Digest of cross-platform 'theft' cases.
The history of the development and formation of the two most popular operating systems today is closely interconnected. The launch of the first iPhone, which marks its 10th anniversary this year, confused the cards of the team working on Android and in many ways became the catalyst for the evolution of the OS from Google, the fruits of which we can contemplate. And let these two operating systems initially have different concepts, let the developers for a long time have been looking for a 'own way' for their products, let fans from different 'camps' spend their time in verbal, textual and sometimes physical confrontations for many years, but over time, let's say , borrowing ideas has ceased to be bad manners and has become a completely ordinary event. Let's try to recall the most significant recent episodes of this 'exchange' (we will limit ourselves to iOS 10-11 and Android M-N).
Android → iOS
- Lock screen notification card interface. Plus, in iOS you can now delete all notifications. Well, how not to mention the panel with widgets, accessible by swiping to the left on the locked screen. In Android it was abandoned as unnecessary and unpopular. Who knows, maybe the front-end designers Apple can give her a second chance.
- Let's not go too far from the lock screen: users iOS only recently got access to the 'hide content' option for notifications. A useful opportunity, it is surprising that Cupertino has thought of this just now.
- The control center, which migrated to iOS 7 from Android, has evolved and acquired a full-screen mode, which painfully resembles the solution found in Samsung smartphones, namely, stretching down from the top edge with a swipe with two fingers display shutter with the necessary switches. To my credit Apple, their solution, for my taste, looks at least more fresh and neat.
- Raise to Wake. An analogue of Ambient Display, borrowed in the new version iOS and introduced in Android in the Lollipop version. Before that, you had to press buttons to look at the notification. Revolutionary.
But it is not exactly. - Offload Apps (literally, 'unloading applications') – deleting the data of a particular application without having to get rid of the entire program. Hmm, the cache in Android has been dealing with this for a long time, and in the settings there is an option to delete data and stop a particular application. Well, it's never too late to take care of the free space in the user's devices.
- Removing stock applications.
- Keyboard mode allowing one-handed typing, adding machine learning to keyboard software for better 'learning' software.
- Collaboration mode in Notes, so similar to the similar functionality in Google Keep.
- Screen recording on video.
iOS → Android
- Native support for fingerprint scanner. Yes, engineers Apple set the bar for their Touch ID, whose idea their colleagues on Android did not hesitate to borrow. After that, we saw Android Pay using fingerprint payment authentication, but until the Marshmallow release, this functionality was not available for owners of Android devices.
- Full control over app permissions. The new feature made it possible to more accurately determine the resolution for each program.
- Intuitive text editing. Fortunately, the time when such an opportunity was not available in Android seems to be something distant and almost unreal. How did we cope with this daily task then?
- Doze. The 'sleep' mode, which actually limits the number of background processes, was introduced as part of Marshmallow, while users iOS had such a mode available since the seventh version of the OS.
- 'Multi-window' appeared in Android N, its prototype was the corresponding mode in iPad. It is worth noting that in Android the idea was refined and functionally surpassed the analogue from iOS 9: in Android the mode is available not only on tablets and allows you to arrange applications horizontally, and vertically, with the possibility of additional screen division. The developers are great in this, which can not be said about the 'picture-in-picture' mode, also borrowed from iOS 9: the innovation is implemented only for Android TV and is not present in tablets.
- Quickly reply to a message directly from the notification without having to open the app in full screen.
- 'Night mode'. But here it is controversial: initially the option was included in the beta version of Marshmallow, then it was decided to exclude it from the final version and was returned only after similar functionality appeared in iOS 9.3.
Engineers and designers of both operating systems have long been not shy about including solutions and findings of competitors in their products, but in the process of preparing the material, I got the impression that over the past few years, more fundamental changes have been made in Android and have subsequently migrated in iOS. This does not mean that there is a process of maximum copying and bringing the OS to a single form, but the trend is obvious.
Nevertheless, there is still something that both systems can borrow from each other: for example, I would gladly change the boring launcher on my iPad Mini to a third-party one. Anyway, it would be great to see in iOS an option for setting default applications, as in Android (launcher, SMS client, etc.). The first step (third-party keyboards) has already been taken, which Jobs is not kidding. In turn, Android would be better if it somehow implemented the Continuity mode at the system level. So far, third-party developers have tried to do something similar, for example, Pushbullet, with its clipboard between all connected devices, regardless of platform.
It seems to me that the process of cross-platform 'theft' cannot be stopped, if only it is for the benefit of users. The question is, will companies be able to compete with each other, provided there are practically similar software features? Of course, this is a fantasy scenario that is unacceptable for both development companies, but gradually the differences are smoothed out. Do you think the process will benefit these OSs or force them to look for other ways to differentiate their products?