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> I'm having a really hard time coming up with an OS feature introduced in a full OS upgrade within the last 10 years that I actually want.

- Live Photos. I won't consider any device that doesn't have something analogous, now. They're magical. Non-kid-havers may feel otherwise, but making every photo I snap of my kids a "Live Photo" is one of the most important improvements any technology thingy has provided in my entire life. (I think these are under the 10-year line? Very close, if not)

- Transparent OCR and text selection in images. The first time I used an image for a couple full minutes, copying text out of it, before realizing only when I went to share it with someone that it wasn't a PDF but a PNG, was when I knew this had to be a table-stakes your-OS-is-incomplete-without-it feature for me. Sure it could just be a feature of some program I've got installed, but having it in any native image view is way better than having to open some specific program to use it, a thing I could long have done, but never did. Making it first-class, fast, and transparent to the user, makes all the difference. I rely on it all the time now.

A couple off the top of my head.



On Android, those features where shipped as apps. PixelCam brought live photos, and Google Lens brought seamless OCR to images.

And really, that's how it should be. Both of those things are not things the operating system does or should do.


> Google Lens brought seamless OCR to images.

Do you have to open Google Lens to do it? I could already do something like that, just didn't. It's totally different when it Just Works.


Neither of those should require an OS upgrade though, those should be apps.


You could already OCR. What made me actually use it was exactly its becoming an OS feature. Now it seems weird if there's an image with text and I can't select the text I can plainly see on my screen.


Copying on any device and immediately pasting on any other device I own.

Headphones automatically connecting to any of my devices that play audio, even switching between them.


Those are very nice to have, but if the device still can do basic web and phone things do you really need to upgrade?


Well, no, but I was working with a bar of:

> I'm having a really hard time coming up with an OS feature introduced in a full OS upgrade within the last 10 years that I actually want.

which both of those easily clear for me. I bet I could come up with a few more if I read over some OS release notes from the last few years—"oh yeah, that! I use it so much I'd kinda forgotten it was a thing" sort of stuff.




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