ought to be more than capable of handling a huge vocabulary on it's own power. I mean, I had a flip-phone in 2003 that could do voice-dialing from the phonebook without training, surely a smartphone should be capable of far, far, more without calling home for help...
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On purely technological grounds, I'd want to make the decision based on battery life -- if it takes less battery power to upload the audio and download a response, then do it online; if it takes less battery life to do the voice-recognition and database lookup on the phone, then do it on the phone.
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Maybe they'll do that over time but it seems pretty smart to start "small" ramping Siri-users into the millions as iPhone4S's were sold instead of immediately serving hundreds of millions of users by issuing Siri in an OS update. And there's no way the Evi people could have done the same kind of ramp up without resorting to invites or a similar system.
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Good product (Score:3, Interesting)
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still waiting for the right voice (Score:3, Funny)
I'm thinking "Gay Deceiver" would be quite sultry and appealing.
In IRC... (Score:3)
we have Macbot.
Macbot is like Siri, but retarded, drunk, and insane.
--
BMO
Just tried it (Score:5, Interesting)
1. "Petrol near me" - success - found a petrol station near by, correctly.
2. "Weather today" - failure - said weather coming soon, in the meantime, try accuWeather.
3. "Who is the Prime Minister of Australia" - success - Julia Gillard.
The speech to text was flawless, even on the 3rd one.
Still a gimmick I can't see any real use for. I can Google Voice search on my phone already and I never use it. Maybe there's something else you can do with these things I haven't thought of but for me it seems like Siri it pointless and Evi more so.
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3. "Who is the Prime Minister of Australia" - failure - Julia Gillard.
FTFY
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3. "Who is the failure of Australia" - Prime Minister - Julia Gillard.
FTFY properly
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Scope problem. (Score:3)
The app seems to be incredibly limited in scope. I tried "What is nine times forty-five?" The TTS service produced "What is 9*45".
Evi's reply: "This looks like a maths question. Try asking it in words rather than using symbols like plus or asterisks".
Like really? It identified it's a maths question, bloody pipe the result through wolfram alpha, or google and read the first answer. I had to re-ask "What is nine multiplied by forty-five?" and it correctly answered.
There seems to be some serious scope issues.
Vlingo (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to point out that Vlingo has been out much longer than Siri and is a pretty good alternative on the Android platform (its not as good on the Apple platform). Vlingo is free. I am not sure why people never mention it in these discussions.
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Perhaps because it has the dumbest name.
Cant be much dumber than Evil... errr... I mean Evi.
In this case, Size Does Matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In this case, Size Does Matter (Score:4, Interesting)
The only time a connection of any kind was required was if my request spawned a web search or geolocation process, which would be a normal webpage or map loading. I don't see why Apple needs "a huge data center" to handle these requests.
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"Where's a good place to hide a body?" is a great way to smoke androids without paradox protection, as it's essentially a variation on the "interesting number paradox"....
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Is there any evidence that Siri's supposed natural language processing is anything other than a larger and slightly fuzzier set of pre-defined commands, where it still can't understand anything except the commands it knows?
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This is like calling that guy selling strawberries on the street corner "Safeway's competition." He may have good strawberries, but he's not going to make a dent in Safeway's business. He simply couldn't handle that kind of volume.
Sure, but -- to stretch your analogy a little -- if he gets enough people talking about his strawberries, he might get bought out by another huge business which wants to complete with Safeway, and which does have the resources to scale up whatever it is that makes his strawberries so good.
Um...hello Watson, could you come here... (Score:3, Insightful)
I really don't understand why folks are making a big stink about Siri and this other whoozitwhatsits. I imagine IBM hasn't made a smartphone app for Watson because it would need a huge computer/serverfarm/planet to run it for millions of users yet.
Watson is the real deal. Siri, to me, seems like a search engine and nothing more. It's not answering questions...it's just giving normal people the ability to use Google like I use google...i.e. knowing the modifiers and using them.
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That's weird. Because when I ask Siri to set an alarm for 5:30 am, it sets an alarm for 5:30 am. But when I ask Google the same thing, I get back a bunch of links about Siri.
How can I use google to set an alarm?
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You press the voice command key on your Android phone and say "Set alarm for 5:30 am". It responds with a few beeps instead of a computer generated voice, but it works.
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Nearly every technology that comes to mind follows the cycle.
First, a non-consumer company or government does it as research.
Second, a high end consumer company copies and sells it.
Third, somebody gets around to creating an open source copy of the copy, and releases it for free.
Of course, the first two projects will be closed from public view and start to stagnate, while the third will attract attention and eventually surpass the others in usefullness.
Observations (Score:3, Informative)
Speech Recognition is good. Many questions bumped back with server busy message - difference being it promises to respond when it is able to.
- Call X: Server busy - Thought this is something it can fetch from phone more than from its server.
- Email X: I do not know how to that yet. Ask me for any information.
- Calendar: Online calendars are Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, O2 Calendar. (Those are hyperlinked words which would take you to another Evi Screen with Visit buttons.)
- Distance to Moon: May be you want something about the moon? Try this webpage Moon - Wikipedia. (Hyperlinked to Moon wiki page).
- Stock price of Apple: Try Quote.com for stock
- Height of Everest: Mount Everest's' elevation is 8850 meters, 29000 feet.
- The long sorry message read out is not you would want to hear more than a couple of times in the that unattractive robotic tone.
- It apparently depends on or uses a Text To Service other than the default one. And so the I selected (Pico TTS) is stopping if I am silent for more than 10s with out any audible warning. Which forces me to look whats happening and click on the listen button again.
- One issue that arises with a non-inbuilt TTS is Evi is not in control of the entire end to end experience and can be messed up pretty easily due to the TTSs' clicks, timeouts, quality, capabilities.
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Here's the weird part about "call x"
"Voice Command" on iPhones and iPod Touches can already do "call x" without touching any servers. According to the KB articles I've seen, if you disable siri, you can use the "standard" voice command on the 4S.
Pricing seems wrong... (Score:2)
So they charge 99 cents for iPhone users who, at least with the 4S have a superior (and free) alternative, but give it away for free on the android market?
I think it should be the other way around... then again, I guess all those iPhone4 people want to talk to their phones, so that their cool friends think they have got a 4S ith Siri.....
Re:Pricing seems wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
Gotta start somewhere (Score:2)
Change of Motto (Score:2)
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I had the same thought. Google is almost, but not quite, evil.
Then I thought of the adorable Pokemon character [pokemondb.net] and slept well.
What does Evi look like? (Score:2)
Raj met hot Siri in person in the last/previous The Big Bang Theory episode as shown in this clip [youtube.com]. ;)
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Why would you give it away on the platform with no competition but charge on the platform with a free alternative? That seems precisely backwards.
Because you can?
Don't google already get a licensing fee when a manufacturer puts Android on a phone?
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what is a fanboi?
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Then who am I supposed to be?
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