At Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the brand revealed huge updates across its entire ecosystem, including the iPhone’s operating system, iOS.
While iOS 26 is set to mark a new era for iPhones, those sporting some of the best Android phones will already be familiar with some of the headline features.
We’ve rounded up some of the upcoming iOS 26 features that you can currently find on an Android smartphone. We’ve also compiled a guide to iOS 26 which offers a more in-depth look at the update, including when we can expect to download the software.
Call Screening
Receiving spam and nuisance calls has become an annoying part of everyday life. While some prefer to simply ignore unknown numbers, this method isn’t always ideal, especially if you’re expecting an important call.
Fortunately for iPhone users, Call Screening will launch with the upcoming iOS 26 update. Building upon Apple’s Live Voicemail, which allows users to see a real-time transcription of a voicemail someone is leaving you, Call Screening promises to gather information from the caller and give users “the details they need to decide if they want to pick up or ignore the call”.
As useful as this is, many Androids have had a Call Screen feature for years. In fact, the tool launched with the Pixel 3 back in 2018 and uses AI to reduce the likelihood of picking up the phone to an unwanted caller.
Hold Assist
iOS 26 will see the introduction of Hold Assist, a promising call tool that will wait in a phone call queue for you and let you know when a live agent is available.
Again, Google introduced its Hold For Me feature in 2020, allowing you to avoid being stuck in a queue, waiting for someone to answer your call. Google did experience some issues with the tool and had to disable the feature altogether on the Pixel 6 due to bugs, so it’ll be interesting to see whether Apple can avoid a similar situation when it rolls out Hold Assist.
Visual Intelligence
Although Visual Intelligence isn’t a new tool, as it launched with the iOS 18.2 update in December 2024, Apple promises the feature will see a welcome update with iOS 26.
At the time of writing, Visual Intelligence launches when a user presses the Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 series or the Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. However, with iOS 26, the tool extends to the iPhone screen, allowing users to search for anything they see on screen.
Sounds familiar? That’s because the concept is similar to Google’s Circle to Search, which allows users to search for anything they see on-screen simply by drawing a circle around it. Visual Intelligence works in a slightly more convoluted way, however, as users will need to screenshot the desired image to search for it.
Apple also explains that users can ask ChatGPT questions about what they’re looking at on-screen, and Visual Intelligence can recognise when a user is looking at an event and suggest adding it to their calendar. Google Gemini also offers a similar tool, where you can take a photo of an event flyer and it’ll automatically detect key details and add them to your calendar.
Live Translation
Another Apple Intelligence tool that promises to “elevate the iPhone experience” while “unlocking new ways to communicate” is Live Translation, which will be integrated into Messages, FaceTime and the Phone app with iOS 26. As its name suggests, the tool will offer a live translation of both text and audio conversations across compatible languages.
Although undoubtedly impressive, this tool can be found across many of the best Android phones, and offers a way to communicate in real-time with someone speaking a different language. Perhaps most notably, the Samsung Galaxy S24 series, which launched in 2024, introduced this feature for the first time.
Photos app for photos and collections
iOS 18 saw a divisive design overhaul with the Photos app, which seemed to overcomplicate the previously clean interface. While in the meantime you can customise the iOS 18 Photos app so it’s more to your liking, iOS 26 will introduce two separate tabs for Library and Collections views, which should offer a better way to view and search for your photos.
Open up the Google Photos app and you’ll see a similar design whereby photos and collections are in two separate tabs. Not only that, but there’s also a third dedicated search tab which allows you to locate specific images.
