The developer preview of Android 16 is already available and reveals some very interesting changes to Google's mobile OS. Google has said that a new version of Privacy Sandbox with better data protection will be available. reported, but did not mention an improved version of the Privacy dashboard (via Android Police).

Currently, Android's privacy dashboard can show permissions used by apps in the past 24 hours; on phones running the Android 16 developer preview, this time frame increases to 7 days, the same as iPhone's permission statistics will be the same as the [because no one will have time to check the dashboard every day. Still, Apple could learn a thing or two from Google's approach.

The iPhone's privacy menu shows which apps have used which permissions in the past seven days, plus other information. But whereas it is mostly a big long list of text, Android's privacy dashboard is certainly visually appealing. This has been the case since its launch with Android 12.

Android has a pie chart showing which permissions are used the most. These include camera, microphone, location, and the all too mysterious “other. The chart does not tell us which apps used what. We'll have to rely on the list below to find that out, but we can quickly see what is being used the most.

This system gives you a quick glimpse of what is happening on your system and lets you decide if you want to investigate further. If you are particularly demanding about what your phone does at any given time, it may even be enough to raise some red flags.

That's not surprising given that iPhones are providing more information and Apple is constantly pushing for better user privacy. There is an optional App Privacy Report, which shows information about which apps connect to external servers and which domains they connect to and when. There are also more images in the permission tracking list, which definitely looks a bit cleaner.

In short, there is still a lot that Google could imitate to further enhance the privacy aspects of Android, be it Android 16 or later. For now, though, it may be possible for Apple to copy them.