In the early days of smartphones, iPhones and Android phones were like spiders and crabs: technically similar but wildly different. Nowadays, things have changed. Apple and Google have cribbed from each other so much over the years that iOS and Android are essentially two sides of the same coin. The launch of iOS 18 doesn’t change this development. In fact, it moves the two operating systems closer together than we’ve ever seen before.
During the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote this week, it seemed like every single time Apple announced something new for iPhones, our internal Slack channels lit up with comments like, “Android has had this for years,” or “My Galaxy S2 from 2011 could do this!” Now that the dust has settled from the launch, we actually took the time to go over every single thing Apple announced for iOS 18 and compared them to Android. We found that the overwhelming majority of “new” iOS 18 features either exist in full or in part on Android already.