Google Now on Tap - What and Why?
Google couldn't build every app - hence Google Now on Tap.
If you have the latest version of Android(which makes you a minority anyway) - you would have received what is probably the best feature in an Android phone(other than "freedom" of course) called Now on Tap - what does it do? On any screen that you might be on - you long-press your home button and it gives you information about anything important on that screen - just like how you'd search for it. Saves you the effort of copy-paste or typing it into the search bar. How does it know what is important? Well, that's where massive investment in Artificial Intelligence(AI) comes into play. Anybody with real intelligence will tell you how important AI is for Google. The more you use it - the more it learns about you.
In an ideal world Google would have loved to build every app on your phone. The Intent? To know as much as possible about you and hence show you the most relevant ads. The more you use them, the more data points and hence more granular information.
With Now on Tap - Google achieves just that. Google is not too worried about building the app, what it looks for is usage patterns to gain trends and insights about you, your preferences, likes, what would your next purchase be, which restaurant might you next visit, etc.
If app revenue really mattered, you wouldn't have email, maps, photos, hangouts, even a whole operating system at no cost. Revenues don't come from selling apps, revenue comes from ads based on information it has about it. Do you think Facebook paid $19 billion for Whatsapp so it could make profits out of the $1 per year renewal? Would take them ages to recover costs (By the way - that fee is history now).
Now on tap gives Google just what it needs - important snippets of information about a user that otherwise Google may not have known. Reading all of this might really put many of us on guard - what do these guys do with all this data about me? Nothing to worry about, nobody cares about your data - here's why.
Hence - "Google couldn't build every app - hence Google Now on Tap."
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