During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, many new features were announced for iOS 9, and while these features may be new to users of Apple products, many of these features have long been available to users of Google and Microsoft products, and some already exist as current iOS apps. Apple used to be known for taking technology that already existed but implemented poorly or rarely, making it easy to use and mainstream. Some of these include touch screens, voice control fingerprint scanning and high resolution screens. Even in these areas that Apple once dominated, they are falling behind, with most new smartphones including touchscreen at resolutions that rival, or even surpass Apple’s, not to mention that Windows 10 is reported to not only support fingerprint scanning, but facial and iris recognition as well.
Apple Music, which Apple is calling the “Next chapter in music”, is a streaming service similar to Spotify, Rdio, and many others. Google and Microsoft have also have similar services, both offering subscription based access to their entire music libraries, as well as the option to stream music you have uploaded to their included cloud services for free.
The new split-screen multitasking is the same exact feature windows 8 introduced in 2012 and Samsung Android phones in 2013. This feature will also only be available to the most recent iPad Air, despite the fact that jailbroken iPads have been able to use this feature since at least iOS 7.
The rest of the list of “new” features being added continue in a similar manner. The new News app is the same as Flipboard and other news apps. Some, like Feedly, also let you add specific sites to your news stream through RSS. Proactive intelligence is the same as Google Now. Low power mode has been built into Android and even Windows Phone for years now.
Apple has always had a reputation for “borrowing” features from its competitors, it’s something all of the major technology companies do, but this time it seems different. Touchscreen have been around for decades, but no one really cared about them until the first iPhone. Voice recognition was something you might occasionally use for dictating text until Siri allowed you to do anything from search the internet, to send texts without even touching your phone. This new set of features however, isn’t a huge, revolutionary step that Apple is known for, but a rush to include many innovative features of their competitors before they get left in the dust. No one is going to switch to from Android to iOS just because it can do the same thing, it will need to do those same things better.