After spending over a decade with various Android phones, I finally made the switch to an iPhone. Here’s why I made the switch and what I’ve discovered since.
The Struggles with Samsung/Android
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Slow Shutter on Samsung Flagships: One of my biggest gripes with Samsung’s flagship phones has been the slow shutter and shutter lag. Trying to capture a moving subjects often resulted in blurry photos or missed shots entirely. This has been an issue with Samsung phones for many years.
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Google’s Service Abandonment: Google has a notorious history of abandoning services. The most recent one being the Podcasts app. The podcast experience on YouTube Music is just terrible.
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Hardware Design: The Samsung S24 Ultra has sharp corners that make it uncomfortable to hold. The Pixel 8 phones have issues with connectivity and overheating. The S24+ comes with an inferior Exynos processor.
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Performance: No matter how fast the hardware is, Android phones always seem to slow down and stutter after a few months of use. It’s like they age in dog years. (My most recent Samsung phone was the S23+, and it already started lagging).
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Apps: Android apps have an inconsistent look and feel. It’s like a patchwork quilt made by someone who doesn’t know how to sew. Also, a lot of Android apps require excessive permissions.
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Disaster: A Samsung update once made my phone unbootable. I had to do a full reset and lost some data. People said I should have made a backup before the update, but Android doesn't provide an easy way to completely backup the phone. That was the last straw.
The iPhone Revelation
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Shortcuts: The Shortcuts app on iPhone is a game-changer. It automates tasks in ways I never thought possible.
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Face ID: Face ID on the iPhone is leagues ahead of Samsung’s version and even better than Touch ID. It’s fast, reliable, and just works. With the amount of unlocks I need everyday, this turns out to be more impactful than I expected.
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Files App: The Files app is actually useful, and it has built-in support for Windows file shares.
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Look & Feel: Everything on iOS feels smoother and more premium. The animations, the UI design – it’s all just so polished.
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Audio: It’s much easier to select audio output in-app when connected to multiple Bluetooth devices and AirPlay.
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Driving: CarPlay is a joy to use compared to Android Auto. Plus, Apple Maps has better voice directions.
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Emulators: Emulators are now possible to use on iPhone without jailbreaking.
Switching to iPhone has been a breath of fresh air. While Android gave me more freedom and customizations. The consistency, reliability, and overall experience of iOS have won me over.
What was your experience switching to/from "the dark side"?
I used Android for many years because I thought such features were important. But when I switched to iOS this time, I realized that better implementation is more important than more features, in many cases.
How? It is not as flexible as Firefox on Android, but Safari has support for adblocking extensions and it displays all websites fine.
This is true and I do hope to see alternative browsers (with different rendering engines).
The same could be said about Google, which is worse in some aspects.
Care to advise alternatives?
Easy for you to say in retrospect after having spent years with access to basic functionality that apple users got like 6 months ago
How much time you got? You aren't a web dev, that's for sure. From lack of support for features standard on the other two major browsers since years ago to bugginess in things like video, it's an awful browser. Web developers have to treat it like Internet explorer used to be, spending hours making apps usable which worked in minutes in the other two. Look up any given recent feature on caniuse and you'll see it's either not supported yet or got support added years after the other ones got it. And the explanation is simple. Apple wants web experiences to be worse because they don't make money from the web, they make money from apps. An entire segment of software developers have to waste many hours supporting the piece of shit because they decided it was more profitable that way. Also btw extension support is very much news to me. Must be directly from Apple stuff. They don't have thousands of extensions available like mobile Firefox, that's for sure.
Say what you want about Google, they are shitty as hell but at least their entire business model isn't being selectively incompatible with standards if it will earn a buck. And they also don't advertise constantly as more private or secure when they absolutely aren't.