Apple has a long reputation of being an innovator in the field of technology. In some cases, that reputation is completely warranted — they helped create the entire personal computer market with their original Macintosh models, and the iPod and iPhone certainly revolutionized the markets for personal music players and smartphones, respectively. Even their iTunes store (and the App store) entirely changed the way people buy music and software.
However, Apple isn’t always the brilliant inventor it’s sometimes portrayed as. In some circles, they have a very different reputation of being a company that borrows (or outright steals) ideas from other companies or developers, and claims them as their own. In some cases, they make the effort to vastly improve the idea before launching their own version. In other cases, it’s more of a blatant theft. In the 10 years since the launch of the iPhone, the operating system (iOS) has changed dramatically, and for the better. However, not all of the improvements should be credited to Apple. Here are 16 iPhone features that were borrowed, copied, bought, or simply stolen.
16. Front-Facing Flash
Once the iPhone started having a camera actually worth taking pictures with, Apple made sure to include an LED flash on their rear-facing, higher quality camera. However, the front facing camera that was introduced with the iPhone 4 has never been given a flash to help with those dimly lit selfies. In a software update, Apple introduced a workaround: if you turn the flash on for front facing photos, the screen briefly flashes bright white, giving those selfies a bit of extra illumination. It’s not a true flash, but it does the trick. The only problem is that the white screen flash was previously introduced by Snapchat, the picture messaging app.
https://techcrunch.com/2012/11/14/camera-update-adds-front-facing-flash-horizon-level-and-live-exposure-info/ Via Techcrunch.com