6 ways that Apple's next major iPhone OS update makes it much, much more like Android

Widgets are nothing new to Apple's iPhone. You've been able to add weather, or news, or whatever other widgets to your "Today" screen on iOS for quite some time.

What's new in iOS 14 is their ability to be built directly into the home screen — something that Android users have been able to do for years.

Moreover, as you see above, those widgets can be placed in various parts of the home screen. This level of home screen customization is standard on Android, and it's finally arriving on iPhone this fall.

For years, when iPhone users downloaded an app, it was forever destined to live on the home screen. There is no way to hide apps — you can delete them, or put them into folders, but you cannot disappear them from the home screen otherwise.

A standard of the Android OS is a concept called an "App Drawer," which is a kind of catalog of all the apps you've downloaded. You can then choose which apps appear (or don't appear) on your home screen.

With iOS 14, Apple is duplicating that concept with the App Library. Apps can be removed from the home screen without deletion from the phone altogether, and you can swap them in and out as you please.

This is a function that has been foundational to Android for years.

Activating Siri on the iPhone currently means launching the Siri app, but when iOS 14 arrives this fall you'll be able to call on Siri directly on the home screen.

Instead of launching an app and exiting whatever you were doing, Siri can be tapped for help directly on the home screen — something that Google Assistant on Android has done for years.

There you were, watching a YouTube video, when your friends sends you an iMessage. You click the notification, and suddenly the video shuts down and iMessage opens. Bummer!

In iOS 14, that video will instead become a little picture-in-picture window where the stream keeps playing.

You'll be surprised to learn that, yes, picture-in-picture video streaming has been a staple of Android for some time now.

When you think of translating languages on the web and on your phone, you probably think of Google Translate. The service is a standard, whether you're browsing the web on a computer or on a smartphone.

But with iOS 14, Apple is taking on Google translate with its own translation service — 14 years after Google launched Google Translate.

A marquee new feature Apple touted as new in iOS 14 is a novel one: App Clips.

The idea is you can download a small snippet of an app that you need briefly instead of having to download the entire app. This might enable you to, say, quickly pay for parking with a parking app you don't have.

But this function, like so many others outlined by Apple during its annual developer conference earlier this week, was already exists on Android (where it's called "Instant Apps").