I’m here to give an update to my journey from an Android to an iPhone after much debate in a previous post (from a different account). TLDR at the bottom.
If you’d like to see the old post: Click Here
For those wondering on details, I switched from a Galaxy Note 10+ to an iPhone 12 Pro Max. I won’t explain my reasons for model choice but it was a balance of price, size, and features in that order.
I’ll discuss my main pros and cons in sections here, going from what is most important to me to least important.
USER INTERFACE The user interface and experience on android isn’t awful, but I don’t think there’s much contest here. I said in my other post that apple has an advantage here and I was absolutely right. iOS has smooth animations for everything, is quicker for searching and finding apps, and just plain looks better to me. And while the android toolbar provides many more buttons for quick actions, I never used many of them. Most of the usable settings are here on iPhone in that easy drop down menu. Even long presses on icons to quickly change settings is here. And the mute button on the side is and has always been a no brained for me, should be standard on every phone.
I come from Samsung and their OneUI so I recognize this could be better on other phones, but I was plagued with some stutter in animations and slow app indexing through their search bar. The UI always felt a little clunky and that’s clear with how much was changed in OneUI versions. Things were often easier to access, sure, but the common actions I was taking reduce to simpler menus. Not only that but scaling is very wrong on android phones for some reason. I had my text somewhat smaller because if I blew it up, it looked very strange to me.
iMESSAGE AND FACETIME This was another big reason to switch because a lot of my friends have iPhones and use iMessage frequently. I can tell you that this is a problem specific to the US but so far I do enjoy the maturity of having a put together messaging app. Only recently has Google created something even close where before each android phone had their own app and it was a massive headache. As I stated, having RCS on android and iOS communicate would be big in bringing me back to android but until that happens, the social cost is not worth it to me. I know other apps fill that void in other countries but I couldn’t get my friends to migrate. Aside from that though, it’s one of the best messaging apps I’ve used and FaceTime seems more stable than most video apps.
APPLE ECOSYSTEM
Now look, I know how it works and they stock you in a walled garden. But consider that other companies do the exact same and *sometimes * the benefits can be worth it. For instance, my partner has an Apple HomePod speaker. It’s incredibly easy to stream music to it and as a plus, the Siri assistant has gotten much better. I can’t pick this apart by each strand, but the smoothness of the connections to my devices has definitely improved. I used to fail just to cast YouTube to my Tv on android for random reasons. It would take a couple tries. Now, first try every time. Same with the speaker. No fiddling with Bluetooth with this one. And the menu to change what device is playing sound is miles better than on my android phone.
VOICE ASSISTANT
This one is unexpected, but I’ve enjoyed the voice assistant a lot more. This is something that should be current across android phones so I feel comfortable speaking on it. If you’ve used SIRI previously, it used to suck. Like a lot. Google was miles ahead by every metric. Now though? I can ask Siri to play music and it knows what app Im asking for and doesn’t take up to 15 seconds to phone home and do the task. It’s faster. Much faster.
The only area in which Siri suffers is when asking for web based questions. Other than that, it works better for the much more common tasks I do.
RANDOM OBSERVATIONS
I mentioned Siri but the real benefit is with CarPlay. Where to start? CarPlay is quite a bit ahead here as well. It starts up on my head unit in about 1/5th the time before the warnings even disappear. And the interface is simple and knows where to put things. Putting the time near the driver and putting the app bar on the left near where I sit just seems like the way to go. So yeah, CarPlay is smooth and even has easy ways to make it wireless with unofficial dongles. Can’t say the same for android auto.
Charging times are worse on the iPhone but it’s not that bad and the phone does last me longer. My battery in my old phone was a bit older though, so I’ll call it even.
Grudges
I hate the lightning connector, it’s a PITA compared to UsbC but I don’t interact with it often, only for charging. And MagSafe would solve most problems and can be used with cases unlike my android phones wireless charging.
The Home Screen is a sticking point as well but mostly just for app arrangement. Otherwise, the widgets are perfectly fine. Better than fine actually because the Home Screen implements the widgets well even if space is limited. I’ve noticed that the apps that I use frequently also have more and better widgets on iOS than on android. I noticed it specifically with TickTick but overall the systems are fairly similar but with less customization of widget size and placement on iOS.
Last comment is that I understand this isn’t for everyone, we all have our own use cases. This isn’t a phone war, just here as reference for those wanting to switch or considering it. If you haven’t used iOS for a sustained period in recent years, understand that your perspective may be out of date because mine certainly was.
Thanks for reading!
TL;DR iOS has its ups and downs but from my perspective, most of what I said in my original post stands as good reasons to buy an Apple device. My main sticking points are repairability, walled garden apps, and initial price. Other than that, I’ve converted to iOS and I don’t miss many features of Android and I suspect that for all but the tech tinkerers, an iPhone is the way to go in the US.
I don’t know anyone actually using WhatsApp - and considering who makes it, I’m not tempted to start on my own. Of course there are other, better alternatives, but you still have to convince others to use what you would like to use. That is an uphill battle - especially with tech illiterate users in your family.
In the US I’ve never met anyone that uses WhatsApp. I think this is because texting was free for everyone here for a long time before it came out, so there was no real reason to move to a messaging app over what was already built in and free.
You think using an app owned by a company that caused a genocide, influenced a major election, and has negatively affected the entire world’s population means you’re tech savvy? I don’t know a single software dev that uses whatsapp. It has nothing to do with being tech savvy.
People in eg Europe often text with people across borders, what with countries being small and borders just being a line on the map. International sms used to be expensive AF. So WhatsApp was a very logical solution to this. Unlimited sms was most often only for national messages.
I cannot handle the lack of a unified control scheme and app logic in iOS. I don’t understand how all apple users just ignore that.
In android back is back. In every single app. It always does what you expect. It goes back.
I iOS sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes up. Sometimes it’s on the bottom, sometimes it’s on the upper top left (why the actual f would you place it there…), sometimes it’s wherever. It depends on the apps it seems?
App settings are sometimes in the apps themselves and sometimes buried twenty menus deep in the phone settings menu. Where is the logic in that?
Those two points alone hold me back from using an iPhone or iPad. (there’s others, but I could live with those). It’s frustratingly complex to use compared to the relative simplicity of an Android.
Most people use a gesture - swipe from the left edge of the screen. Or from the bottom if you want to leave the app.
Yeah, I know this gestures, they’re not the same…
iPhone users always tell me about those. They have never used the superior android implementation for any real stretch of time and don’t know what they’re missing tbh…
iOS does a lot right. Navigating the OS itself is not one of them though imo.
I recently switched myself, my wife, and my mom from old Moto X4 Android phones to slightly newer, but not current iPhones (X, XS, and 11 Pro). It’s been a few months now (maybe 3 or so?). Honestly, I’m not that happy with them. I think I’ll stick to it mainly for privacy, security, and environmental reasons - iPhones are supported with security updates for way, way, way longer than the vast majority of Android phones. Like two or three times as long, in some cases. This offsets the price factor, maintains security for longer, and reduces electronic waste by making the phones viable for longer. By my calculations, I actually come out ahead with iPhones with regard to price. I like that iPhones let you remove most, maybe even all the built-in apps that come pre-installed. I also like that they give you an actual indication of your battery health.
Having said that, many other aspects of iPhones have been a hassle or just plain sucked:
The keyboard sucks. Poor editing, poor layout without a number row, not able to turn off the stupid app bar or whatever they call it on the top row.
The messaging app sucks. First, don’t forget that it’s Apple’s intransigence now that’s preventing iMessage from being interoperable with Android, and I say this as someone who has come to dislike and avoid Google as much as possible. I hope that the EU forcing them to make messaging interoperable will yield some real improvements with this. Second, the messaging app doesn’t show dates and times on messages by default. I have to pull each message to the side to see this info. Third, there appears to be no search function within a message thread, what a pain. Finally, I also found out that iPhones aren’t able to do anything whatsoever with certain common attachments from text messages. I had messages received from Android phones with AMR files in them (audio recording files). The iPhone was completely unable to open them, I couldn’t find even an app that could open them, and the damn phone wouldn’t let me forward the text message to an email! I ended up having to go back to the Android and forward the text to email in order to be able to open the attachments. Completely unacceptable.
The connectivity with PCs sucks. They allow you to see your photos (only the photos and videos, nothing else) when connected through USB, but it barely works. My photo transfers fail most of the time, and it seems to be impossible to let my photo manager delete the photos from the phone after transferring them. Yeah, iTunes is supposed to work, but you can’t manage two different phones with different iCloud accounts on one Windows login. Besides, iTunes itself sucks. Their replacement app for this, Apple Mobile Devices I think it was called, only supports Windows 11, not Windows 10.
The offline PDF storage and reading sucks. I was going to an event that I knew was going to be away from mobile networks and prepared for this by jumping through all the hoops (I’m not kidding) that it took to actually download PDFs locally to the phone so that they were available offline. These PDFs held the map and event guides. I get there, offline, and try to open the PDFs that I painstakingly had downloaded offline. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the damn built-in app for reading the PDFs needed internet connectivity! Thankfully it wasn’t a life or death situation, but still, how frustrating and disappointing.
The official community support site sucks. The impression I’ve had in researching the issues above is that someone will give some incredibly lame answer that doesn’t really resolve the issue and instead papers it over, that answer will be marked as the correct answer, and it’s end of story. You need to find discussions on other unofficial forums for real discussions of technical issues.
This is all I can think of for now. There’s probably more, but you get the idea.
I like this kind of input because it displays use cases and problems that I haven’t thought of which is exactly why I made the post, so thanks for saying all this and taking the time for that.
That being said, I’m not trying to fight but I’ll give my perspective of how I feel about the issues you raised as an average user just to provide some context in case anyone is concerned about this stuff.
The keyboard is absolutely something that, if android keyboards are a must for you, you might be upset by. I have yet to customize my keyboard at all so I’m trying the default layout for now. I don’t mind the app bar because it isn’t any worse than the few keyboards I used on android. Swipe to text works fine for me but autocorrect does occasionally get words wrong. Not any worse than my android keyboards though (I’ve tried all the major ones out there too). However, I’m fine with my typing pace on iOS, so that doesn’t bother me. I have a couple UX complaints with it but nothing to make me ditch the phone. Might just take time for me to get comfy.
As for messaging, I noted a lot of what you said in the previous post I made. Not having RCS is their fault, it sucks, but if the EU gets it figured out it may tempt me back to Android. I don’t mind the messaging app so far because it does provide a lot of functionality for socializing that Googles alternatives just don’t have or are done poorly. Not everyone will use the entire messaging app but a lot of the complaints are niche to me. Ive never even heard of AMR files. Also I believe searching for messages is being added but I agree that its absence is rather odd.
Connectivity does suck. Hopefully it will improve on newer models but again, I hardly ever have a reason to connect my phone directly to my PC. I back up all of my photos over wifi so I have no need. In fact, my previous phone was used only a handful of times for file transfer. So it isn’t important to me and I don’t think its important to average users, but its a good note and I hope a switch to USB-C will improve that.
Also your situation with PDFs is odd. I’ve had the opposite experience as I actually took a short vacation the past week with my device. It brought up and stored the event emails, tickets (in the wallet) and maps that I needed for the event pretty easily. I definitely had to open a couple of PDFs but maybe it used my connection. So I’ll say that I’m not sure what thats about but I’d bet an app can solve that problem.
Your last point is a mixed bag. Community support is hard to find but if you’ve ever looked at forums asking google how to fix something its pretty much the exact same thing. Only difference is that a workaround is usually possible but requires a bit more effort. Like uninstalling their default apps for instance. Or changing the per-app notification sound (may be fixed now idk). When I tried to search for those things, all the google responses just said “pound sand, we’ll add it to our totally real feature request list”. Still, adaptability is more an Android thing for sure.
Thanks. I’m not trying to fight either, but just relate my experience with the switch so far. I would be happy if I could feel that iPhones were all around superior to Android like some people do because my general views on Google have become very negative, but I’ve run into too many silly issues that prevent me from feeling that way. I presume that the people that post that iPhones are great and Android is terrible either haven’t run into any similar issues (limited uses of the phones?), haven’t used Android at least in the last few years, or are trolling, or are brainwashed. I think anyone giving an honest comparison (like I think you’re doing) would say that they are both completely mixed bags.
Just to add some clarifications and new points:
My keyboard usage is very basic. I don’t use swipe gestures, didn’t use any custom keyboard apps on Android, and don’t do anything out of the ordinary. I continue to struggle with editing functionality on iPhone, like once it highlights a partially written word and gives a wrong auto-correct suggestion, I have a super hard time undoing that selection. I have to tap all over the place to get it to unhighlight. Could be user error though. I also continue to hit those app bar buttons at the top of the keyboard in the middle of typing, causing a big interruption in the process.
AMR files are or at least used to be what Google uses for audio files embedded in SMS/MMS messages. I found out that iOS dropped support for the format years ago. Seems like a big interoperability issue to me.
How do you do the Wi-Fi photos transfer from your phone to computer? I would like to do something similar.
Your experience with PDFs may have used an internet connection when it came time to open them, if one was available. When I tried to do the same by using I think the Apple Books app (for the first time, which may have been my issue) it said it needed a connection. Maybe the connection was only required to set up that app. Maybe siri would actually be useful in getting things properly set up. I’ve avoided doing anything with that so far.
One other issue that I forgot to mention in my previous post: serious overheating issues on iPhones. Like my phone has shutdown in the middle of maps navigation (while charging and also playing music), and also in the middle of a video call. I have a TPU case on it, which apparently is a problem? But this never happened with my Moto X4. Admittedly that was a mid-range phone at the time it was released, while these iPhones are near the top of the range if not at the top. Maybe top range phones run hot because of faster CPUs. It still seems odd though.
Well for photos I’m currently using Google photos to transfer stuff but I’ll be moving away from that pretty soon so im not the person to ask probably. The hope is that I can find an app to either directly transfer photos or have my own cloud storage going forward.
I’d prefer to move away from Google services but it does make backing up photos very easy so there’s that
Why won’t you just use a 3rd party keyboard and messaging app if you loathe those? It’s not like apple forces anyone to stick with the stock apps if you don’t like them. I use Gboard and Whatsapp/Messenger and they are pretty much what you would get on android as well!
Good point. I had forgotten that I had briefly looked at the 3rd party keyboards on iOS, but I think I either decided to give the built-in keyboard for a while and then forgot to try the others, or if I didn’t see any caught my eye. Gboard would be out since I’m trying to degoogle, but I need to look into this again. Thanks for reminding me.
I have to respectfully disagree with many of the points you mentioned, and I believe it really boils down to the different android phone models that can provide a very different user experience.
I have been using my Xiaomi Mi 11 for a maybe 18 months now, and going through some of your points but from this phone’s perspective:
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iOS has smooth animations for everything, is quicker for searching and finding apps, and just plain looks better to me - the Miui interface is renowned / notorious for being a copycat of the iOS interface, so I actually see no big difference from the iOS interface. But Android being Android, it is highly customizable, and with my phone rooted, I actually have the iOS’s own San Francisco system font installed (I hated Android’s default roboto font), and have customized the main page to have two news update widgets just the way I wanted it. My background is an animated waterfall that to me looks stunning (created from my own video shot during a hiking trip). I know it is subjective, but honestly I see it the other way around. Android, with the right phone model and when setup right, can have butter smooth animations for everything, is just as quick if not quicker for searching and finding apps (I literally have the apps organized in their respective folders, never difficult to find), and it just plain looks better to me especially with the animated background of my own choice.
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some stutter in animations and slow app indexing through their search bar - … yeah it probably has something to do with your old phone. No problem whatsoever over here. 120Mhz refresh rate. Butter smooth all day long.
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iMESSAGE AND FACETIME - can’t comment here. Facetime especially can be a headache if everyone else is using an iPhone.
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Voice Assistant - haven’t tried Siri for years. But I have been using Google Assistant both in Android Auto and (to a lesser extent) on the phone itself. No complaints there. I have a Google Nest Audio device too and thought it integrates well with my phone and my smart home (turning lights on/off, activating the home alarm system, interfacing with Home Assistant, etc)
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CarPlay is quite a bit ahead here as well - hmm this is where I am really quite confused. My wireless Android Auto works extremely well with my vehicle. It starts up as soon as I enter my car in like less than one second with a totally seamless process (as in I do not need to do anything at all). With the coolwalk version of AA (released for more than 6 months already I believe), it actually has everything you mentioned that are available on Carplay: No warning message, time IS near the driver, app bar IS on the right where I sit (we have steering wheels on the right side). My AA IS smooth and is already wireless without any need for any dongle. And since my phone is rooted, I can even tweak my AA to play videos which is nice when your car is parked and you are waiting for someone for instance. Here is a snapshot:
I agree, there’s some unnecessary exaggeration as well lol. A full minute to phone home to play music? Definitely not, sometimes for lights but my partners iphone does the same so I think that’s our bulbs.
Apologies, its an exaggeration on the ‘full minute’ part of the spectrum but I have noticed that the assistant is faster by quite a bit. I’ll change that part. While using the assistant and asking it to play music in my car, it would often take up to 30 seconds to get from me finishing saying the prompt, it uploading to google, coming back, and playing the music I want. Siri takes about 10 seconds at most.
I have had many times where the assistant just gave up on me though, especially while driving. It would stop my music when I summoned it for about 20 seconds, appear to be listening, and then tell me that it was sorry and couldn’t complete my request or would say nothing and resume the music. I got so frustrated with the assistant in my car that I stopped using it entirely. Could just be my experience, seems like some people think Auto and the assistant work just fine for them.
Oh no worries at all! Don’t get me wrong, I definitely wasn’t saying that G Assistant is good by any means, and I think there’s a wide variety of factors ranging from what Google decides to deploy per user (is it a thing? I dunno, but they do staged rollouts so why not have staged deployments) to what specific conditions the user is trying, like under Android Auto (you) and for what vehicle or in a bedroom with an ancient Home Mini (me). For both of us, assistant seems to have a high suck to work ratio in this scenario. However for me just using bluetooth headphones, or a regular voice command to control my phone it’s flawless, whereas my partner cannot stand what Siri does when she tries and it’s slow to actually do whatever it decided to.
Ultimately what these things come down to most of the time is fairly subjective workflows and usecases each with various strengths and weaknesses that may or may not matter to the user. I find that G Assistant used to be able to take complex commands, then got really bad, then got decent at simple commands, then got bad, and now is just mediocre all around. Through that time my partners had pretty similar experiences on her iPhone 14 - Siri is slow and opens the wrong app or doesn’t actually set the timer/alarm, mine can’t do “and” commands and adds a new timer each time. They’re all buggy, just in different ways lol.
If you’re driving around, I definitely get wanting whichever is fastest for you. If that lines up with whatever ecosystem you’re looking for then even better!
I really appreciate your response, it’s exactly what I was hoping to add to the post here. I want people to hear what is working for others in the Android ecosystem. I’m just hoping to add some valuable input about why I didn’t want to be on android anymore and how that went.
To respond though, the animations thing like you said had to do with my phone slowing down. Why? No clue. I don’t think it was my fault, I don’t mess with my phone and I kept my apps minimal and storage wasn’t close to full. I’m not saying it’s impossible to get smooth animations on android, my phone used to have them, but I will say that most UI features animate more consistently and nicer out of the box with iPhone. I’ll also give a nod to what I said about people who tinker. That was me and I enjoyed the freedom of android for a long time. But I didn’t want to spend the time to get it perfect anymore. I setup my phone in a couple of days how I wanted it and now I don’t feel the need to touch very much on it. Different strokes. I should also note though that my phone was only about 3 or 4 years old at that point and was chugging more than I expect at that mark.
The assistant thing is anecdotal, but Google does a pretty decent job. Unfortunately their integrations with my model of choice were subpar so I didn’t enjoy using it but I can see why people would prefer one or the other. I like the simplicity of Siri I guess (common theme) whereas Google has built an assistant with a million gizmos to it. I’ll get back to you on the smart home stuff eventually :)
CarPlay is going to be another anecdote. My car is not old, a 2017, but I don’t have a similar interface. Maybe it’s the smaller screen or something? But it’s only changed UI like once I think. Either way, for me and my car it works better and I commented what I did as I noticed it. So I guess YMMV on that.
It’s always seemed to me like android prioritizes new and flashy stuff and easily forgets their older legacy devices. Support being hit or miss is why I gave up android, but it could just be on Samsungs side. Just a thought, Cheers!
That has to do with the fact that iOS runs the UI on a separate thread with a higher priority,
No that’s not true at all. In fact iPhone CPUs are under-clocked whenever they’re idle, running at about 0.5Ghz which is drastically less than full speed.
When you tap on a button, an iPhone CPU might ramp up to full speed, but by the time it does the animation is already half way completed. However usually the CPU load during the animation is so low that it doesn’t bother to ramp up.
There’s nothing high priority at all about an animation on an iPhone. If it was Apple would setup their CPUs to run animations at the full clock speed.
iPhone animations are fast because they use low level GPU instructions such as “here’s a static image, move it to the left by half a dozen pixels, repeat until it has moved all the way from one end of the screen to the other”. Any phone sold in the last 20 years can do transitions like that effortlessly.
Android hardware is absolutely capable of stutter free animations. And the software could be extensively rewritten to be more efficient. They’ve had 15 years to do that work and they still haven’t done it, even though for that entire time the iPhone has had smooth animations. At this point I’m not sure it will ever be fixed.
A beefier CPU won’t help much. Bottlenecked software will be slow even on the best hardware. The video frame is stuttering because the CPU is doing something else - probably twiddling it’s thumbs idle while waiting for slow flash memory to provide a file. And why is the flash memory slow? Again, because they choose to put slow flash memory in the phone. Fast flash memory is available, it probably just costs and extra five bucks. Users would be happy to pay five bucks more for a significantly faster phone… but the phone manufacturers want to keep that profit for themselves.
I made the switch too earlier this year from a Samsung Galaxy S10e to an iPhone 12 and I agree to all of your points.
The only thing I liked much more on Android were the notifications. Android’s notification are so much more flexible with the option to customise each different kind of notification for each app, to have silent notifications and “collapsed” ones that do not show a marker in the status bar.
Speaking of that, it is annoying that on iOS there is no indicator in the status bar if you have a notification, so that you always have to pull down to check for new ones.
Beside that, Apple ecosystem is so incredibly well integrated and in my opinions feels overall smoother than Android.
EDIT: changed tone a little bit
I generally agree about notifications being a little better on Android, but I think I’ve used iOS for long enough that I’ve made it work for me regardless. On iOS, I’ve found that the best way to see when an app needs your attention is to be very intentional about which ones get notification badges, and make sure those apps are visible on your first home screen and/or dock.
Once that’s set up, you probably won’t need notification center as much, or you might only check it when you see a badge on an app you care about. I’d still love to see a couple more options (maybe utilizing the dynamic island?), but this gets the job done.
I always see people mention notifications not being good on iOS, and maybe I’m in the minority but why do people really care about them? What benefit am I missing from constantly being bombarded by notifications?
Like I only have notifications on for messages and phone calls, and once a month for a week turn on outlook for when I’m on call.
I’m just not sure what people need besides a line or two about what the email is or message says and the iOS covers that, whether in the card that pops down or in the Notification Center.
I switched a few months ago and this for me has been a bit of a pain point.
As you say even a dot at the top would be adequate to show there’s notifications. Just like the apple watch!
It’s interesting you bring that up. It annoys me slightly about the notifications but also I thought that my android phone spammed me with them. And they all got equal priority. So at least iPhone does do that better. I think for me it’s about equal there as well because I never took time on android to customize the notifications and I’d rather they all just act consistently.
