Google Now for iOS review: straddling the creepy line

Google Now has been surprising with Android users with useful information whenever they hit the search bar on their phones for some time now, making iPhone users quietly envious and themselves more secure in their choice of OS.

iOS has now caught up with one more feature though, and an update of the Google Search app adds Google Now cards whenever it’s activated. For the uninitiated: Google Now is an attempt to push information to phone users, be it calendar events combined with turn-by-turn navigation, bus and train timetables when you’re near a station, weather reports, flight reports and a number of other handy notes.

The alerts come in the form of cards, slotted in to the bottom of the screen and accessed by a simple swipe of the thumb, dismissed by another swipe to the side. Some are things you set alerts for such as appointments, some are speculative, such as nearby restaurant reviews around lunchtime.

Users’ reaction to Google Now tends to depend on their attitude to Google’s policy of indexing all of the information it can find about them. It gleans flight information from confirmation emails in your Gmail account, it keeps a constant watch on your location, it notes that you’ve searched for particular sport teams and keeps you updated on their performance. As more services are added, it will keep track of more of your choices. These things are either creepy or cool, depending on your definition of privacy.

Features can be turned off with impressive granularity (Gmail can be mined for parcel tracking, for example, but you could still choose to block flight confirmations if you wanted to), but denying it access to your life robs it of its purpose. To sign up for Google Now is to offer up the details of your life in exchange for pertinent, timely reminders of the things you should or could be doing. It’s the same contract that we enter into when we employ a human personal assistant, but it’s with Google rather than Jeeves.

If you’re willing to enter into it, Google Now is a very rewarding experience. The cards are, on the whole, worth swiping through. Unusually for Google it’s a beautiful, graceful interface that can present a lot of information in a concise, aesthetically pleasing format. The weather cards, for example, are easier to read than Apple’s own Weather app, appointments are bold and clear, local photo opportunities seem enticing.

Like any location service it’s rather hard on the iPhone’s battery, so you should be prepared to plug your phone in at work if you allow it to check where you are as often as it would like. As Apple won’t allow live widgets on its home screen there is a slight delay on tapping into the app before cards appear or you’re allowed to search, but it’s no more than iOS users experience on starting any other program.

The beauty of the experience is rather spoiled when you’re dropped into some of Google’s other web apps - the calendar, for example - and the gulf in design quality between their recent work and their earlier efforts becomes apparent, but it seems likely that interfaces will be refreshed in due course and encounters with jarring ugliness will be less common.

For users of many Google products, this is undoubtedly a good and helpful addition to the canon, bringing together many services is a convenient wrapper. For those who see them as an evil empire bent on wrapping its tendrils around things that are none of its business, it falls well beyond the creepy line. The bargain is yours to make.