Gemini and Apple Intelligence get all the attention these days, but this one feature I rely on everyday is keeping me on Android.
With the iPhone 17 finally getting some long overdue upgrades like a larger and high-refresh rate display, I’ve found myself toying with the idea of switching ecosystems over the past couple of days. It also doesn’t help that Google stumbled out of the gate with the recent Pixel 10 launch. Thanks to the latter’s unexpectedly small performance and battery life gains, I see no compelling reason to upgrade from my Pixel 8.
But after mulling the decision over, I came to realize that I’d be giving up much more than I initially thought if I switched over to an iPhone. And it’s all thanks to Google’s slow but steady creep of useful feature additions to Android over the past couple of years.
While AI features have come to dominate the discussion surrounding new smartphone launches these days, my favorite feature on Android is firmly rooted in the pre-generative AI days. Circle to Search is often misjudged as just a shortcut for Google Lens, but it’s arguably now an ecosystem-defining feature. And as a frequent traveler, I cannot even dream of giving it up.I can’t imagine traveling without Circle to Search
I’ll admit that Circle to Search is not exactly cutting-edge technology; you could already summon Google Lens from the Recents menu on Pixel phones. The same UI also allows you to select any text within any app. However, this feature has always had a big limitation that keeps it from being useful for me: it doesn’t play nicely with non-English languages.
Circle to Search doesn’t suffer from the same limitation. As the feature’s name suggests, you can use it to visually search anything on your screen. But beyond that, I appreciate it the most for letting me select and manipulate foreign-language alphabets — a feature that has saved me an immeasurable amount of time and money while traveling abroad.
Take a look at the followings screenshots from the Grab app, which is the de facto ride hailing and food delivery service in most Southeast Asian countries. If you ever need to order something as basic as a McDonald’s meal to your hotel room in Thailand or Vietnam, you might find yourself stuck trying to decipher the local language within this app. In the old days, I would screenshot the menu and then manually open it in the Google Translate or Lens apps. Grab has since added an automatic translation feature to its app these days, but plenty of others like WeChat, AliPay, and a litany of Japanese apps still do not.
