Apple

Hey everyone, genuine discussion here as fair as possible, not trying to start a war or anything 😂

So I have been an Android user for more than the last 10 years and have seen all advancements from Android since version 2. I always respected the build quality and hardware of iPhone but iOS was so restricted you could basically do nothing with it.

Lately, both operating systems have hugely evolved and have reached a certain feature parity so I felt it was time for me to give a chance to the Apple side.

So I did it and moved from my last OnePlus Nord 2 phone to the latest iPhone 15 Pro Max. I know these phones belong to different categories but my discussion will concentrate mostly on the OS stuff so it won't matter.

What troubles me is that although iPhone is certainly a nice phone with good build quality, I keep trying to find reasons that would explain and make my switch worthy but on the contrary I constantly find things that annoy me and consider loss of functionality after the switch.

So I wanted to try and give a small summary of my pros and cons as fair as possible and have a discussion around what people think.

Let's start with the cons:

• my work uses Google Workspace accounts. Apple calendar does not fully support Google calendar syncing. What I mean is that PUSH is not supported to get immediately new events from the server but a fetch is done (by the app) every once in a while to get the updates. What is worse is that by default this is set to happen only when the phone is plugged in and on WiFi, which means that you sync stuff once a day... There is the option to make it more frequent up to 15 minute periods. However, even this makes you miss last minute changes that are not synced to your calendar. So this is definitely a no go for me, leading me to use instead.....the Google Calendar app which has no such limitations.

• next is the photo sharing with iCloud. You can only share them with people that have Apple devices which is really annoying because my girlfriend does not have one and we used to have a lot shared albums on Google Photos. So again, I ended up using Google Photos on iOS.

• the keyboard... My native language is Greek. Starting from the fact the for some reason Apple decided that they wanted to change the official qwerty outline of Greek keyboard by removing the final s (ς) from its place, which creates a different key placement that constantly leads to typing errors when you are used to the regular outline. Note that the ipad correctly has the outline, only IPhone doesn't. But more importantly, word correction is a nightmare. If you enter an unknown word, it never learns it and constantly tries to correct it. You have to do the whole process of going into settings and adding a word abbreviation for each unknown word... This is really bad... So I installed swift keyboard which just allows you to tap onto an unknown word and it is added to the dictionary.

• iOS is missing some nice gimmicks such as showing your palm to the camera to get a selfie which is really more useful than the timer when trying to get a group photo

• not showing business caller IDs in dialer!!! This is really bad. Most business have their listings on Google and Google Maps. So on Android you directly get their ID when you or they call you. I would expect this from IPhone as well and was really disappointed to see it is not there.

• Does not support Miracast which is far more widely supported on TVs than AirPlay

• Siri is quite more restricted compared to Google Assistant

• Really miss my fast charging where I could charge the phone in 20 mins

• can't easily share a WiFi password with non apple devices as done with the QR code sharing in Android

• No actual file system when you connect it to the computer to easily share files with the phone. This was also really useful to be able to quickly use your phone as USB storage

• No sideloading of apps!!! That was also a hit for me... You cannot have apps like ad blocking YouTube or whatever you want like you could in Android

• Notifications seem to require more effort to work with VS how they work in Android

Now about the pros:

• Instant and effortless camera usage

• it does play really well with other Apple devices with features like Continuity, hand off, sharing etc...

• iMessage (although not much for me because huge majority of my contacts are on Android). Again I believe Google RCS is getting close.

• Backup. I really like that when you actually backup the iPhone it also backs up app data meaning that upon restore you can completely resume your work. Only thing needed to set up again is FaceID and apple pay. Android cannot do that natively. However they have started to implement APIs for apps to backup their data on Google so apps that do this have also their data restored during the process. So it's up to the devs to catch up.

• Video quality on apps. Apps that use the camera and can fully access it's potential is really a big difference compared to Android where due to the fragmentation and no support of each different vendor you get a really bad quality when using the 3rd party apps. There are attempts to unify this under certain APIs in Android as well but it will certainly take a while.

• FaceTime call quality is stunning. Have never been able to have such good quality calls using any other app whatsoever.

• I would also say update support but this is not that much anymore with more established brands catching up with this. Apple offers 5 years of updates. Samsung offer 4 major updates and 5 years of patches and Google with the new Pixel 8 years!

So there certainly are some good points according to my experience. However, these are more nice to have things as opposed to functionality loss of the bad points which hurt my user experience.

What's your take on all of the above? And most importantly for those who have switched from Android, what won you over?