Google infiltrates iOS - Googlifying your iPhone/iPad/iPod

We get a lot of requests from novice and veteran Google users alike who want to better integrate the Google experience into their iOS devices. Not all users of Google's massive ecosystem are Android users which makes the Google-on-iOS combination quite appealing if you enjoy Apple's hardware, customer service, and general usability.

If you use an iOS device, replacing Apple's default apps with Google alternatives is now a seamless experience, especially compared to the painful past. It's very easy to do, and if done properly, you'll probably never need to open the default Apple apps ever again. Begin by downloading the Google apps you'll need to begin the 'Google-fication' of your iOS device. Here's a list of some of the most popular ones.

These are just a handful of the many Google apps that can replace most, if not all, of Apple's default apps. Although Apple does not allow you to pick a default app for a specific service, Google has implemented a clever workaround for this: all of Google's apps (and even many third party apps) have an "open in" option that gives you the ability to open links in the intended Google app. For example, this will allow you to open links in Chrome, videos in YouTube, and addresses in Google Maps.

The Google Hangouts setting here shows a list of existing Google apps that links will direct to.

You'll find that nearly all of Google's apps have this setting to some extent, enabling you to stay fully within the Google world. Although this setting allows fluidity between Google apps, you still can't change things like your default email or calendar app, which is an understandable compromise if you fully buy into the plethora of Google's ecosystem.

Google's apps weren't always the best on iOS as they weren't as polished as Apple's were, but in our experience, this has changed and they now far outstrip Apple's default offerings. Google Maps and the Drive suite of apps (Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides) are both great examples of how far Google has come on the iOS platform. Google Maps offers better driving directions than Apple Maps, as well as cycling and transit directions, and navigation inside buildings where supported. Furthermore, Drive is much easier to use for storage than iCloud and offers you access to all of your files without configuring and searching through unnecessary settings. And as you'd expect, Drive automatically opens any files in the appropriate Google app, ignoring Apple's defaults entirely.

With all these Google Apps taking over iOS defaults, there are still a few small drawbacks. Google tends to update its iOS apps more slowly than its Android counterparts. Unless you really need to have the latest updates, this isn't really problematic, but it does mean they won't integrate with the latest iOS features immediately. For example, many Google apps don't have Notification Center support, and none of them have Force Touch support yet. If these aren't of concern to you, then your Google experience on iOS can be near-perfect. 

If you're faithful to iOS, but still want or need to indulge in Google's apps for personal or work reasons, hopefully you now see that Google and iOS can harmoniously coexist. Sometimes, you can have the best of both worlds! Check out this article from LifeHacker to learn about more Google apps and their integration to iOS.

Using YouTube Live and Hangouts On Air for Google Apps domain-restricted town hall meetings

If you've ever wanted to hold a private town hall meeting for your organization but haven't been able to get everyone involved because of geography, time zones, and other factors, you can now join the ranks of Conan O'Brien, Tyra Banks, The New York Times, Deepak Chopra, Cadbury, and the Miami Hurricanes by using Google+ Hangouts On Air and YouTube Live.

Best of all it's included with your Google Apps for Business subscription for no additional cost.

There are a couple of prerequisites to being able to broadcast live either to the Internet at large or just to your organization. First, you must have a YouTube account that is in good standing--meaning you've got no strikes on it. If you don't have a channel, create one and verify it via SMS. Once your YouTube account is configured, make sure that your Google+ profile or business page is connected to your YouTube channel. If you've just created a YouTube channel, this is done automatically for you. For existing channels, you can connect it to a Google+ profile or a Google+ page. If you previously used your Google+ page to broadcast to a Google+ profile administrator’s channel, you need to link the page to its own YouTube channel.

Now you're ready to broadcast using Google+ Hangouts On Air and YouTube Live! Navigate to your Video Manager:

Once you're in your Video Manager, click Live Events in the left-hand navigation menu:

You'll notice at first that there are no events scheduled. Click "Schedule a new event" or the "New live event" button on this page and you'll be taken to a page with lots of options. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory, such as title and time, however there are a few things that need to be configured to make sure you're not broadcasting to everyone in the world.

On the "Basic info" tab, click the "Public" drop-down box and select "Private". A new text entry box will be added to the page and you'll be able to share the broadcast with Google+ Circles, specific people, or your domain. For a town hall-style meeting, we recommend setting it to your Google Apps domain name circle, though you can add as many or as few people as you'd like. When you pick the Private option, anyone who wishes to view the broadcast must have a YouTube or Google+ account tied to the e-mail address or domain you've shared the broadcast with and must be signed into that account. Some of your Google Apps users might have to create their Google+ profile for the first time to access the YouTube stream.

Make sure "Type" is set to "Quick" so that you don't have to do any extra setup work, and leave the Advanced Settings screen alone, unless you'd like to add location data or a recording date.

Click the blue "Go live now" button, and you'll receive one final warning to let you know that you're about to go live.

If everything is okay, click the OK button, and now you're broadcasting! You can monitor the feeds on the fly through the Google+ Hangouts On Air window that pops up, or by clicking Live Control Room on the broadcast setup page:

From this control room, you can monitor people who are watching your video, add or remove abusive viewers, mute attendees, and more. It's like having your own TV station control room, right on your PC or Mac!

And, of course, anyone who tries to view your broadcast without the proper rights to see it will simply see a message pop up telling them that the video is private.

Once your event is done, YouTube will automatically save the video online with its sharing permissions intact, so that anyone who missed it live can watch it again whenever they want.