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.
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 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!
The biggest advantage Siri has is it’s able to perform simple actions on the phone, without connecting to the internet at all.
That’s always going to be faster than sending your voice to a server and waiting for a response.
As for how reliable it is - a lot of that depends how much you use it. It’s a machine learning voice processing algorithm that needs to learn the owner’s voice and it works a lot better when you’ve issued tens of thousands of commands than when you’ve only issued a few.
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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!
The biggest advantage Siri has is it’s able to perform simple actions on the phone, without connecting to the internet at all.
That’s always going to be faster than sending your voice to a server and waiting for a response.
As for how reliable it is - a lot of that depends how much you use it. It’s a machine learning voice processing algorithm that needs to learn the owner’s voice and it works a lot better when you’ve issued tens of thousands of commands than when you’ve only issued a few.
Google assistant does have plenty of offline features…