iPhone vs. Android: Hidden iPhone feature is a big advantage over Android

When it comes to iPhone vs. Android, Apple often comes out on top; likely because they invented the modern smartphone while Google is just trying to approximate it for the less discerning.

“Among all the reasons Android and the iPhone were able to eliminate the competition, one really stands out to us: these new platforms stopped trying to tell people what to do with smartphones and started letting people do what they wanted to do with smartphones. And what’s most interesting, perhaps, is the fact that they accomplished this feat in very different ways,” Zach Epstein writes for BGR:

Apple’s iOS platform is very controlled, which has upsides and downsides compared to Google’s open approach with Android. On the one hand, it gives users much less freedom. But on the other, it has allowed Apple to focus on things that have seemingly been an afterthought with Android… like security and privacy… A nifty hidden feature we came across over the weekend serves as a great reminder.

In a thread over on Reddit in the iPhone sub, a user shared news of a nifty feature that he discovered on his iPhone. It’s so simple, but so telling of Apple’s approach to privacy and security. Here’s what happens when you take a screenshot of any page within the iPhone’s list of stored passwords:

MacDailyNews Take: The username is intentionally obscured by the user, of course, but what Apple’s iOS does automatically is to leave the password field blank.

With third-party photo storage/sharing services, if you took a screenshot of a password for reference, it could be automatically uploaded to a third-party service for who knows who or what bot to see. Apple thinks of the details, so they’ve saved us all from unintentionally sharing images of our passwords with the world.