It's that time of the year again. Apple executives took to the stage to announce some new features and additions coming to the iPhone with the upcoming iOS 27 update. While Apple mostly focused on refining the fundamentals (read: fixing what it broke), the company also introduced a handful of useful additions that make iOS 27 feel like more than just a maintenance update.
Sure, Google fixed a few of our annoyances with the Android 17 update by adding features like updated emojis and the ability to create widgets just by describing them. But Apple still came up with a few great ideas this year, including some AI features (an area where Google usually loves reminding everyone it's ahead).
And after watching the iOS 27 announcements, there are a few features that I genuinely wish Google would steal and bring to Android.
Android needs to take parental controls more seriously
Apple spent a big chunk of the WWDC keynote focusing on the new and improved parental controls coming with iOS 27. And as someone who's soon going to enter the parenting stage myself, I can absolutely see why Android users would want some of these features on their phones as well.
Apple has added a number of thoughtful parental control improvements in iOS 27. It's no longer just about restricting app downloads based on age ratings, but the company is going much further this time.
One of the biggest additions is Time Allowances, which lets parents set limits for specific app categories rather than individual apps. For example, you can decide how much time your child can spend on entertainment apps versus educational apps.
There are also more granular controls throughout the system. If a child visits a website they've never accessed before, parents can approve it directly from their own device before access is granted. Apple has also expanded its communication safety tools.
In addition to automatically blurring nudity, iOS 27 can now detect and blur graphic or violent content in shared images and videos as well.
Google Family Link lacks most of these capabilities, and it feels like it's time for Google to give its parental controls a much-needed upgrade.
It's time to bring Shortcuts-like automation to Android
As advanced as Android has become when it comes to AI and automation, it still doesn't have a true equivalent to Apple's Shortcuts app. Google offers Pixel Rules, but it's fairly limited in what it can do.
Samsung is really the only Android brand offering something close to it with its Modes and Routines feature, but that's Samsung-exclusive and not available across Android as a whole.
Google really needs to bring a native automation app like this to Android. With iOS 27, Apple has made creating shortcuts and automations even easier. For creating Shortcuts, users no longer need to dig through complex menus. Instead, they can simply describe what they want using natural language, and the system builds the automation using AI.
With Google pushing Gemini so aggressively across Android, it feels like the perfect time for the company to build a similar app. Android already has the AI capabilities; it just needs a proper, system-level automation app to tie everything together.
Siri mode in the Camera app
This is something I've been asking for on Android for years. We're in 2026, and there are still Android phones that don't even support basic things like native QR code recognition directly through the camera app. Meanwhile, Apple has gone much further by integrating Siri Mode directly into the camera experience.
With Siri Mode, you can simply point your iPhone at something and take action immediately. Point it at a plate of food, and it can identify nutritional information. Point it at a restaurant bill, and it can help split it. You can even point it at a flyer or poster and have it automatically create a calendar event with the relevant details.
What I really like is that all of this is built directly into the camera app. It's not that Android lacks these capabilities. In fact, most of them already exist, and Google Lens is available in the camera app on many Android phones. The problem is that these features remain fragmented across apps and services.
Google can already recognize objects and information through AI, but you often need to launch Gemini Live, which is actually tucked into Google Lens. Similarly, Google Lens can identify all sorts of things, but that often requires opening the app. If Google forces Gemini mode directly into the camera app across all Android devices, it would make the overall experience feel much more cohesive and useful. Perhaps that means evolving Google Lens.
Spatial reframing
Google already offers Auto Reframe on Pixel phones, which can help change the frame of the shot you've already taken. But Apple is taking things a step further with a new feature called Spatial Reframing in iOS 27.
What makes Spatial Reframing interesting is that it doesn't just let you extend the frame using generative AI. It can actually change the perspective of a photo after it has been captured. In addition to changing the frame in 2D, you can shift the whole camera angle and then have AI generate and fill in the missing parts of the image to match the new framing.
It's a much more ambitious take on photo editing than simply expanding the edges of a picture, and something, I think, a lot of Android users and especially Google Photos users would benefit from.
Google killed Pixel Studio at the worst possible time
The timing couldn't be more ironic for this one. It's only been a few days since Google officially killed off the Pixel Studio app on Pixel devices, while Apple has gone in the opposite direction by introducing a significantly upgraded Image Playground app in iOS 27.
The previous version of Image Playground was mostly limited to generating emojis and cartoon-style images, but the new version goes much further. Apple now allows users to generate more realistic and genuinely useful images through its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.
Like most modern AI image generators, you can choose the style you want, whether that's realistic, cartoon-like, artistic, or something else entirely. But what I really like is that Apple is thinking beyond just image generation itself.
You can tell the app exactly where the image will be used. For example, whether you want a landscape image, a portrait image, or even a wallpaper, it will optimize the output accordingly.
That might sound like a small thing, but it's exactly the kind of detail that turns AI image generation from a gimmick into a genuinely useful tool.
