For nearly two decades, smartphones have all worked pretty much the same. This year, however, Apple and Google are finally taking separate paths.

Apple’s next phone operating system, iOS 26, includes a transparent aesthetic mimicking the look of glass and making apps and buttons blend in with content on the screen. Google is doing the opposite with its newly released operating system, Android 16, which emphasises brighter, punchier colours.

Those are just cosmetic changes that may represent the beginning of a greater split between iOS and Android. Google is also leaning heavily into integrating Gemini, its AI chatbot, to automate tasks like writing emails, editing photos and creating shopping lists. In contrast, Apple has released a small set of AI features and has postponed the debut of a revamped version of Siri because of technical challenges.

With Google diving into the deep end of AI, Android users will soon have phones that dig into their data to do lots of tasks for them — but whether they will appreciate this remains an open question. Apple phone users will get some nice-looking software with extra polish, which is more of the same.

iPhone’s apps fading

When Apple unveiled iOS 26 — giving its software a new numbering scheme based on the fiscal year when it becomes available — it announced a new software interface that it calls Liquid Glass. For instance, an app icon or a button could change its appearance to adapt to the lighting and colours of the photograph behind it. Apple is applying the glasslike aesthetic to its other devices to make the experience more consistent across its ecosystem.

In contrast, at Google’s software conference in May, the company unveiled the new design for Android 16, called Material 3 Expressive, which makes your phone screen look more like pop art. Google said its goal was to give users a more emotional connection with Android.

Killer app Gemini

Like its predecessor, Android 16 features Gemini, which users can interact with through voice or text to streamline tasks on their phones. Over the past few years, Google has expanded Gemini to control various pieces of software, including its note-taking app, Google Maps and YouTube. The chatbot is based on generative artificial intelligence. This lets Android users hold down the power button on their phone to summon Gemini and speak into the microphone to ask it to do things like generate a grocery list for guacamole and look up how long it takes to walk to a local movie theatre.

To put it another way, even though the flashiest new part of Android 16 is its colourful interface, the true force driving Android is shaping up to be Gemini.

Catch-up in AI

In iOS 26, Apple is expanding on its AI, Apple Intelligence, which debuted last year, with new features including automatic language translation and the ability to do a web search using data from a screenshot — tools that Android users have had for a while. The real-time translations can work inside some of Apple’s communications apps, including messages and FaceTime. On a FaceTime call with a relative speaking his or her native tongue, you can see a translated caption in a bubble on the screen, for example. (Google released a similar tool in 2021.)

The new iPhone software also uses AI to streamline tasks using information in a screenshot. For example, if you take a screenshot of a website with the date and time for a concert event, a suggestion to add the concert to your calendar will appear. Or if you take a screenshot of a handbag you are shopping for, you can tap a button to do a web search for similar-looking handbags.

As for Siri, Apple was supposed to release an overhauled version of its virtual assistant with AI to rival Google’s Gemini this spring, but those plans have been postponed indefinitely after internal testing found that it was inaccurate on nearly a third of its requests. For now, users can talk to the old-school Siri and redirect some requests to OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT.

What this means

Every major consumer tech company is redesigning its products to include new AI technology in the software we use every day, and all the tools still make mistakes.

In other words, there’s no rush to jump on this bandwagon. But at this rate, Android users will get to experience before iPhone owners what it’s like to have an AI phone — a device that uses your apps for you.

NYTNS