Apple made several announcements at this year’s WWDC conference. The most prominent was iOS 16. The iPhone operating system has a variety of new features, including image segmentation to use as lock screen wallpapers and the ability to remove subjects from photos using machine learning.
Some iOS 16 features may be familiar to Android users. Here are some features Apple borrowed from Android and Android OEMs to create its mobile platform.
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1. Live Captions
The most notable iOS 16 feature is Live Captions. Apple announces real-time transcriptions of audio and video conversations. This functionality is identical to Google’s Live Caption functionality, which was introduced in 2019, and uses machine learning on-device to translate any audio on the device.
Apple also announced that iOS 16 will support Live Captions for Facetime calls. Google’s solution supports both phone calls and video calls. We’re happy to see that both platforms offer this useful accessibility feature.
2. Lock screen widgets
Apple’s iOS 16 feature of choice was the addition of lock screen widgets. This allows you to view information such as the weather, events, and alarm from your locked display. Multiple lock screens can be tied to different Focus profiles. Although it sounds great, this feature was not available on Android before.
With the release of Android 4.2 in 2012, lock screen widgets were introduced to Android. You could add a calendar and a clock to your lock screen. This feature was almost eliminated by Android 5.0. Samsung’s One UI, however, still offers a predetermined set of widgets as shown above.
3. Shared photo library
Google Photos offers shared photo functionality. You can share albums with your loved ones and let them add their photos to the collection. Google Photos also allows you to add photos by face to an album so that you can add all of your grandmother’s snaps into one album. Based on the person in the photo, it suggests contacts to share.
Apple also adopted this concept from Google with iOS 16 but with some tweaks. iCloud’s new shared photo library functionality allows you to share your photo or video library with up five people. It also allows users to add their content to the library, following Google Photos. It is also possible to choose what you want to add to your library based on a start date and the people featured in the snaps. This is pretty cool.
4. Translate camera
Apple embraces machine learning in many ways. iOS 16 is another example of how tech can be used. Apple’s devices now have access to the Translate camera functionality in the first-party Translate App. This allows you to point your camera at text and get translations.
This feature has been available on Android phones for many years through the Google Translate app. You can point your phone’s camera at text to see a translation overlayed in the live viewfinder. Apple’s approach is slightly more limited. It takes a picture and overlays a translation on the text.
5. Resizable app windows
This is not an iOS 16 feature, but an iPad OS 16 function. The iPad’s ability to run resizable apps windows is similar to what many Samsung tablets offer for years.
Samsung’s tablets have always offered resizable and overlapping app windows, especially when used with the Dex mode, which can be done either directly on the tablet or via an external display. This feature was not available in the Dex Labs settings until a while after it was released. However, some apps cannot be resized.
6. Undo/schedule sending of emails
Apple also announced that it will be possible to cancel the sending and scheduling of emails through its Mail app. This is especially useful if you find out you sent the wrong email or made a mistake.
These features were first introduced in Gmail some time back. Undo sending was first announced back in 2009 as an experimental feature. These functions are available on Gmail Android, iOS, and PCs.
These are not the only iOS 16 features that we have seen on Google-powered devices. Multi-stop navigation and haptic feedback on the keyboard have been available for some time on Android and other Google apps. Are there other iOS 16 features that were available on Android and Google platforms before? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments.