Implementing their own service as an OS-level feature is a peculiar decision when the EU's DMA would force Google to allow competitors to have the same capabilities.
Google already violates the DMA in some minor ways (like how Chromebook clipboard sync can alter the clipboard in the background, but tools like KDE Connect and Microsoft's My Phone cannot).
On the other hand, the default "assistant" app is one the user can pick freely in the settings so if whatever API WhatsApp exposes is also usable for Bixby/Bing/Claude/ChatGPT, I imagine things would fit the phone just fine.
As for Siri, I think Apple customers just don't really care about Apple gatekeeping apps like these. For some reason, they seem to like Siri (even though I can't get it to do basic things for me, it's somehow even worse than Gemini) and for some reason they trust Apple to access their personal information, so there's no need for controversy.
Google already violates the DMA in some minor ways (like how Chromebook clipboard sync can alter the clipboard in the background, but tools like KDE Connect and Microsoft's My Phone cannot).
On the other hand, the default "assistant" app is one the user can pick freely in the settings so if whatever API WhatsApp exposes is also usable for Bixby/Bing/Claude/ChatGPT, I imagine things would fit the phone just fine.
As for Siri, I think Apple customers just don't really care about Apple gatekeeping apps like these. For some reason, they seem to like Siri (even though I can't get it to do basic things for me, it's somehow even worse than Gemini) and for some reason they trust Apple to access their personal information, so there's no need for controversy.