My mother’s upgrading from a Huawei P9 to an iPhone she received as a gift (don’t know which model it is).
She doesn’t know how to use iOS and I’m finding it difficult to teach her, since I don’t know how it works either, so I was wondering if it was possible to install some version of Android on it.
Sorry if it’s the wrong community to post this in
Sell the iPhone and get an android
Is not looking bad more valuable than the effort involved in one or both of you learning iOS?
You can’t seriously argue iOS is harder to learn over the myriad of android oses and their frequent updates
Generally selling a gift is in bad taste.
However… In this case I wouldn’t have an issue with it, since she really isn’t comfortable using it.
Also, a gift is a gift… When you gift something to someone, you let go of it. What they do with it is up to them, as it’s no longer yours.
Honestly for most people who aren’t tech-savvy, iPhone is a better solution since things work one way, and you don’t have to figure out how to address the basics (like where is my data, is it being backed up, etc, etc).
It’s why I use an iPhone for work, but Android personally. iPhone “just works”, even if it’s in a way I find limiting and frustrating. But for the essentials - calls, messaging, calendar, utilities (calculators, estimators, etc) and most typical apps, it’s consistent and pretty straight-forward.
I find it frustrating when trying to approach it from a computer mindset, looking for files, copying things, etc. It just doesn’t work that way. Apple’s paradigm is about tasks and functions. You share data between apps, rather than save a file, browse the file system, and then open it or copy it somewhere. What you save on the phone (say a word doc) is retained in your files, and if you setup iCloud it all syncs there (with a few exceptions, you can save only locally, but you kind of have to do it intentionally, and it isn’t easy to work with local files like that anyway).
Set it up without her Sim card, and just work through it a bit, taking a blank-slate approach (act as if you don’t know anything about Android). Think of moving from one task to another, rather than the process of manipulating the system. You don’t open files, you go to the app that performs the task you want.
I can do most stuff on iOS that I do with Android, just not the computer-like things, and I don’t use iCloud, so it gets painful for me.
The other replies answered your question already, but this may solve your little “problem” here: Apple offers free in-person training sessions on how to use their products. They’re intended precisely for non-technical people like your mother.
So, if you don’t want to be the person teaching her how to use iOS, you could look into getting her to attend these sessions instead.
You can fault Apple for many things but this offer of theirs is just great on every level IMHO.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this programme made them a rather sizeable profit even if they had a typical margin on their products.
It’s not possible lol. Apple makes it as difficult as humanly possible to alter their OS. We’re lucky enough to be able to jailbreak iPhones
Honestly, though, as much as I hate how restrictive iPhones are, I gotta admit they’re restrictive in a way that makes things a lot easier for people who aren’t tech-savvy. What part are you struggling with? I haven’t owned an iPhone since the 5C but I could probably help.
I’m not sure that’s so true nowadays, I’m very tech literate, and find iPhones still quite filled with bugs and weird design choices that make me have to actually TRY to be able to use them.
Take the browser for instance, why do I have to click the share button to use the “find on page” option? Well I learned from another dev that it’s actually the “action” button… but it’s almost exclusively used as a share button.
The mail app has some oddities. The pull down to search function is fucking stupid. I can’t quite remember all of them, but there are so many horrible UX decisions made for the sake of a “clean” interface.
And then there are the bugs, my AirPods won’t connect… they take forever to attempt, and then nothing happens. I after a couple of other troubleshooting steps, I figure out that toggling Bluetooth on my phone allows the AirPods to connect immediately.
Lots of bugs, with workarounds that I can figure out… but they’d drive someone else up a wall.
And we had a horrid time trying to use FaceTime on AppleTV to AppleTV. Apparently it was stability issues on my phones iOS version. And my phone wasn’t updating, despite updating multiple times on 17, the latest wouldn’t download until I went and removed an old ios16 beta profile. But I guess that’s kinda on me.
Other things that irritated me when I recently switched from android to iOS:
The keyboard doesn’t have the numbers along the top. Didn’t realize how much I used digits when typing stuff out so switching back and forth is annoying.
When typing long text messages I find it impossible to just click higher or scroll up to reread what I typed
Speaking of messaging the fact I can only do emoji reactions with such a limited range is really amazing especially in 2023-2024
The calculator doesn’t show you what you typed in….maybe I’m the idiot but I can’t figure it out
No ability to do Picture in Picture especially with FaceTime, so everytime I leave the app to look at another window it always blacks the video out
Printing things from my phone is so difficult now
Apple Pay for some reason only works when I double click the side button before placing the phone near the reader rather than scan and then double click
Speaking of wallet I can’t transfer in a local public transit commuter card from android….i need a physical card or number to scan. There is no option to manually enter that I can see
The action button why can I only do 1 action and not multiple with a click and then a hold option?
Speaking of action button I have mine set to silent bc if I keep clicking the volume down button it doesn’t automatically put the ringer on vibrate and then silent
Which leads me to why in gods name can I not turn off send noises from any app? I don’t need to hear the swoosh sound every time.
The Notification Center in general bothers me
Also I really miss the back button and menu buttons on the bottom.
I’m sure there’s more I forgot about but those are little things that have bugged me.
You can download a free app called pass2u wallet and it will allow you to add any image to your Apple wallet. That might be able to help you with your transit card issue
You can just type in the address bar to search, you don’t have to share. It’s always been that way since page search was introduced. It shows up under its own suggestion category as “Find on page (results number)”
What a wonderful example, there is a feature, but it’s in absolutely no way obvious, not if you look across your screen thoroughly, or if you’ve got a few decades of computing experience guiding you.
If I don’t scroll down, how would I ever know that the “found on page” is down there. I’ve been using iPhone and safari for years and didn’t know about this method. Other things like that have come up before, hidden features that no one in their right mind would naturally discover.
I wonder if safari on macOS has the same functionality, I bet it doesn’t. But even if it did…
Technically speaking its a ‘plausible’. Practically speaking it’s a hard no.
It’s perfectly possible for tech folk to create a version of android for any iPhone. Apple has locked the hardware so that that can’t happen.
As others have said, you can sell the iPhone and get a nice Android.
Best case, it would be astronomically more complicated than just learning to deal with iOS. That’s if it’s technically possible at all.
Maybe just swap the phone out for something that runs Android natively.
