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 tried going to android, got a Samsung galaxy s5 way back. I couldn’t believe how shitty it was, it constantly tripped over itself and felt like a very old laptop.
Some told me that I would have to remove all the bloatware. Kind of defeats the purpose of a phone imo, the whole point is that it’s a convenient computer, if I want full customization there are other devices out there.
Removing bloatware is mostly placebo effect. Most bloatware take up some storage space but don’t really affect the performance or stability of the phone.
Yeah exactly. Why spend energy on a phone that might be good if you spend time on it. Just feels like a bad consumer product with missed opportunities.
Bloatware is the point of a phone? Do you have any inkling how that sounds? Sounds like you don’t know what bloatware is, at minimum
That’s the exact opposite of what was said. Convenience is the point of a phone; having to debloat is not convenient. A phone without bloat is more convenient.
It was confusingly written but yeah I can see that was the point now. Funny to me though that the implication is that only apple has discovered the perfect set of software for a phone and either none of it is bloat, or somehow bloat doesn’t matter if they do it.
What are you talking about? I’m a software dev so I understand bad software practices (or at least my employer thinks I do)
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I don’t have to convince a random person on the internet, was just giving my 2 cents.
And I was trying to either criticize a terrible point or have you correct me if I got it wrong. Another user corrected me. But yeah apple is not immune to bloatware, and I’d bet you cannot even remove it on their devices. Since prevention of choice is the most key part of the entire business model