I recently switched from Android to iOS and I'm really surprised by one thing: I can't set Google Translate as my default translation tool. On Android, if I tapped any text and selected 'Translate', it would instantly open Google Translate or Google Lens, making everything super quick and easy. However, on my iPhone, Apple's native Translate app doesn't support Hebrew, and whenever I highlight text to translate, I can't even select Google Translate as an option, not even for a one-time use. I've noticed some other apps like Reverso show up, so why is Google Translate missing? Do multilingual users have to settle for less? Is there any hope this will change in iOS 18, or does anyone know of a workaround?
3 Answers
Honestly, I doubt we’ll see this feature in iOS 18. If you want to make a suggestion, you could drop a note on Apple’s feedback page.
It's up to app developers to support system-wide translation features on iOS, so if Google hasn't added it for their app, there's not much Apple can do about it. But yeah, it's pretty surprising since it worked so smoothly on Android!
As a fellow iPhone user who sometimes uses Hebrew, I feel your pain! I wasn’t aware that Android had that feature either, but it does sound incredibly useful. Unfortunately, while Apple provides the necessary tools for translation integration, it’s really up to Google to enable that in their app.
That feature on Android was amazing! With Google Lens, you could just snap a photo and get immediate translations. Now I've set up a workaround, but it's kind of complicated.
They manage it just fine on Android, so I'm not sure why they haven't made it work for iOS too!