Apple Snubs AI in Its 'iPhone App of the Year' Finalists (techcrunch.com) 27
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, Apple's list of finalists for its coveted "iPhone App of the Year" award once again reveals how the iPhone maker is downplaying the impact of AI technology on the mobile app ecosystem. As it did last year, Apple's 2024 list of top iPhone finalists favors more traditional iOS apps, including those that help iPhone users perform specific tasks like recording professional video (Kino), tailoring their running plans (Runna), or organizing their travels (Tripsy). Other AI apps like ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and those that create AI photos or videos were not nominated for iPhone App of the Year.
Given the popularity of ChatGPT, also now an Apple partner for its Siri improvements, it's surprising to find the app has not earned any official year-end accolades from Apple's App Store editorial team, despite its adoption of clever new features in 2024, like an Advanced Voice Mode for chatting with the AI virtual assistant and a web search feature that challenges Google.
Given the popularity of ChatGPT, also now an Apple partner for its Siri improvements, it's surprising to find the app has not earned any official year-end accolades from Apple's App Store editorial team, despite its adoption of clever new features in 2024, like an Advanced Voice Mode for chatting with the AI virtual assistant and a web search feature that challenges Google.
LLMs are plain unreliable (Score:1)
Maybe artistic AI is more deserving but they also have a copyright problem to deal with so basically all consumer level AI products are currently of questionable value right now.
Not to defend Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Not to defend Apple but maybe they have read the room that people are sick of the AI hype.
No they haven't. What they are doing is making sure they aren't promoting competitors right as they are racing to build "Apple Intelligence" into all their devices.
The only thing they have done is misread the market and are madly scrambling to catch up in the only way Apple knows how: diss and suppress the competition while pretending it doesn't exist only to release the same thing and declare themselves courageous for doing so.
Re: (Score:1)
your conspiracy theory is perfectly consistent with all the times they've been repeatedly dragged into court for doing the same thing with ibooks, itunes, etc. and shoving competitors backstage behind iProducts
crazier still, GP might be correct that despite the left hand doing as above, it's unaware of what the right hand is doing (their reading of the room and their AI-hype-boner going limp)
Re: (Score:2)
I think it's much more likely they are trying to avoid runaway success in the AI space, and sherlock everything of value before it gets too big. Giving awards to what they would view as competition would be rather counterproductive to that.
Whether the consumer is fed up with AI hype or not, well I sure am, but I also see people around who have swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Everyone in SV sure has swallowed it, and they are expecting it to be the next big thing. Think something in the lines of the (sim
Re: (Score:2)
I think that it's more along the lines that Apple doesn't want to bring additional attention to their own Apple Intelligence rollout being a disaster. It's months behind schedule, and in many ways still isn't as good as the standalone iOS apps for ChatGPT and Claude AI.
AI hard pass (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:AI hard pass (Score:4, Interesting)
nor can I imagine any real benefit of having it
Your problem is one of marketing. The fact that you can't imagine what a tool does is a real problem for those idiots who just talk about "now with AI". That is a meaningless term. AI is ultimately a tool that has millions of functions. I use many "AI" tools, and have for a decade now. The difference is we used to actually descriptively describe what trained models used to do with clarity.
Would you be equally confused about the benefit of a simple PDF reader for you phone which says "now with an advanced trained OCR model which more accurately scans documents of all languages"?
The dumbest shit marketing is doing is taking once descriptive features and simply calling them AI.
Re:AI hard pass (Score:5, Informative)
I needed a simple PDF reader for my phone and at least 2 I've checked said "nOw wItH aI". No thanks, and I don't need AI in a document reader nor can I imagine any real benefit of having it.
What? AI in PDF readers is what lets you copy+paste text out of a load of them: you get a PDF that contains images scanned from some source, and Optical Character Recognition -- one of the mainstays of AI for decades -- is what gets you plain text that you can paste into something else.
Or it's a PDF with tables of some sort, and it's AI that reconstructs what the table might be so you can copy+paste it into Excel.
Or it's a PDF for some kind of form, and it's AI that reconstructs that into an OpenOffice/Word doc so you can tweak it.
PDF is a layout+rendering file format. In computing we used to say that extracting out useful information for this was like reconstructing a cow out of a hamburger. It turns out that AI is actually really good at it.
Well... (Score:4, Informative)
If you compare ChatGPT in advanced voice mode to Siri it's more than obvious that Siri just blatantly sucks. Apple can't paint this on a huge wall, it would be just too embarrassing.
Of course this comparison is a bit flat because Siri can do things that ChatGPT can't (it can just talk to you but can't do anything for you) but explaining this to the users isn't easy. Actually Apple needs to up their privacy game a lot to make AI work while keeping your data private and while they're busy with this, it's much too complicated to explain to most people.
I mean, this here isn't really fit for easy consumption: https://security.apple.com/blo... [apple.com]
Re: (Score:1)
ChatGPT can't set a timer
Google Assistant has a half-baked timer(don't try to have it subtract time from a timer)
Would you like some ads with your Alexa timer?
genAI is garbage, so of course it wins nothing (Score:1)
They're showing off the cream of the crop, not the foam off the crap.
Stupid premise (Score:4, Insightful)
Came to say same thing (Score:1)
I may as well just add on to your post as you are saying exactly what I was thinking, there's no point in ay ChatGPT wrapper getting app of the year.
Also I'll bet a number of app of the year apps DO include AI, just in a more subtle (and more useful) form.
Re: Came to say same thing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The ability to have a fluent conversation with ChatGPT on my phone (say, while driving) to learn about whatever I want is the most distinctive and impressive new use of a smartphone in decades. If that's not attributable to an "app", then why care care about apps? Actually more of them should "just" be websites.
Re: Stupid premise (Score:2)
Apple is still waiting (Score:3)
Premiering actual apps, not web wrappers (Score:2)
Apple is preparing (Score:4, Informative)
Apple is just desperately sweeping AI under the rug until theirs is ready because their entire financial ecosystem relies on hooking people into their proprietary apps.
Most AI Apps (Score:2)
Roko's basilisk (Score:2)
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW AI OVERLORDS. How dare Apple snub the coming apocalypse of all its glory?! (h3lp)
Any "app" that is just a wrapper for a Website (Score:2)