[dchuk]

Anybody ever switch from iPhone to android back and forth? I’m Apple products top to bottom but wouldn’t hate being able to switch to something like this for a few weeks at a time to change my habits…but it just seems gnarly and painful to make that kind of switch given how deep I am into Apple ecosystem (photos, iMessage, etc)

[projektfu]

I make the switch from time to time. I don't like or rely on Apple photos, and my friends are mostly on WhatsApp or, surprisingly, RCS.

There's a handful of apps that aren't available on one or another. I really like f-droid, too, and I wish that apple had a free software directory somewhere.

I find Android Auto less finicky than CarPlay and Google Assistant more useful than Siri. But it feels like voice assistants are actually getting dumber as time goes on.

But eventually I get frustrated and switch to another phone, there's always something to complain about.

[hedora]

If you try to maintain the same level of privacy as iOS (no unencrypted personal information server-side), then android is basically unusable.

The main issue is that most apps require location services or other google stuff that also needlessly sends private data to google. (There are attempts to reimplement the location services api, but they were all flaky for me).

It’s not just that one service, and in practice apps will crash on startup for a week or so, then work, then regress again.

The second problem is that you have to pick third party apps with reasonable privacy practices, and those are buried in the app store search rankings (FDroid makes them easier to find.)

If you don’t care about privacy, then you might have a passable experience under android. The main advantages I noticed were that you can run emulators, and that it is easy to pirate abandonware. (I have a BB-8 sphero, and they didn’t renew the IP license with lucas arts, mostly bricking it. On android, it is possible to pirate the old bundled software. On iOS it is not.)

[THENATHE]

The real problem is that you sacrifice privacy for quality of life.

I have had so many fucking bugs with my iPhone 13 Pro Max:

The camera fucking SUCKS, even compared to my pixel 2 xl. Every photo looks like a cheap watercolor. And the computational photography (night mode) is fucking terrible. The image stabilization is nonexistent compared to the pixel 2 xl, and don’t even get me started on video stabilization

The keyboard will randomly get earsplittingly loud for no reason at all and will have huge typing delay.

Notifications are just worse

My messages app crashes frequently, and contact pictures refuse to show up about half the time

They keyboard is fucking awful compared to gboard, and the iOS gboard isn’t good

Google assistant is orders of magnitude better than Siri, and let’s be real: if you use any assistant it is going to listen to you

Apple Maps is terrible compared to google maps, and apple optionally chooses to gimp the lock screen navigation of everything besides Apple Maps (also yelp )

Voice typing is truly horrendous

The notes app is shit, just doesn’t work very well

I could keep going, but having been on apple thrice and android 4 times, I’m throughly done with apple unless they make some MASSIVE changes

[nullnotzero]

Sort of related, but I switched from an iPhone to a Unihertz Titan with the goal of reducing smartphone screen time. Ultimately switched back to iPhone because I found that remaining connected to my social circle necessitated an iPhone. Of course, YMMV.

Link to my experience if you’re interested: https://rickytakkar.com/blog_smartphone_detox.html

[skavi]

I think mkbhd (a tech reviewer) may have made a video on that.