A banner spotted at WWDC 2014 prior to Apple’s keynote – courtesy of The Verge
Today’s tech news has been dominated by the announcements made by Apple at WWDC 2014 happening now in San Francisco. As many expected, Apple is making their yearly iteration to their mobile OS platform, iOS, bringing it to iOS 8 sometime in Fall this year. And as usual, some of the improvements that Apple is making in iOS 8 bear some eerie resemblance to features already featured on Android; some commenters have already said that this seems more like Google I/O 2011 rather than WWDC 2014, but we’ll leave that argument there. The last few iterations Apple has made to iOS have been huge in bringing the platform back into contention with Android on a functionality level which some have suggested should worry Android and Google. However, I think it’s actually the opposite: I think that iOS 8 is good for Android, and here’s why.
Image courtesy of The Verge
The upgrades to iOS are extensive, and a full list of those can be found pretty much anywhere you look on the internet today. Widgets, predictive text, third-party keyboards, or automatic photo backup are all nice, but we’ve seen it all before, some of which Android has had for many years. The improvement that caught my eye, however, is the actionable notifications. This currently only has a very basic implementation on Android right now, suffice to issue basic button commands, but Apple’s implementation will allow you to complete entire actions, like reply to a message, all from the notification. While it remains to be seen how useful this actually is in reality, it’s made more interesting by the fact that this isn’t available on Android yet. And this is where this becomes useful to Android.
Image courtesy of The Verge
Depending on how these features are accepted by its users, Android may choose to do something similar in the next major iteration of Android. If you’re an Apple fan and you somehow feel incensed or smug about the suggestion that Android should copy Apple, just remember that Apple has been catching up to and copying Android for years; notification bars in iOS 7 and now widgets and third-party keyboards in iOS 8 should be evidence enough.
And really, the argument shouldn’t be who’s copying who, or even who is better than the other. Sure, fans on either side of the fence are going to fight to the death about who copied who and who’s done what functionality better. But at the end of the day, the people who benefit most from these two gargantuan mobile platforms doing battle is us, the consumers. While it’s arguable which platform is making better progress lately, it’s kind of a false dichotomy as the competition between the two drives them to improve things for the common good.
So the next time someone tells you that iOS has something that Android doesn’t have, remember that the competition is a good thing and that you can be sure that Android and Google will have something in store to one-up Apple in the future, and inevitably, vice versa somewhere along the track.
What do you think about Apple announcing iOS 8? Do you think the competition between Apple and Google is a good thing for mobile platforms? Let us know your thoughts below.
Sources: The Verge, Android Police
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