Apple announced a number of new features today during WWDC , and some of them might seem familiar—probably because you’ve seen them elsewhere before. It’s a particularly bad day for the team at Raycast , a widely popular Spotlight replacement that Mac power users know well. A number of that application’s best features—from an AI integration to searching menu bar items to triggering custom actions inside applications—are now offered in Spotlight as of this fall’s macOS 26.
But Apple didn’t just grab ideas from people building useful applications for their own ecosystem. They also tasked their world-class engineering and design teams to copy features from competing products built by other tech behemoths. There’s the call-screening feature and hold-assist features, both of which have been offered on Google’s Pixel phones for years. There’s the live translation feature , already available on Samsung Galaxy Phones. And there’s the circle to search feature, which is already available on Android. Apple’s unique vision and attention to detail made it possible to offer these features years after they were available elsewhere.
The Messages app will now mirror the backgrounds and polling features from Whatsapp and Telegram, allowing you to put pictures behind your conversations in yet another place. Only Apple could deliver this kind of seamless experience (with the possible exception of the other applications that offered them years ago, of course).
Credit: Apple
Steve Jobs himself once said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal”—a saying that he may have borrowed from Pablo Picaso (at the very least, the sentiment dates back to the 1800s) . I supposed it’s true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and these features are good ones—plus, some amount of copying, tweaking, and reinventing of ideas is inevitable in this space.
