I would argue that it’s the nature of having a mature and complex product. Adding new stuff is hard because you have a lot of legacy code / UX that you have to accommodate for. You need to move slower because it’s easier to break stuff in a more mature product.
I’d also argue that Apple and Google’s research teams are generally hearing the similar stuff out of their end users, so it’s to be expected that both companies are going to prioritize similar functionality.
That was my experience when I’ve worked on massive products. The complexity of the product impacts development speed, and shared understandings of user desires results in similar feature sets between competitors.
Exactly. You get it. At the end of the day they are all going to get many of the same features.
They both copy from webOS anyway, at the end of the day. That webOS from Palm was way ahead at the time but lacked the hardware and Carrier support needed to succeed.