The Year I Basically Stopped Using Apple's iOS Apps

+Liz Gannes writes in All Things Digital about replacing Apple’s built-in iOS apps with those from Google. She shares the same view that there are better alternatives to most of Apple’s apps. Surprisingly, as many others (myself included) are coming to find as well, these apps are often being produced by Google.

For the record, I wouldn’t consider myself a partisan of either Google or Apple — I’m praising Google’s mobile software here, but my primary phone is still an iPhone. I think iOS is a very nice operating system. But the Google utility apps increasingly fit my needs better, for some of the most important and basic things a smartphone does.
Why? Google Maps gets me lost less frequently and syncs with my search history. Chrome has tabs and syncs with my Web history. Gmail has actual functioning email search.

There are others that she didn’t mention, which don’t substitute for Apple’s built-in apps, but the list of good Google iOS apps goes on. Blogger has gotten much better. Google+ is starting to get really good. Google Drive is, in many ways, more functional than Dropbox (built-in editing for docs is awesome). It’s nice to see Google focusing on more than just the Android platform. For those of us who just want the best product, it’s a big win.