It used to be a tale as old as time: iPhone apps would get the best features before Android. As Android has quickly become the most-used operating system in the world, developers have taken notice and often bring features to Android in parity with iOS, and sometimes even first. However, there are still a handful of apps that have a significant number of extra features or better user interfaces on the iPhone versus Android, which most likely relates to the relative ease and power of the iOS development environment which runs on a finite number of phones, versus Android, which still has a bit of a fragmentation issue. Here are a few such apps that have evolved on iOS to the point of making the Android versions feel half-baked.

Hero Assistant on iPhone

The Hero Assistant app promised us the world, and while it was a bit of a letdown, one thing is for sure: the iPhone version is more feature-complete. This app was supposed to be a super-app that integrates all the data in your life, like your task list, your calendar, and notes, and allows you to collaborate with others. We found it to be a classic “jack of all trades/master of none” and it didn’t really fulfill its promise.

On iPhone, the Hero Assistant gives you a Perplexity AI agent that allows for voice input, such that you can create events, manage tasks, or take notes with your voice. The Hero AI agent on iPhone also lets you convert photos to text, and can even deeply organize your notes. But on Android, this entire tool is missing. This is probably because of resources: the Hero Assistant app comes from a small startup that most likely has to prioritize features for ease of development, and many developers still find iOS a bit easier to add features too, so the iPhone gets the best stuff first.

Gboard on iPhone

It turns out that Gboard on iPhone has a pretty handy feature: it has a built-in calculator. This means that within any app, you can simply start typing a math sentence and, if you’re on an iPhone, the answer to your sentence will appear above the keyboard, preventing you from having to leave the app you’re currently in just to do a calculation. Google probably did this because on iOS, keyboards are heavily sandboxed from the operating system, giving Google leeway to build in a calculator to the keyboard’s logic at a system level. I have to imagine that this feature will come to Android, eventually.

Google Photos on iPhone

The floating nav bar UI is more immersive on iPhone

The Google Photos app (some want a less-cluttered alternative) on iPhone is more immersive than Android and lets you see 28% more photos thanks to the use of iOS’ floating navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, while Android still has the older tabbed-based interface. This is key because by lifting navigation off the bottom of the screen, the interface becomes more content-dense. Early builds of Google Photos in 2026 reveal that Google is looking to shift its UI to a floating navigation bar, and I’d expect Android to get the new UI in the first half of 2026.

Android app development has gotten easier

Thanks to tools like Android App Bundle

To zoom out a bit, writing software for Android has improved a lot, but in the early days, it wasn’t uncommon for developers to have to build multiple versions of the same app for different screen resolution and processor configurations. In fact, the Google Play Store has a tool that allows you to distribute different versions of the same app to different configurations. Since 2021, Google uses something called the Android App Bundle that dynamically generates a custom APK that is custom to the hardware of the client. This has made a huge difference since its release, to make it faster and easier to create and update apps on Android.

Why features differ on iPhone

Prioritization, development tools, and fragmentation are all factors

If you’ve been around tech for a while like me, you know that historically, iOS apps have had a leg up on Android. Many years ago, this was because of fragmentation: developing for the iPhone meant writing software for basically one device with one screen resolution and one processor. Obviously, things are more complicated now that there are multiple iPhones with multiple configurations, but from the beginning, Apple has tuned its development tools to make it easy to “develop and deploy once” with tools like Swift and SwiftUI being cross-device native from the ground up.

But Android being more developer-friendly is a relatively new dynamic that not all developers have provided for, which is why today, maybe developers still target their best features for iPhone users first. If you look at a longer arc of time, most major apps reach feature parity on Android quickly, and only in the early days do iPhone users get an advantage. However, there are still a few exceptions.