iOS has its problems, but every time I have to handle somebody's Android (i.e. to help them do something faster than telling them), I want to give it back as quickly as possible.
When someone asks me what phone to buy, my answer is always "what phone do you have now?" because frankly, there is no reason to switch from one to the other. It's just a waste of time and energy to go through that.
Huge difference. You have fdroid, apk slicer and alternative stores without google gate-keeping. You can reflash your phone with ungoogled android or open source alternative gapps package. Use microG to sandbox google stuff.
There are ton of ways to contain googleware.
And I have a custom rom which gets update every month. Ungoogled. :)
I'm still under update coverage for my Pixel 2XL, haven't felt compelled to upgrade at all. i do wish more handsets supported using Lineage or another open variant/option for after coverage expires at least.
My experience with custom ROMs was unfortunately a lot worse than yours. I had the original Galaxy Note, and picking a custom ROM for that was a "Updated, has features, doesn't kill your battery - pick 2" kind of deal.
Then google knows what? That you installed fastmail, firefox, and maps.me?
Google is very strong in the data heavy areas. GMail, Calendar and especially GBoard and are extremely hard to replace, as are YouTube and Translate.
If you are technically minded, you can easily flash LineageOS + microg on your phone a use a virtually surveillance-free phone (as far as you can, ignoring stuff like cell tower tracking and opaque baseband, etc).
If you have an iPhone and you use Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Microsoft Office, Google Photos/Docs, Spotify, the Dominos Pizza app, etc etc there are half a dozen companies holding your private information either way. If you want to go total lockdown, get an iPhone with a VPN and never use any social media or cloud apps, but don't pretend like having an iPhone alone is some huge change to your privacy problems.
Apple has the security advantage though if you disregard the information apps leak but then again on both OS's you can use Pi-Hole, or better yet NextDNS, to shut up some of the chatter.
And I say this as someone who runs Pi-Hole. But I feel like it is a battle I am using.
First day she got the S8 I set it up for her and showed her how to make calls and send text messages. Next day I got an MMS with a picture from the garden, she'd figured that out on her own.
Mainly I think things are just different, some things are easier on Android, some on iOS and vice versa.
I favor the gesture input, and it's surprising how many words have similar swype patterns for the keys.
I highly doubt a top of the line phone like the Galaxy or the Pixel would have issues with input lag.
If anything, I get annoyed by how long animations on iOS take compared to Android. Everything feels like it's running in slow motion.
Happens in laptops too. Its just silly. Go in the same price range and then make a judgement.
I long for the freedom of android and use iPhones reluctantly only because i really think they are a good value at almost any price point.
Same with LG, Sony and others. The only smooth Android I have ever tried was Huawei's and I am reluctant to buy Chinese telco hardware.
You can compare iphone and android performance benchmarks here [0] and here [1].
Apple devices still come out ahead of top of the range models from other manufacturers.
Yes I know benchmarks can be gamed and don't mean everything, but there is still a performance difference between top of the line Android models today, vs not only top of the line iPhones, but also iPhones from a couple of years back.
0: https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks 1: https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks
I don't remember the details of it, but android uses more ram for applications, because of the dalvik VM. The iPhones also have way more cache on dye in the A CPUs. And apple completely decimates the competition in browser benchmarks.
I had a z3 compact before and was happily using it for 4 years before that(when I bought it was already old). Someone patched the system so that the camera apps still work on an unlocked device and I used a custom ROM which was working well.
Here's the thing about android devices. When you can keep them up to date with custom roms you gain things like fine grained privacy settings and faster lean custom ROMS.
But ... Sony is notoriously bad at that. Not only did their software quality degrade. They added more DRM and security features to make sure your Camera and other DRM functionality will not work on your custom ROM.
Compare that to Xiaomis Poco spinoff where they recently send all the XDA custom rom developers a free device to get the community involved.
I like Sonys devices but the software is utter crap. They completely botched the Android 10 update for most of their devices. It took them 2 months to release a version that wouldn't randomly fail and even then gesture navigation is not working in the older flagships. With Sony devices you can estimate only getting 2 major update the second one likely being buggy. Compare that to the iPhone update strategy which is a million times better.
To some extent the Android 10 disaster is to be blamed on Google since apparently the fingerprint problems existed in almost every vendors Android 10 release. I guess that when google moved their pixel 4 to no fingerprint/only faceID(or google face unlock) they just didn't care enough about other Android OEMs.
Not sharing an opinion on anything written, however Dalvik was replaced with ART all the way back in Android 5.
I feel that it is sad that Google phones mostly follow iPhone trends. It's as if the Google phone team are iPhone fans. Heck, I saw an Android team video and most of the people in the background were using iPhones.
I think customers would be better serve if each company play to their strengths, not on carbon copying each other.
I don’t think that’s true if you work with sensitive data or are just generally privacy conscious. iOS is then recommended over the OS from the advertising company (eg by tptacek and other experts here, if I’m not mistaken).
On a Pixel, I can use Google Assistant like a secretary. It screens the calls, forces the caller to answer questions, then relays the answers to me to see if I want to talk to them. That's pretty damn awesome. But again, it's not everyone's priority.
I have both an iPhone (work) and an Android (Nexus 2, personal) and use both daily.
I find (stock) Android to be a much more usable and capable operating system. Which is a shame because the iPhones really are better hardware, especially the smaller ones.
How else will you distinguish between them?
Love having a physical keyboard, and will gladly give up some screen size for a much comfier typing experience. That and the BlackBerry Hub is amazing and actually makes managing all my communication in a day much more effective. (Global shortcuts, gestured text navigation, a control key, etc):
At least Hub can be installed on other Android devices, for me a unified inbox is a killer feature.
Not to mention that you basically need to look at the latest iPhone to know what maybe 70% of Android hardware is going to look like for the next year or so (notch, cameras, software features like Animoji, even the absence of things like the headphone jack).
Both the state of smartphones and the state of laptops and OSs really make me want to get into that industry and make some better alternatives.
Another glaringly obvious thing with Android that frustrated me to no end with iOS: Why the fuck do you need to swipe twice to remove a notification. So many swipes wasted that I could've used for Tinder instead.
I have a boatload of stuff that annoys me about iOS, to the point where at one point thought about opening a Twitter account to send a daily tweet about something that sucks on iOS.
Emojis look good though.
They've actually made it worse in a way by removing the magnifying glass, but at least the new copy/paste/cut swipe gestures are handy, if a little odd on smaller screens.
The biggest loss for me on newer devices is 3D touch, since that's the best way to select text quickly and easily.
On many websites it will zoom around unpredictably.
Very awkward to select specific text in Notes etc. sometimes, especially around links and other clickable items.
I’ve found that if you try to move the cursor with the keyboard it’ll show up.
And for the love of god why does your spellcheck keep trying to replace the word "talk" with "ya'll?" I've had to manually set text replacement for way too many word pairs like that, and if you do typo the word you're going for in a way that's not in the text replacement, it defaults to the weird choice anyway.
This is something Android messed up since Android 9 (IIRC). You used to have a small arrow below the Wifi and Bluetooth (and whatnot) icons where you could select what to connect to. Removing those since 9 was partially what drove me to angrily expore iOS.
Can't say about the spellcheck because I used Swiftkey on iOS but the Android version is miles ahead of it. In hindsight I should've probably just reverted to the iOS built-in one.
My ideal is that I can flip up and change the source in the time it takes for a song to change, which I used to be able to do seamlessly in Android. Though according to the sibling comment, Android got worse for that use since I switched too.
Just wish both had some kind of UI indicator that there's a long-press action available... it's not like people are reading mobile phone manuals nowadays, even if they existed.
[0] For example no mention here https://www.xda-developers.com/everything-new-android-p-deve...
Personally I think the down arrow is way too small for me to press so I always just long press the icon anyway.
For the most part, I adapt along the way... I've felt similar with iOS, but refuse to buy from Apple.
It may also because idiots keep "innovating" with the home screen experience but for most androids the home screen is just another app you can replace with one not made by incompetents.
Nova is nice for example.