iOS 26 is official with Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language, and it is the butt of jokes from the Android community. Aside from Liquid Glass looking like what Microsoft did with Windows Vista 20 years ago, iOS 26 got “new” features that have been existent in most (if not all) Android phones. Here’s our top 5 “new” iOS 26 features that have been existent with Android for quite some time.
Visual Intellience. At the top of our list is Apple’s Visual Intelligence, which is a poor version of Google’s handy Circle to Search. It’s a bad implementation as iOS requires you to take a screenshot first before being able to search for information. Google’s implementation is way better, and we don’t know what Apple is thinking with Visual Intelligence. If the implementation of Apple Intelligence is already bad, Visual Intelligence is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with Apple’s approach to AI.
Apple Games. This one confused us, as Google’s Play Store already has a Games tab and other Android brands have their own spin at the dedicated game app to provide not just a neat library for your games, but also features to enhance your gaming experience. Apple Games simply looks like what you’d see with Google Play Games, and we’re scratching our heads with this “new” feature. Apple’s M and A series chips consistently outperform flagship chips from MediaTek and Qualcomm, yet it took them a while to introduce a dedicated games app for iOS gamers.
Call Screening. Android has this handy feature for quite some time, and it’s laughable that iOS users had to wait THIS long to have an actual app to help screen spam and suspicious callers. It’s also ironic that until iOS 26, iOS users needed 3rd party apps like Whoscall and Viber to filter out suspicious callers to save them time and have additional protection from being scammed. At least with iOS 26, iPhone 11 (and newer) users can finally have peace of mind against unknown callers.
Live translation. This is another proof that Apple is behind all of the AI features Android already has in the past year. With all of the hype for Apple Intelligence for the past year, we just find it laughable that Samsung beat Apple in introducing live translations to their native apps. And that’s why we insist that Galaxy AI is one of the best phone AI services out there–miles ahead of what Apple Intelligence can even offer.
Tiling apps on the iPad. While this is more part of iPadOS 26, we found it amusing that the iPad only got this tiling feature now despite all of the muscle it packs inside, outperforming most Android tablets. Considering higher end iPad models are very capable productivity powerhouse machines, it’s funny that it is only with iPadOS 26 that they get features that make them close to macOS and become the proper laptop alternative they should have been for years.
That rounds up our top “new” iOS 26 features that have been available in Android for quite some time.
