Will Google Photos Become Useless on Apple Devices?

Google Photos was a life saver at the beginning of this year. I always run out of space too quickly on my phone due to having too many photos and videos, so when I first heard about the app, I jumped right on it. Essentially, this Google app works like a drive that you can access from anywhere. Any time I take a picture or video, it is automatically replicated and put into the Google Photos app, and therefore I can gain access to it from anywhere, even on my PC. Another great part of the app is that it creates collages, animations, and slideshows from certain moments of your photo library that were taken close in time to one another. Also, it has a feature that you can search for people, objects, places, and days, so that any picture that is relevant to the keyword you search will pop up. For instance, if I were to search “mom” after titling my mother’s picture “mom”, then it will pull up on my screen every picture my mom is in, because the app can recognize faces. After years of searching through hundreds of photos to find the one I am looking for, this app was a nice change and gave me a much easier experience.

The one downside of Google Photos is that in order for it to help save space on your phone, you must first wait for all of the photos to sync to the app, and then delete every photo from your phone’s photo library. This means that if you want to post a picture to or change your profile picture on a social media website, or if you want to switch your background on your phone, then you need to re-save the picture you want back to your photo library on your phone. This can be a hassle.

Apple noticed this flaw, and decided to give Apple users the best of the best when it comes to a photo library. With the new iOS 10 update, Apple has created a program in their photo library app that is seemingly identical to the one that Google had already created, but better. Apple created iCloud for pictures, so that every time you take a picture it is saved to the Cloud, not your phone. However, this time the photos you take remain in your photo library without taking up any storage space on your phone. This means that Apple kept all the same features from Google photos—the search engine tool, the automatic animations, and the slideshows—while adding features that are favorable to Apple users. These new features include showing a map of where the photos were taken, as well as separate albums for Twitter, Instasize, Snapchat, and Instagram photos. This, along with the beneficial aid of having the photos remain in your photo library for easy access, trump the old Google Photos app.

Will people stop using Google Photos now that Apple has implemented these new features? Google Photos seems almost useless for Apple users now, since the photo library takes over the responsibilities that Google Photos once provided. Even still, a majority of my photos are no longer on my phone and are on Google Photos, so I’m not sure if I will ever stop using it now. However, I believe that only time can tell us what to expect from the Apple versus Google Photos predicament that many people—myself included—now find themselves enduring. We shall see!