Is the final form of iOS fair … Android?

If we compared Android to iOS once, we compared them a hundred times. At this point, we may have compared them a hundred times. It is not always the same comparison – we have examined everything, niche tools with remained personalization features – and the same operating system is not always in mind. However, at this stage, we spent enough time going back and forth to notice some trends, and none was more surprising than the slow and regular android of iOS. I would go so far as to say that IOS starts to feel like one of my favorite Android skins, and here is why.

I am old enough to remember when each iPhone felt almost exactly the same thing – it is only a year or two, after all. Jokes aside, you only have to return to iOS 16 or 17 to lose many features of customization of Android level that we know and love, and if you come back as far as iOS 14, you lose access to the widgets on your iPhone. It is a surprisingly short chronology of only four years, because Apple’s software was almost as locked as possible.

And don’t get me wrong – as a fan of Android, I am happy that Apple has made a lot of progress in the past two years. This is exactly the type of competition that my favorite operating system needs to continue to move forward. I mean, the fact that Apple has caught up a few things that I have been doing since I had an incredible 4G of HTC Droid in my pocket a decade ago should have Google Triping in its boots. Okay, this time, I really finished breaking on Apple for its slow and stable approach.

After all, relatively new customization options have proven to be one of the simplest ways for me to convince my friends to update their phones for once. I could not win them with RCS or Apple Intelligence (because it would have required a new phone), but the idea that they could suddenly organize applications around the face of their pets was everything it needed. In all honesty, it also worked on me – I do not fear my annual cash register in iOS almost as much now as I can stick to the reception screen with two factors with two widgets that I love so much. In addition, like so many Android devices and skins are starting to look more and more, it is good to see someone use the old slogan “Be together, not the same”.

Of course, there are still a lot of personalization features that Android does a lot, much better than IOS, but it is pleasant to see Apple increase its game. I still prefer the experience of the application icon by color on Android on Android, which chooses a palette of colors according to your wallpaper rather than simply making each part of the interface a color and giving your icons dark backgrounds. It may be better than the free Apple approach, but it’s even less consistent than Android. On the right side, Apple has already changed the way its themes work at least a little, because the choice of a color no longer dyes my spotify widget and makes it more difficult to read.

I will also give Android the edge with regard to widgets, if only because it offers much better forms and more third-party applications to choose. I always love that Google has opened the photo widget with free shape forms in Android 12, and nothing mixture of circular widgets, in the shape of a pill and square would make what would be like a much more fun grid system. The day Apple ventures outside its square widgets (or perhaps rectangular), it is when I start to think that it is caught by Android.

And yet, I have to give a small Apple credit for its locking screen widgets. Although Android has technically technically first, they were a short -term feature of Android 4 to Android 5 before disappearing – although they could officially return in the framework of Android 16. Apple, on the other hand, presented them when it revised its personalization system of the whole locking screen in iOS 16. Real Apple mode, although they are limited each time you change the small readable screen.

Although personalization is probably the most obvious example of iOS trendy to Android, it is far from the only thing that Apple has pinched from the outside of its enclosed garden. As an open source operating system with many more developers working on shiny skins such as a user interface, Hello UX and Oxygen OS, it is easier for a functionality to hit Android first and to be recovered by iOS later. This is often summed up when Apple will adopt a functionality, not so.

Do not look any further than the display always on to see how much the apple has eight balls can be. According to whom you are asking, there have been on Android since the days of the Moto X almost a decade or on Nokia phones even further. Apple? Yes, it did not come to a screen still on the iPhone 14 Pro launched in 2022, and even now there remains a pro-reserved feature. Some – including me – could even say that Apple’s AOD is a little too always, since I don’t always need to see my wallpaper when I just look at my eyes for a notification.

Even something as omnipresent Android as the application drawer finally made its way to iOS after several years of waiting. If I had to guess, I would say that you do not remember having used an Android phone without scanning drawer for its applications, simply because it was a key element of the operating system from Android 1.0, and it is difficult to come back further than that. IOS, on the other hand, has not added its library of applications – which organizes your applications by category rather than alphabetically – with iOS 14 in 2020.

With hindsight, I could even say that iOS 14 was the beginning of Apple’s Android-Iification, because it marked the addition of several other features previously reserved for our favorite open source platform. It was the same year that Apple added the possibility of defining certain default applications – although not all applications correspond to an Android 2.3 capacity. IOS 14 also marked the start of the image medium in the situation, which remains as close to a real shared screen mode as we have seen from Apple.

And then, there is a battery saving mode – something that every smartphone user never needs at one time or another. The battery life has traveled a long way in recent years in terms of efficiency, but for a long time, Apple simply relied on its upper level optimization to stay ahead of the battery life curve. Then, in 2015, he added the low power mode as a key characteristic of iOS 9, just a few years after Android brought him to the system scale with Sower Saver in 2011.

For me, there are two ways to look at iOS increasingly Android – you may be afraid that it will distance users from Android and in the safety of the enclosed garden of Apple, or you can see it as Apple admitting that it is not always fair. As a fan of pixels, I will look into the second option. After all, I congratulated Google when he continued Apphe concerning the quality and reliability of the equipment, so why not rent Apple to relax its strict control previously on its operating system?

In addition, it is not as if Apple really became Android. It is still by far the more locked and tighter operating system, with stricter requirements to submit an application to the App Store, limits what you can do in terms of lateral loading applications and optimizations of all the latest aspects of its software to tighten every last minute of battery life from small cells otherwise. I have an important problem with any of these things, because Apple’s ability to push years and years of software updates to its iPhones compensates for limits.

And perhaps, just perhaps, this is the type of pressure that Android has needs iOS from the start. Even if the functionality of software like FaceTime and Imessage remain reliable means to put pressure on people to go to iOS – at least in the United States – Android customization options have long been sufficient to give people the second thoughts. They were good enough and flexible enough for people to ignore that their friends considered them green bubbles simply because spending hours modifying their house screens or finding the right widget for any situation was more pleasant.

With iOS sporting a lot of the same wrinkles, it is time for Android to find another way of differentiating. Perhaps this means relying on its characteristics of AI, whether gemini, Galaxy Ai, or elsewhere. Or maybe it means leaning even more in foldable factors, especially now that the Huawei Mate XT is more than a simple concept and that the triple foldable of Samsung is tilted for a summer launch.

But if Android uses AI as a differentiating in the future, I hope it does it carefully – sometimes Apple’s slow and stable approach is bearing fruit.