Perplexity Assistant is the Best Example of Apple Needing to Expand Extensibility on iOS
Sunday, January 26, 2025
Last week Perplexity launched their latest product: Perplexity Assistant for Android. I’ve been a big fan of Perplexity for a long time. Despite its often contentious relationship with publishers, they make a spectacularly good tool. I love them, if only for the fact that they’re the first search engine to give Google a run for its money in years. But this isn’t about the search engine game or the AI search race. Perplexity Assistant is a replacement for Google Assistant and Gemini on Android phones. It can be summoned from anywhere, understand screen context, answer complex questions, and do normal personal assistant things like set reminders. I’ve been using it on my Pixel 9 and have been extremely impressed. It’s created an even starker contrast to the experience I have on my iPhone. Just the other day, John Gruber wrote about how the latest incarnation of Siri can often be worse than the previous non-AI infused version. Despite Siri’s new AI features, I still mostly use it for reminders, alarms, and calendar events. I almost never use it for complex questions or even for the ChatGPT integration. I prefer to just use the native app. Perplexity Assistant on Android is so good, both functionally and visually. It’s often better than Gemini and it is leaps and bounds ahead of Siri. It is the first example in my opinion, of how much we could benefit from Apple opening up more parts of iOS. I continue to believe that Apple should not wholesale open up the operating system to work like Android. But in this new day and age of artificial intelligence, it would be a great reward to users to allow us to use other assistants. And I know what you’re thinking, wouldn’t this just highlight how bad Siri can be? Sure, but I think it would also further light a fire under Apple’s butt to fix Siri. Real competition to drive improvements. They can’t coast.