This real-life Google hack on my Pixel is why I could never switch to an iPhone

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’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.

As you can see, Circle to Search allows me to highlight just about any on-screen text in any language and translate it with another tap. In fact, I can get a translation even faster via the handy Translate icon in the bottom-right corner of the overlay. Thanks to this, I don’t remember the last time I opened the full-fledged Google Translate app. It doesn’t matter if I’m staring at a PDF, a foreign menu, or an Instagram post that the system doesn’t recognize as selectable text.

Before Circle to Search launched in early 2023, quickly translating on-screen contents was a Pixel-exclusive feature. It was a big reason why I switched from Samsung’s Galaxy S series to a Pixel 8. The feature would appear within the Google Assistant, alongside a Read Aloud button for websites in Chrome. In fact, these two buttons still technically exist if you use a Pixel with the Google Assistant instead of Gemini.

But you don’t have to buy into the Pixel line any longer. With Circle to Search, you get the same quick translation experience no matter which Android device you use. I have considered switching to the S25 Ultra, but I could just as easily shop for a Xiaomi or OnePlus phone knowing that I’d retain these features. Having said that, the Pixel line is still the only one that lets you quickly copy text and images from the Recents menu. Circle to Search’s text selection initiates a full web search every single time, which I don’t appreciate from a privacy standpoint.

On the flip side, selecting text within Circle to Search can be useful sometimes. In the Uber Eats app, for example, selecting a restaurant’s address brings up a quick shortcut to the Maps app. This saves me several taps when I’m cross-shopping options as I can quickly switch between an Uber Eats listing and the corresponding Google Maps page to assess photos and reviews.

Apple’s pitch with iOS 18 last year was that its Apple Intelligence suite would make your iPhone smarter in ways that actually help. Visual Intelligence and On-screen awareness are supposed to recognize what’s on your display, understand context, and let you act on it. In theory, that sounds like Apple’s answer to Google’s Circle to Search. But practically, the execution feels half-baked at best.

Visual Intelligence is capable of doing a lot of what Circle to Search can, but most of its functionality is inexplicably tied to the camera app. And while on-screen awareness sounds like it should deliver on that promise, it suffers from problems of its own. You have to jump through extra hoops just to get what Circle to Search already delivers in a single gesture. The first step requires you to capture a screenshot, which is already a more involved process than Circle to Search. Next, you can only look up visual objects or images — not text.

If you’d like to make sense of the text in your screenshot in any way, you’ll have to “Ask Siri” and instruct it to act upon your screen’s context. But it doesn’t have translation capabilities, so it must hand the task off to ChatGPT, which requires yet another confirmation prompt and loading interstitial. It’s frustrating and doesn’t save much time versus opening the Translate app. Not to mention, it’s a gigantic waste of resources given the ecological cost of large language models.

Apple will no doubt refine these features over time, but right now, Google has a clear lead. I haven’t even mentioned the other aspects of Circle to Search yet — the music identification button makes Google’s Now Playing effectively universal, instead of being limited to the lock screen on a Pixel. The Lens shortcut turns my camera into a quick reference tool for everything from identifying products to figuring out which flower I’ve randomly come across on a walk. The latter is perhaps the only feature that Apple has managed to successfully replicate with Visual Intelligence.

Google has also doubled down on support for Circle to Search. The company recently announced the rollout of Scroll and Translate, a new feature that can translate your screen’s contents even while you actively scroll. I will undoubtedly end up using this feature to translate long menus and I might not even have to buy a new phone to take advantage of it. Meanwhile, Apple is still treating features like Visual Intelligence as a glimpse of what’s possible someday.

So even though the iPhone 17’s hardware upgrades are worthy of praise, and the Pixel 10 hasn’t particularly impressed me, I’ve come to realize that Circle to Search is the anchor that will keep me from switching. It may not keep me tethered to Google’s flavor of Android, but it’s certainly an ecosystem lock-in I did not expect.