What made it take so long? Seems like this should have been a relatively simple app to build.

Unlike ChatGPT's Android app, this doesn't actually seem to use Google Play Services for anything but OAuth, which is nice. Got it running on my deGoogled phone. It feels quite snappy, hopefully isn't just a webview.

If it feels snappy, why would it matter if it’s a webview? Native apps are a means to an end, they’re not virtuous in themselves.

Battery life can be one factor. Many older phones have enough RAM and reasonable CPU/GPU specs to reasonably run modern apps (at least without Google services in the background), but their degraded batteries are already showing their age. In my experience, web views can quickly eat up your battery, regardless of what's in them.

Claude seems promising, but after giving it a try two things stood out to me (I have previously used ChatGPT and Gemini):

1. I miss voice I/O more than I thought I would, in particular on mobile. Maybe because of how great of a job Whisper has been doing in the case of ChatGPT in particular.

2. Claude seemed hyper-conservative in ways that I would personally classify as annoying. Example: it refused to detail the plot of a ~60 year old book, claiming that doing so would infringe copyright (!). It relented only after I pointed out you can find the same information on Wikipedia.

Agreed. Claude is full of censorship and filtering. That made it too untrustworthy for me to continue evaluating. I found more success with Dolphin and Mythomax but I’m still searching for the best.

To point 1, I totally agree. ChatGPT's VUI is really good, especially when "learning" things with my kids. A huge step up from trying to "talk" to Alexa.

I haven't tried Claude on mobile, but my first instinct would've been to try the mobile web version. Do they have a good mobile web app? Has anyone compared the mobile web app with the native app? Based on the screenshots, it looks like this could've just been a mobile web app, especially since all of the features rely on remote computing to do anything.

The mobile web app is fine.

Claude also seems to be available in canada now, which it wasn't last i checked.

I'm seeing this recent onslaught of mobile and desktop apps for all the popular LLMs, but do they offer any functionality beyond a simple web wrapper? I have already had claude.ai pinned to my home screen for a while now.

People want apps. Even if it's just a web wrapper. Even if a PWA would serve the same function. They just want an app icon that behaves the same as their other app icons, is delivered by searching in their app store, and multitasks like its own app.

At least for Chat GPT, the key thing is I can leave the app and let it work in the background.

This is only really an issue on mobile devices though...

What does it do in the background though?

As in I can tell chat gpt to look up if the Lakers won last night, switch back to YouTube and come back to it.

On a mobile browser you just have to wait.

Why can't you switch out of the browser and come back?

Chat GPT will stop running in the background if it's in a mobile browser.

ChatGPT is running on the server. When you leave the browser, the response will keep getting generated, and will be there when you come back.

Claude is a LLM chat bot. You can ask it general knowledge questions, document summarization, creative tasks and for general conversation.