All the Features Apple “borrowed” for IOS 26 and MacOS 26
Apple announced a bunch of new features today during WWDC , and some of them might look familiar — probably because you’ve seen them somewhere before. It’s a particularly bad day for the team behind Raycast , the widely popular Spotlight replacement that experienced Mac users know well. Some of that app’s best features — from AI integration to searching for items in the menu bar and launching custom actions inside apps — are now coming to Spotlight with macOS 26 this fall.
But Apple didn’t just borrow ideas from people creating useful apps for its own ecosystem. It also tasked its world-class engineering and design teams with copying features from competing products made by other tech giants. There’s call screening and hold assist, both of which have been available on Google’s Pixel phones for years. There’s live translation , already available on Samsung Galaxy phones. And there’s Circle Search, already available on Android. Apple’s unique vision and attention to detail allowed it to offer these features years after they were available elsewhere.
The Messages app will now replicate the backgrounds and polls features from Whatsapp and Telegram, allowing you to post photos behind your conversations in yet another place. Only Apple could deliver such a seamless experience (with the possible exception of other apps that offered them years ago, of course).
Steve Jobs himself once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” a quote he may have borrowed from Pablo Picasso (at least that sentiment dates back to the 1800s) . I believe that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and those traits are fine — plus, some amount of copying, tinkering, and reimagining is inevitable in this field.