Android to iPhone

It's official! I have hit my quarter-life crisis. Up until the last month I had been an Android guy for life. In fact, at some point, I'm sure I said the words, "I will never own an iPhone". It's not that I was a super huge Apple hater. I've always thought that iPhones were good phones just not the phone for me. The price, lack of customization, and Apple controlling what you can and can't do on an iPhone kept me from buying one for a long time. But here we are! I'm not even sure now how it happened but I am now the proud owner of an iPhone 14 Pro and Apple Watch Series 7. I'm here to tell you that both Androids and iPhones have their pros and cons. Now that I've been using the phone for about a month now I want to write up my experience moving between ecosystems.

Migration Process

I preordered my iPhone the morning they opened sales. I was scheduled for a delivery a month later even though the actual phones were available a week later. What!? A whole month!? I was pumped but slightly annoyed. I've preordered pixel phones before and had those show up a day before they were supposed to. Ok whatever, I was excited about my iPhone and it just gave me something to look forward to. Well, except I was impatient. A week later after the phone was officially available I checked online and found one in stock at an Apple store near me and picked it up the next day.

Ok, so I had the phone now the hard part. Switching my whole life over from Android to iPhone. I expected this to be very difficult and time-consuming. The first thing I learned was NOT to use the Move to iOS App. I hadn't used it to start but when I called to set up the eSIM I got unlucky and got an incompetent support person. They told me the Move to iOS App would set up the eSIM for me and that I needed to factory reset my iPhone first. Of course, this was after already installing all the apps I wanted and backgrounds, etc. After the factory reset and using the app, it didn't move the eSIM over and it caused a bunch of problems with bad data. My iPhone couldn't load all my messages and contacts and everything was just spinning for hours. I had to factory reset my phone and call my carrier yet again. This time I got someone who had my eSIM setup in 2 minutes. Great, now I could set up my phone and finally use it after three hours.

As far as moving data over, I left all my text messages behind and didn't worry about moving them after the previous issues with the migration app. I'm not one of those sentimental people over my text messages. I was surprised that Apple let me use my Google account for contacts and calendars and so setting all that up took only a minute or two. I store all my pictures in Google Photos which makes transfer as easy as installing the Google Photos app on my phone. I was excited that the native Files app integrated nicely with Google Drive as well, although I still downloaded the drive app from the App Store. Overall I was happy I didn't have to link my storage with iCloud for now but could still get full functionality out of the phone.

How Android beats iOS

Smartwatch Compatibility

I realized Garmin Watch worked great for activity tracking and syncing to Strava, it no longer displayed notifications. I could it to work for an hour or two and then it would stop again. This wasn't something I had expected and while I had thought about getting an Apple Watch if I ended up liking the iPhone if I needed that functionality sooner I'd need to buy one sooner. I'd never once had a problem with any other smartwatch I'd had an Android.

File management

File management on iOS, although it has come a long way, sucks. A good example of this is my folder of audiobooks. With any Android phone, I can plug it into my computer and drag and drop the full folder onto the phone and then listen to those books with a variety of different apps. With iOS I had to import that folder into the Books app on my Macbook and then sync it over. When I import the audiobooks into Books on my computer it copies all the files to the App's storage directory and so the files are now stored in two places. This is also annoying because I like to backup all my files to Google Drive and I'd like to be able to point the storage directory to somewhere in my Google Drive folder.

Sending Gifs

Ok, why is sending Gifs so hard? On Android, I used Google's Keyboard and could attach Gifs anywhere. On iPhone, Messages has its own gif search, Discord has its own and if the app I want doesn't have its own I have to use a gif keyboard and copy the image and paste it. Not a super huge deal but more clunky than on Android.

Spam Texts

I didn't realize how many spam texts I got until I switch to iOS. Android does an amazing job of filtering out any spam text I got without me even knowing it most of the time. On my iPhone, I can block specific numbers and report messages as junk but there is no way to avoid the notifications without disabling notifications for everyone outside of my contacts.

Individuality

I miss being different. When I look around the room it seems like everyone has an iPhone. It was fun keeping up with different companies making new phones and what they were trying to do.

Global Backward Gesture/Button

iOS is missing a global backward gesture/button. For some apps, I can swipe from the left side to go back but not on all and when I have to look around for the back button that is different sometimes in different apps it can get annoying. Again not a huge deal but just one way that iOS is missing a little finesse.

Customization

On Android, I could make my phone look however I wanted. iOS has gotten better recently. It took me an hour or two and I was able to set up shortcuts with custom icons that I wanted, but laughably more complicated than installing an icon pack and pressing apply on a custom launcher. It drives me crazy that the home screen widgets will always show the name of the app below them. The only pro for customization that iOS has is the lockscreen. I love the lock screen widgets and the ability to have multiple lock screen/home screen combinations for easy switching. Also seems like Android has a lot more third-party developers making free customizations than iOS does.

How iOS beats Android

The Apple Ecosystem

When you have everything Apple, it all just works together so nicely. The other day I pulled out my laptop and didn't have a Wifi connection, but my iPhone was already listed there as a hotspot without me doing anything. The shared clipboard is life-changing. I love being able to hand off calls to different devices. I also love being able to send and receive SMS and iMessages from any device or getting Apple Maps notifications about upcoming directions on my watch while I'm driving.

Face ID

It's great when it works. I think the best situation would be to have Face ID and a fingerprint sensor. I do get annoyed when it doesn't work when I'm lying in bed at night. Everywhere else it does work is so nice though. I love how all my apps can use it for authentication as well. Feels like I can securely get into things faster than I could on Android.

The Screen

This is why I bought this phone. The display is amazing. Brightness is great, so smooth. Just feels like very high quality. I know there are other Android phones out there with similar specs but I think this iPhone is in the top three out there.

The Camera

The software behind the camera is amazing to me. The video stabilization makes it look like your video was recorded with a drone. The picture quality looks is top notch. I know other phones you can get the same resolution but I still think iPhone pictures look higher quality with all the magic they do behind the scenes.

Updates

Apple does a better job of keeping all of its devices up to date. This isn't entirely Android's fault but it's easier to buy an iPhone and know it will get software updates than an Android phone period.

UI/UX

I think Apple nails usability. Anyone can figure out how to use an iPhone. Everything looks nice and consistent. I also love the consistency of the UI across devices. I have seen other companies fail at this.

Overall, the only thing that I've found my iPhone can't do that my Android could (at least out of the box) is run a game emulator. Everything else works great, I even found several apps that let me ssh and run terminal applications (which I thought would be impossible). I still feel like the price tag was a little high and the hype a little more than it should be. I also don't fully agree with Apple's stance on a lot of different things but they do make great hardware and software. Looks like I'll be sticking in the Apple camp at least for the next three to four years!