Although the mobile phone system is divided into two camps: Android and iOS, some functions of the two are “learning from each other”. After the release of iOS 16 Beta, foreign technology media 9to5Google took stock of the iOS 16 features that Google first made, and they are now available in Android phones.
Smarter Lock Screen
The new lock screen for iOS 16 has to say it looks great. Apple uses the depth effect to add depth and realism to photos, and the stacking with the clock makes it look great. Plus, users get Apple Watch-style information on health, stocks, battery, and weather. Users can change iOS fonts, clocks, wallpapers, and theme colors, which means you can create a lock screen that suits your needs.
But Google has done the same thing a long time ago. Google offers the “At a Glance” widget, which intelligently gives you similar information by anticipating what you need. It always shows the weather and date, but other information like upcoming events, tropical storm warnings, or boarding passes before boarding the plane is smart.
These are more powerful than what Apple offers — you just can’t manually select what you want all the time. The color of the clock can also be changed. It will be drawn from the Material You palette to match your wallpaper. Android 12 has 4 palette options, while Android 13 has up to 12 options.
A smaller feature Apple has added is Live Activities, which lets apps add a widget to the bottom of the lock screen with information like sports scores or Uber distances. This is basically like notifications on Android, which have been available to app developers for years on Android.
The new iOS 16 lock screen is great for iOS users, it looks good and works well, but it’s also something Android users have been experiencing for years. iOS users are lucky to get it right now, although it’s fair to say that Apple was heavily inspired by Google.
Automatic Sharing in Photos app
In the Photos app in iOS 16, you can automatically share photos of your family members in a shared album that everyone can access. It has options to allow all photos after a certain date or all photos that have them in them to be shared automatically.
There’s even a button in the camera app to automatically put photos into a shared album. This shared album now gives everyone equal access to add photos, edit photos, and delete photos. Everyone has equal access and everything is shared with everyone in the album.
Google Photos implemented this feature as early as 2 years ago – Partner Sharing, which allows users to automatically share photos containing that person. It has all the same features as Apple, just not limited to Apple products. Since Google Photos is web-based, you can upload a photo from your camera from any computer and have it shared too.
In addition to this, Google also has automatic photo albums for sharing. This will automatically add all the photos you’ve taken of a person or pet into an album that can be shared via a link or directly through the app. You can even enable collaboration so others can add their photos to it too. An entire group of friends can be set to automatically add each photo of each other to an album, and they can all access it.
The Google Photos feature came out early and is more powerful than Apple’s. Luckily for iOS users, you can download the Google Photos app on your iPhone now to use these features without having to wait for iOS 16.
Dictation with punctuation and smarter user interaction in iOS 16 Dictation
On iOS 16, the Dictation feature now allows you to edit and interact with what you dictate while dictating. You can tap and delete something, just tell the phone what you want to do, and it will do it. It also now automatically fills in punctuation.
These dictation features are an almost direct clone of the Google Assistant voice input capabilities of the Pixel 6/6 Pro. It has the same type of features for interacting with text as you type, voice control over what you’ve already typed, and proper punctuation.
According to 9to5Google editors using iOS 16 Dictation and Google Assistant voice input, Google still has a big lead on this feature. iOS 16 likes to put punctuation where it shouldn’t, and it’s still hard to get me right. But this is the first iOS 16 betas, so this feature is likely to be improved.
Multiple waypoints in Maps
Apple Maps now allows up to 15 waypoints to be added when planning a route. And this simple feature has existed in Google Maps for years. The only real difference between these features is that Apple Maps supports up to 15 stations, while Google Maps supports up to 10 stations.
Live Captions
Introduced at Google I/O 2019, Live Captions uses Google’s speech recognition technology to provide captions for content on phones that don’t already have closed captions. It will work in real-time and generate subtitles for any audio. In March, Google also announced this feature for phones.
iOS 16 brings this exact same feature. It enables real-time captioning of audio in any application, including calls and FaceTime. The UI even looks exactly the same. After a quick test, though, it seems to be quite a bit slower and less accurate than Google’s alternative.
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