How to Get the Perfect Google Experience on IPhone

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Apple makes a great operating system and a solid phone, but some of their apps leave a lot to be desired – especially the disaster that is iCloud. I’ve replaced all my usual tools with Google apps, and even on iOS it’s amazingly flawless.

Not all Google users are Android users. You might just be the type of person who loves Google services, but Apple’s hardware, customer service, and overall usability have won you over. You might be tired of paying for iCloud when it doesn’t sync and just want a simple experience that combines the best of both worlds.

Wherever you go, Google-on-iOS is a pretty decent setup. I decided to see how easy it is to replace most of Apple’s default apps with Google alternatives. Spoiler alert: It’s very easy to do, and with proper setup, you’ll almost never have to hit Apple’s default app again.

Apps you need

First things first, let’s download all the apps you need to live the Google life on iOS. Google has a ton of iOS apps , but we’re just stuck with the ones that make sense as an alternative to Apple’s default apps for this article.

There are more of them, of course, but the above should replace most of Apple’s default apps and help you delve deeper into Google’s system.

How to fix the “problem with the default application”

Apple still does not allow you to select a “default app” for a particular service. For example, if you click on a link in an app, Safari will open by default, not your preferred browser. However, Google has implemented a pretty ingenious trick to get around this. All Google apps (and many third-party apps) have an “open in” option, which gives you the ability to open links in the corresponding Google app, such as opening a URL from Gmail in Chrome. You’ll have to tweak this setting for every app that supports it, but essentially it lets you make Google apps “default apps” even if the OS doesn’t recognize them as such.

If you look at the settings (usually by clicking the hamburger icon> Settings) in almost any Google app, you’ll find the option to allow opening files, links, and anything else that makes sense in other Google apps. For example, in Hangouts, you can configure it to open links in Chrome, URLs in Google Maps, YouTube videos, and more. The most important of these is Chrome, which allows you to open links in almost all Google apps, so you never will have to leave the Google ecosystem. Almost every Google app has this setting to some degree, so turn it on wherever you want. Once you do this, you never have to log out of Google apps.

Many third party apps support this feature as well. For example, Tweetbot has a setting to choose between Safari or Chrome as the browser of choice. Many others have this same option, effectively making Safari almost never open by default. You still can’t change things like the default email or calendar, but if you fully own Google’s app ecosystem, there is no need to. Other than that, you can also use an app like Workflows to create custom shared sheets so you can always open your Google app of choice from any other app.

Where Google Beats Apple

Google apps haven’t always been great on iOS, but they pretty much ruin Apple’s standard offerings these days. The best ones include Google Maps, the Drive suite of apps and, surprisingly, Photos.

Google Maps is so good that even if you don’t give a damn about the rest of Google’s apps, you probably still use them on a daily basis. It offers better driving directions than Apple Maps, as well as cycling and public transit routes – two things Apple hasn’t considered for a long time (unless you live in one of the 10 cities that have public transit routes ). Likewise, Drive (along with Documents / Sheets / Slides) is much easier to use for storage than iCloud Drive, and you can access any of your files without jumping through any weird iCloud Drive hoops. As you’d expect, Drive will automatically open any files stored there in the corresponding Google app, skipping the standard Apple app entirely.

Google Photos surprised me the most. I hate Apple’s various photo backup solutions, relying instead on Dropbox and Flickr as my two photo backup solutions. Google Photos is a fantastic replacement for the clunky, expensive, and difficult to use iCloud Photos. You get unlimited storage (not full resolution, but that’s okay for most of us), tons of editing options, a powerful search engine, and an extremely simple sharing system. Once you turn on auto upload (Settings> Backup & Sync), it will automatically back up all of your photos from your camera roll when you take them, just like iCloud.

Another surprise is Play Newstand, which works just like Apple News, but slightly better. It works the same way: you add sources, read news as they appear, and customize the app for the type of news you want. Unlike Apple News, the news topic (health, technology, etc.) is featured prominently on the front page, so it’s easy to switch between topics. And yes, as you would expect, Play Newstand makes it easy to open all those links in Chrome.

Chrome is for iOS, and if you’re using Chrome on the desktop, you’ll probably want to use the iOS version to keep all your views in sync. Likewise, apps like Calendar and Keep look much better than their iOS counterparts and perform well when loaded. They lack Siri integration (which includes reminders for the location of the reminders), but otherwise they do everything that Apple apps can do, but better.

Where Google Fails

The biggest problem I ran into in my experiment is with Hangouts and Google Voice. To put it simply, they are not suitable for iOS, and while they may be serviceable, if everyone you know uses an Android phone, this is an almost impossible situation. Hangouts may sometimes fail to send notifications. Google Voice just as often fails to handle notifications and has the added benefit of being horribly outdated in design. No matter how much you love Google, Hangouts and Google Voice are on the verge of being unusable. Which isn’t all that different from the Android experience as Google Voice seems almost dead in many ways and so.

Google also tends to update its iOS offerings much later than Android apps. If you don’t need to be on the cutting edge, it doesn’t really matter, but it does mean they won’t immediately integrate with the latest iOS features. Many Google apps do not have Action Center support, and none of them support 3D Touch yet. Even Hangouts lacks the basic “reply to notification” functionality found in almost all existing messaging apps.

There are also a few places where Google fails that don’t bother me but might annoy others. Using Google Now instead of Siri is as cumbersome as you’d expect. Personally, I use voice control so rarely that it doesn’t change much for me. However, if you want to replace Siri with Google Now, you’re out of luck. Google apps are reliable, but they can’t penetrate the Apple ecosystem deep enough to replace core functionality.

Google apps still don’t outperform their Android counterparts. On Android, you can add Exchange accounts to Gmail, but on iOS this isn’t possible. So, the Gmail app is only useful if you have an @ gmail.com address. Inbox works the same way. Likewise, on Android, Hangouts handles all your instant messaging and SMS needs, while the iOS version can only handle a portion of instant messaging. This means that no matter what, you will be using multiple messaging apps to communicate with different people.

I’ve always been a little skeptical about Google’s suggestions for iOS. For a long time, they were poorly ported resource consumers that didn’t work as well as Apple’s default apps. These are now all pretty simple guidelines as some of the best alternatives to Apple’s apps. If you’re deeply rooted in the Google ecosystem but aren’t a fan of Android, Google and iOS are pretty happily living together right now. Sure, you’ll miss out on some Android-specific features like Google Now integration, but overall it’s a surprisingly good experience.

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