Who are we kidding? Everyone copies Apple

If you’re looking for thoughtful discussion of the latest tech news, it might be wise to avoid Twitter, aka X, aka Elon Musk’s Idiot Circus. The algorithm rewards engagement, which in turn incentivises controversy, disinformation, and unthinking knee-jerk hot takes. So when Google tweeted a promo for the upcoming Android 17 update last week, it was inevitable that the most visible comments would contain more rage than reason.

Which isn’t to say they’re necessarily wrong.

A decent number of Android fans were outraged by the hint, offered in an accompanying promotional video, that Google is about to pivot to a new but simultaneously familiar aesthetic. “Please don’t tell me Android is going to have a Liquid Glass look,” pleaded by far the most polite of this group. “Stay original, Android,” said another, summing up the majority view. And it’s probably fair to say that the shimmery, glowing, translucent new appearance shown off by The Bot had more than a touch of the WWDC 2025 about it.

Android ecosystem president Sameer Samat quickly denied that Google is copying Apple and insisted that Liquid Glass on Android is “Not happening! Y’all are wild.” Maybe this is true. The glowy, somewhat glassy look has only been seen in one (non-UI) video, and it’s easy to jump to the wrong conclusions when you haven’t yet got all the facts. Particularly if you’re on Twitter.

But it’s also true that copying can be both nebulous and easy to deny. One’s judgment of how visually similar one UI is to another, for example, is completely subjective. Google may in due course announce its new Fluid Crystal design language and insist that it isn’t the same as Liquid Glass because the toggles are different or there’s a slightly different transparency effect on the home screen. It’s not a pyramid scheme, true believers will insist, it’s a reverse funnel system.

In any case, you’ll have to forgive us for raising an eyebrow and wondering if Google’s designers have been getting their inspiration from Apple Park, because this sort of thing happens constantly.

Only a couple of months ago, Apple launched the MacBook Neo to instant acclaim, and what do you know, a bunch of PC builders suddenly decided to take their lines in a new direction. The iPhone Ultra won’t even launch for another four months, and Huawei and Samsung are already pivoting to the strange wide form factor it’s expected to use.

Samsung’s Galaxy Buds and Galaxy Watch Ultra are astonishingly shameless rip-offs of the AirPods and Apple Watch Ultra, respectively, and while the company denies that the Galaxy S25 Edge was based on early leaks of the iPhone Air, the similarities are striking. And as for Honor’s Power 2, which even comes in a color almost identical to Cosmic Orange… well, the word is probably “blatant. At this point, Apple must feel like it can’t release an internal memo without someone from a rival company making one of their own with a worse interface.

Some will say that imitation goes both ways, and that Apple has practised its fair share of plagiarism over the years. This charge isn’t entirely unfair, although Apple’s borrowings usually take the form of smaller software features rather than whole-cloth interfaces. In the hardware sphere, the company prefers to regard rival projects not as exemplars but as flawed prototypes it can learn from and then vastly improve. This is a practice that goes right back to the foundational but not yet commercially viable GUI ideas it learned from Xerox in the late 1970s and then polished for use in the Mac. (Apple paid for that visit with lucrative stock options, by the way. There’s a right way to go about copying someone else’s ideas.) Neither the iPod nor the Vision Pro was technically the first of its kind, but each took its respective product concept and raised it to the next level.

No, Apple definitely gets copied more than it copies. And in some ways, it’s good for the tech market that it does. Apple has grown so powerful that it can serve as a useful lightning rod for other companies: it drops the optical drive, it removes the headphone jack, it takes the charger out of the box, it cops all the flak, and then everyone else can do the same thing three months later with a fraction of the negative publicity. Where Apple leads, the industry follows… in everything except privacy and data harvesting, unfortunately.

So no, I’m not terribly inclined to give Google the benefit of the doubt when it comes to Glassdroid. Maybe Android 17 will look like iOS 26, and maybe it won’t, but Apple’s designers have been copied so many times in the past that despair and irritation are natural responses to a promotional video that was either weirdly clueless or deliberately provocative. In fact, I think I’ll go and complain about the situation on Twitter.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

Trending: Top stories

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Podcast of the week

In the latest episode of the Macworld Podcast, we discuss everything that’s new with the iMac. What are the latest rumors, when can we expect to see an update, and what would we like to see Apple do with its iconic all-in-one. We also discuss the current Mac mini shortage.

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Reviews corner

The rumor mill

YouTuber goes ‘hands-on’ with ‘so strange’ iPhone Ultra.

One analyst thinks the MacBook Neo could face a price hike. But Mahmoud Itani believes the $599 Neo is here to stay.

Apple may turn to longtime frenemies to make chips in the U.S.

Will Apple release anything new in May? Here’s what’s we expect.

Video of the week