Friday, 31 January 2014
From more inter-app communication to app installs from
anywhere, here are the Android features we’d like welded to our iPads
and iPhones
Steve Jobs once said, “good artists copy, great artists
steal” (attributed to Picasso), and followed up by admitting: “We’ve
always been shameless about stealing great ideas”.
It’s perhaps one of the most misunderstood quotes in the technology industry. It doesn’t mean to find something good and then clone it, but to look around, immerse yourself in the best of what’s out there, and then figure out a way to do it better.
Of late, Apple has certainly been accused of doing quite a bit of stealing, notably with iOS; the ‘flat’ design has been likened to Windows Phone, and there’s clear Android inspiration in various components, including Control Center.
Of course, you’d be pretty deluded to consider this one-way traffic, given the industry’s predilection for using Apple as a kind of giant outsourced research and development company.
If anything, we wish Apple would ‘steal’ more, especially from Android, which has some really great ideas that we’d love to see in the next version of iOS:
It’s perhaps one of the most misunderstood quotes in the technology industry. It doesn’t mean to find something good and then clone it, but to look around, immerse yourself in the best of what’s out there, and then figure out a way to do it better.
Of late, Apple has certainly been accused of doing quite a bit of stealing, notably with iOS; the ‘flat’ design has been likened to Windows Phone, and there’s clear Android inspiration in various components, including Control Center.
Of course, you’d be pretty deluded to consider this one-way traffic, given the industry’s predilection for using Apple as a kind of giant outsourced research and development company.
If anything, we wish Apple would ‘steal’ more, especially from Android, which has some really great ideas that we’d love to see in the next version of iOS:
1. App installs from the web
Apple grudgingly provided an online App Store of sorts with iTunes Preview, but it merely offers app information and screen grabs. By contrast, Google Play enables you to install apps to your devices from a web browser. Perhaps Apple considers its stores within iTunes and iOS apps safer or simpler, but it’s maddening when someone points you at a great iPad app or game and you cannot buy it from your iPhone.
2. App installs from anywhere
We’re not stupid — we know vanilla iOS will never allow apps to be installed outside of the App Store (excepting the odd corporate product or ad-hoc test build), but it’s something we’ve grown to love about Android. This isn’t about piracy either, but enabling devs to create apps gatekeepers won’t allow through, or indies to provide direct sales and offers via their own websites or the likes of Humble Bundle.
3. Typing suggestions
When
you’re typing in iOS, there’s the usual autocorrect shenanigans that
help you to avoid making any miss steaks. The thing is, it’s a bit
opaque, and not obvious enough how to override, hence all those
wonderful typos from your iPhone-owning friends. Android offers a
similar autocorrect feature, but also attempts to anticipate what you’re
typing, be it the current word or the next one in your sentence. The
system is extremely intuitive and can hugely speed up fashioning emails
on your smartphone. iOS feels comparatively prehistoric.4. Alternative app defaults
5. A straightforward app list
Want a list of everything that’s installed on your iPhone? Then you’d best get a pen and paper, and laboriously work your way through every folder and home screen, noting app names down. On Android, you instead prod a single icon to see everything that’s installed on your device — handy for most people and an absolute godsend for power users who regularly install lots of new apps and games.6. Superior sharing
It’s fair to say no-one’s entirely mastered inter-app communications on mobile yet, with seamless round-tripping proving particularly elusive. However, Apple remains rooted in shoving every app into its own sandbox, stymying the possibility of apps easily working together — at least in a totally consistent manner and without huge effort from developers. By comparison, Android enables you to share to a much more diverse range of apps or services throughout the system, based on your needs and demands, rather than those of the people back at the mothership.7. Send screen grabs to their own album
It’s only a little thing, but when living in journo land, we love how Android saves screen grabs to a separate album, unlike iOS, which shoves every type of image into a single stream, leaving you to play ‘spot the actual photo’ among hundreds of pictures of apps.