iOS 26 Wishlist: 5 Android Features We’re Dying to Have

The debate between Android and iPhone has been a hot topic since the beginning of the smartphone era. Some say Apple’s restrictions make the iPhone worse, while others think that the lack of polish, quality, and optimization makes Android the lesser smartphone.

However, the truth is that neither platform is inherently better than the other. Each has its pros and cons, and the competition between devices can actually be beneficial for us, the users. Since both tech companies want folks to buy their smartphones, they have to keep giving us more new and cool features.

Not only that, but tech companies are often forced to copy each other’s features to avoid falling behind, which is also great for us, as we’ll have most of the other platform’s key features eventually.

With that said, Apple likes to take its time when it comes to adding features. Because of that, Android still has a handful of genuinely practical features Apple hasn’t fully matched on the iPhone yet.

However, with Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) just around the corner, there’s still hope we might see Apple “borrow” some more features from the competition. Here are just a few Android features we’d love to see on the iPhone.

True Split-Screen Multitasking

One of the biggest Android features the iPhone still lacks is true split-screen multitasking.

Android has supported a multi-window mode on phones for years, including split-screen layouts where two apps can share the screen at the same time. That means you can keep a chat open while checking a website, compare two documents side by side, or keep notes visible while reading something else.

The iPhone still doesn’t offer that kind of dual-app multitasking. Apple’s biggest multitasking feature is still mostly built around Picture in Picture. That’s handy for video and FaceTime, but obviously not the same thing. Watching a floating video while using another app is useful, but having Messages and Safari open at the same time is a completely different level of flexibility.

This would be useful enough on a regular iPhone, but it would really shine on the larger iPhone Pro Max — not to mention the much-rumored foldable iPhone that we’re expecting this year. Once you’re carrying around a large phone, it’s not unreasonable to want to look at more than one app at a time. The extra display space is there. The processing power is there. And for people who do a lot of messaging, research, planning, or document reading on their phones — aka “pro” users — split-screen support would cut down on a lot of constant app switching.

It’s not like Apple pretends not to know about this feature; the iPad has had it for years. It makes no sense that we still don’t have it, so maybe we’ll see it in the future.

A Real Desktop Mode When You Connect Your Phone to a Monitor

This is probably the most ambitious feature on this list, but it’s also potentially the most exciting. Some flavors of Android have long supported desktop-style capabilities when connecting to an external display, and Android 16 expanded that to a much wider range of devices, with Android 17 expected to push it even further.

This allows you to connect a supported Android phone to an external display to give you a taskbar, pinned apps, and multiple apps running side by side in freely resizable windows. At that point, the phone starts feeling a lot less like a phone mirroring its screen and a lot more like a lightweight computer.

To be fair, the iPhone does have some capabilities like that. Supported iPhones that are connected to a display can use your keyboard and mouse as if they were a computer. But the changes pretty much stop there. It still feels like you’re using an iPhone — just on a larger screen. On Android, desktop mode works way differently, and on some devices, you can use your smartphone and your “computer” for different tasks at the same time.

For a lot of people, this would be one of the most useful upgrades Apple could make. Imagine traveling with only your iPhone, then plugging it into a monitor at a hotel, desk, or shared workspace and getting something that feels closer to a real desktop interface.

You wouldn’t replace your Mac for every kind of work, of course, but you could absolutely cover email, messaging, docs, browser tabs, files, and basic productivity tasks much more comfortably than you can now.

Android is already pushing in that direction. While there were some rumors of this coming last year with a Stage Manager-like interface, they never materialized. For now, Apple seems more comfortable keeping the iPhone locked into being an iPhone even when it’s attached to a much larger display. Of course, that may not be too surprising; unlike Android makers, Apple already has the iPad and the Mac, and it would probably prefer folks to buy one of those devices in addition to their iPhone.

Notification History

Almost everyone who has used a smartphone long enough has had the same annoying experience: A notification comes in, you swipe it away without thinking, and then five minutes later, you realize it was something important.

On Android, notification history gives you a pretty elegant answer to that problem. It can show snoozed notifications, recently dismissed alerts, and a history of the day’s notifications.

The iPhone still doesn’t have a true equivalent. Apple gives you notification grouping, summaries, and better customization than before, but there’s still no official system-wide history page for dismissed notifications. If you clear the wrong alert, you’re often stuck hoping you’ll get another alert or that you find the update yourself.

This is one of those small Android features that ends up being much more helpful in real life than it sounds. It isn’t flashy, and it probably wouldn’t even be showcased during Apple’s WWDC.