As a screen reader user, Apple does have a first party screen reader, VoiceOver, and does indeed not let you run a third party one. In fact, it does not work well even on the more open MacOS. So essentially it's VoiceOver or nothing. Luckily, especially on iOS, VoiceOver mostly works well.

I'm glad it works decently on iOS, at least. my mom has little central vision, and she struggles on iOS just using high contrast plus scaling plus magnifier. I think she has just enough vision to not absolutely need VoiceOver but it still makes using her phone a frustrating and tiring experience.

Try https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/assistive-access-iphon... ?

I don't think they're "trusting Google" with anything. It's a Google model run by Apple, just like you download a model from Hugging Face to run when you want to.

> It's a Google model run by Apple

Run by Apple where? Do they really have enough hardware to run it in-house?

Reportedly it's running in Google Cloud, but Apple already uses Google Cloud for iCloud

Yes, and if they don't, they can lease datacentre capacity like anyone else can. SpaceX seems to have plenty for rent.

Apparently it's now a Google model run by Apple on GPUs rented from Google.

updated my post to reflect this, thanks.

You bet! Also I appreciate your edit, a lot of people don't understand how much benefit they can bring to this community by doing that!

> Apple doesn't think parties other than themselves should be trusted with those iOS permissions.

I think we have ample evidence that regardless of whether Apple in particular is to be trusted, tech companies by default are certainly not.

Opening up access to users’ private data requires not just any given app to be trustworthy, but all of them.

In this case I think it is true that 3rd parties can not be trusted with this capability, but Apple brought this on themselves by creating a ton of other capabilities like AirDrop, Airpods integrations, and apple watch capabilities which would have been safe for 3rd parties to use but keeping them locked down so you'd get a better experience with Apple accessories.

I don't think they trust Gemini as they run that on-device or on-site, on Apple's own servers.

See also https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Newer one:

https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/