Android and iOS have existed in tension for a few years now, and each is continually borrowing ideas, designs, and features from the other. Nothing wrong with a little friendly theft when trying to stay competitive.

The operating systems are far from exact mirrors of each other, and they have even grown more distinct with new generations. But there are a few features we’d still love to see cross sides, in the interest of keeping the operating systems functional and easy for customers to use. During the weekend, we looked at features Apple would be smart to borrow from Google. Today we turn the tables. Here are five features we’ve enjoyed using in iOS that we wouldn’t mind seeing make the transition to Android. (Make sure to share your own ideas, or what you think of ours, in the comments below.)

Notifications center/Do Not Disturb mode

Android made the notification menu first and made it right. For a long time, iOS notifications and alerts were more or less a junk drawer where everything kept disappearing. The apps had their little red numerical alert badges, sometimes, to indicate activity within an app. But should you not have that app on your main home screen or pass it by swiping through the other pages of apps, it’s like your friend may as well not have played you that pity tile in Carcassonne, thus saving your bacon.

But with the new notifications center, iOS gave users a centralized place to flip notifications from apps on or off without having to dig into settings menus within the app. Even better, the alerts users do want to use are customizable: whether the lock screen shows alerts, whether they’re banners or pop-up windows, how many queue up in the drop-down notifications menu… the options are many.



Google’s notifications, on the other hand, are still determined primarily on the part of the application, and users have to dig into app menus to toggle them on or off. Many apps offer options for things like blinking a light on the device or making a sound when there’s a new notification, but every app is different. There is no good way to consolidate or synchronize the way app alerts interact with your phone because there is no top-down view.

Do Not Disturb mode is a subcategory of notifications center. With one flip of a switch, your iOS device remains blessedly silent and dark until you decide to interact with it. You can silence a Google device or turn all notifications off. But as we noted previously, this is tiresome work. There are a couple of apps that mimic this functionality (save for letting phone calls through), but to have it built into the OS and accessible with one switch flip would be ideal.

Siri's personal assistant features

We mean no disrespect to Google Now. That part of Android certainly has its strengths over Siri, as we noted in our comparison piece, especially in the breadth of information it can process and access. But its voice recognition capabilities are still a bit lacking by comparison, and we’re thankful that the feature has a text entry component. Commands to text a friend, for instance, are more easily executed right from Siri than in Google Now.

Android is great at seeking out information (except in the instances where Siri accesses Wolfram Alpha, wherein Siri tends to better). But Google Now is worse at the personal life management aspects that Siri’s celebrity friends are so fond of trotting out in commercials. We know Android was first at text-to-speech, but we’d love to see it work better and more seamlessly from the front-facing Google Now.

iMessage's ubiquity

Technically speaking, this is not strictly an iOS feature. At least, some of the parts we love about it have nothing to do with iOS. But the ubiquity of the iMessage across iOS and OS X devices cannot be ignored. The ability to maintain conversations across iPhones and iPod touches and MacBook Pros is a joy.

Android shares a lot of iMessage’s features in Google Talk, including the cross-platform message syncing. But Talk can’t integrate with a phone number and can’t supersede or thread itself through a text message interface. Maintaining Google Talk conversations and text ones still requires two apps. iMessages can fall back into being SMSes if the occasion calls for it, but Google Talk is always data-based.

iMessage isn’t without its problems, especially if you have more than one address or phone number that messages can arrive to. Group conversations with people with multiple handles mean messages end up hither and thither, with one conversation broken into multiple threads. Set up your handles wrong, and suddenly an entire day’s worth of conversations end up on your iPad but nowhere else. Start up you computer, and the iMessage conversation sometimes loads as one entire side of an hours-long conversation.

But for its faults and occasional finickiness with regard to setup, we appreciate the ability to maintain one conversation across multiple devices from within one messaging interface. We wish the same for Google.

Passbook

Google is not lacking for brand-centric apps any more than iOS is. That is to say, you can’t swing a dead cat in Google Play or the App Store without hitting some app for a retail chain or travel service. But Android itself doesn’t offer an app-level place to consolidate all of the materials that go along with retail interactions; iOS does.

Passbook in iOS 6 gives users a centralized place to stash tickets, loyalty cards, gift cards, and other similar items. These all become accessible through one interface. Cashier at the register asks for your rewards card? No problem, it’s on your phone. (Well, for some stores, but Apple’s selection is pretty decent and growing.)

A Passbook equivalent would not be a trivial thing to implement, as it requires the cooperation of retailers through their apps to allow information and documents to be pulled into the central Passbook area. Samsung is hard at work on its own Passbook competitor, Wallet. Virtual name theft of Android’s own Wallet aside, Google should not take this lying down. We have absolute confidence in Google’s ability to wheedle and chide and throw its weight around to earn the favor and cooperation of all the necessary retail giants for a concierge-style app.



Privacy menu

So you are in the Google Play store, browsing the app selection, and decide to treat yourself to a new toy. You pick out an app, click install, and your shopping experience comes to a halt: the app presents you with a long list of app permissions. Storage, location, camera, contacts—the app wants a lot from you. But you want the app! How can you say no? You cannot. There go all the little pieces of you and your identity off to the app’s servers. Soon you forget, until the app suffers a security breach and all your friends’ e-mail inboxes are flooded with spam.

That is an extreme scenario, but it’s easy to forget what apps are taking from you and when. While Android only lets you review app permissions per app within the settings, iOS gives a top down view of those settings grouped by permission (access to contacts, location, etc), and lets you toggle that access on or off all from within one menu. Admittedly, many users don’t think twice about these things, but in the event that they do, iOS makes permissions much easier to handle than Android and its apps do.

Pick all the nits!

In terms of features, Android has always been the more robust of the two mobile operating systems, and Google continues to build it out with every new iteration. Hence, it was a little difficult to scrape together specific features that were out-and-out inferior to iOS.

Our bigger problems with Android are more meta, both endemic to the platform and difficult to solve. For one, for all of the competitiveness the current version of Android presents to iOS, the vast majority of Android users aren’t even running the current version of the operating system. It happens for a variety of reasons—whether their phone has been deemed too obsolete for more updates, their updates are snagged in carrier developer hell, or the users are just plain ignorant. The latest version of Android can have all the features in the world, but that does no good for the people who can’t, or aren’t, running it. More to the point, most major Android handset makers skin the stock OS with their own UI overlay (Sense from HTC, TouchWiz from Samsung), so what stock Android does or doesn't do may be done or undone, however haphazardly, by hardware partners.

The second issue is that some of Android’s shortcomings, even the ones outlined here, are filled out by third-party apps. Good for Android developers that they can see the weaknesses and find ways to tweak the OS. However, this puts the onus of figuring out how to make the OS as consumer-friendly as possible on both consumers and app developers.

Obviously Google can’t field every deficiency. But when app developers are using their work to compensate for a weakness or omission in the OS, Google should be sitting up and listening. The company needs to work to make that setting or feature a native part of the operating system. The way Apple goes about this isn’t exactly ideal either; occasionally their feature additions are thinly veiled thefts of popular apps. If Google could find a way to integrate third-party-added features while still giving the original developers their due, that would be ideal.