Anecdotally, among my (20 something year old) friends, the iPhone used to be a must-have for many reasons; now, it's only a must-have for imessage. If android phones could send "blue texts" than I'm sure many would switch over.
Or is it a particular feature of iMessage that WhatsApp is missing?
The feature called "Built into the ROM of every iPhone".
You can see why I might think that forcing phone number to equal identify might be a bad idea.
I understand that I'm an unusual case, but I'm sure plenty of other people go through something similar this every couple years if and when they switch phone numbers or providers or move.
Question: how do people you haven't been in contact with manage to find you, if you change your number every 2 years?
People contact me via email. Apple's iMessage is the only chat client I've been able to use effectively, because they tie identity to email, not phone number.
Though, who actually cares about this and why?
Anyway, I recently switched to iOS for an experiment and my biggest gripe is: no back button. Instead of a conveniently placed button, I have to always reach up to the upper left corner of the app to go back.
My second biggest gripe is that links from Apple's shitty programs only want to open in Safari instead of my browser.
And third, I can't organize my icons the way I want to. Typical Apple: No choices. Their way or the highway. Fuck you power-users and people who know what they want.
You can swipe from the left corner of the screen to go back (do this with 3D touch and it switches to your previous app). You don't need to reach the top for the back button every time.
I had an Android for awhile and the hardware back button made no sense to me. I thought most phones eventually moved to a software back button. I never really knew if I would be going back inside the app, to the last app I had open, to the home screen, or if I was at the end of the queue and it did nothing. Apple took much longer to add it, but I prefer the context their implementation has and gestures for it.
> And third, I can't organize my icons the way I want to.
I have no idea what you're talking about. This is what it sounds like you're talking about[1]. I don't think it was in the original iPhone (2007), but I see references dating back to Jan 2008.
[1] http://i0.wp.com/content.screencast.com/users/Fosteronomo/fo...
The Android OS implements the software back button, not the apps...and it's always at the bottom of the screen where I can easily reach it. iOS does not implement any such back button - each app has to implement its own and the convention on iOS is to place that back button all the way in the upper left corner of the screen which is very inconvenient to reach for.
> I have no idea what you're talking about. (re: organizing icons)
So, let's imagine that you have 3 app icons on one of your home screens in iOS...
Can you put one of them in the lower right corner? Nope.
Can you put one of them all the way on the right side while the other 2 stay on the left? Nope.
Can you do anything to position them absolutely? No you cannot.
You must resort to jailbreaking or other hackery (like blank icons) to make this work.