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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

A lot of iOS 10 features are Google inspired.

It's always easy to say that things are inspired from a different company or product, but always keep in mind that these features don't always come ready before a year or two of work. First person to announce it working and integrated gets the merit, but a lot of time, the same things are being worked on in parallel in different places :)

... but done with proper consideration for privacy.

Indeed!! No doubt. The engineering effort to do all the computations locally on device is monumental.

And no one knows what effect those 'monumental calculations' will have on the battery. Paranoia kept apart, doing them on the cloud makes more sense IMO.

Yeah, google Pampers and get diapers adverts on every f@!#!@# web site for the next several months.

No thanks...

Yeah. But would you like it if Apple does the same? Because I bet they'll end up doing it sooner or later.

Yes, the company that is expending significant effort on (differential) privacy, end to end encryption, ad blocking (and just wrapped up their small, privacy-sensitive ad network)... is going to start hosting Pampers ads.

No, you didn't get it. They won't host ads, but they'll have to upload things on their servers to compete with Google in terms of features (both Google Photos, and Google Now) (of course, they'll still do it with the holier-than-thou attitude). It's not that they've never taken complete U-turns anyway.

A lot of the features are pretty common-sense, too, and were parts of other OSes before Android.

Which is reasonable. For all that Apple gets a lot of stick for "failure to innovate", as a reasonably longstanding iPhone user, I'm quite pleased to see they're maintaining their habit of letting other manufacturers take risks, and letting time and user preference shake out what's worth actually implementing.

Does that matter for some reason?

It does, because when Google did it in past, and they did, Apple zealots ripped on them.

Saying something is valid because someone else did it, doesn't mean anything.

And right now the Google zealots are doing what?

I swear it's going to take forever for the last half dozen zealots on either side to just shut up.

If you're interested in features that might bring users to the platform it matters.

Can you be more specific. I haven't use Andoid in a couple of years.

Swipe left for widgets stuck out to me as an Android origin. They were first with widgets, and they introduced the swipe-left-from-homescreen UX.

You already swipe for widgets in iOS, it's just a different direction. I'm not sure that's exactly a copy.

But there is a ton of stuff in iOS 10 that's 'copied':

iMessages looks like WeChat/SnapChat/some other stuff had a baby

A lot of the photos features seem right out of Google Photos

3rd party apps have done the Mac unlock thing before

Android has had the ability to add plugins for some apps for quite a while, no? Or at least things like keyboards weren't sandboxed the same so they could do similar things to what iOS is now getting.

That's progress. Someone makes a cool feature, if it works out well other companies start integrating it. Google has 'stolen' from Apple, Apple has 'stolen' from Google. Everyone borrowed stuff from Palm.

In the end, we all get better phones.

I feel like all the photo features are them just putting features back in to Photos after dropping iPhoto. iPhoto did face matching, geo tracking, etc etc.

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