then I started working full-time and had way less free time and realized 99% of the time I now use my phone to read news sites and take quick photos, and then switched to iPhone...
Was Android (even stock) insufficient for reading news sites and quick photos? Or is iOS much better for you at those tasks? If that's all you need, then I would consider both Android or iOS sufficient, but I don't quite get why you'd give up so many options and capabilities to switch, unless iOS is much better at reading news and taking photos.
Maybe an analogy to help with my question. If all I need to do is unscrew Phillips number 2 screws and the occasional flathead, and I already had a great power drill with a bunch of bits in the kit (and had mastered it), why then buy a different power drill that that takes a proprietary bit and can only do Phillips and flathead? At some point I might have a need to do torx or hex or square, etc. Wouldn't you be better off having the capability should you need it? Why is it better to not have the capability?
Edit: I'll add a bit here - I didn't realize just how much maintenance and fixing I was doing on android, because I was so used to it. I would frequently have to fix some issue and I didn't think twice because it was something I either did often, or I just wasn't in a rush and I went into "fix broken tech" auto pilot mode. But I started to realize how often I was doing it and how it wasn't really normal to have to do that, because I would just zone out and focus on fixing the issue at hand.
I had a bad experience with an Android tablet. Apps would crash regularly and the OS refused to update. (The system update crashed too.) I never touched an Android device again. But this was 10 years ago.
I love that there are so many super cheap android tablets, but I hate that there are so many super cheap android tablets.
Some arguments were: Android's capabilities became less over time. I had cool apps until 4.4 Kitkat which automated toggling on/off WLAN/GPS/mobile network among others, but these APIs were restricted more and more over time so the benefits became less.
Another fact was that I calculated that iPhones were cheaper than all Android I owned when taking resale value into the calculation. That Apple gives OS updates for 5+ years helped a lot here, I had experienced <1 year on flagship models before. (buying 2 year old iPhone and selling it at 4 year old was cheapest/year)
But one of the biggest reasons was that I never trusted Google much. For example I never used the feature to use WiFi networks to get coarse location. Which meant worse UX (had to click NO on a dialogue each time I activated GPS) but also a "feature" the iPhone had (better location).
This is obviously a very personal point of view and it might be very different today, as I used Android in its earlier years.
Low-end Android phones by Realme, Poco, Xiaomi, iQOO, Moto/Lenovo, Samsung et al are super capable and super cheap.
African, Indo-Chinese, and South Asian markets are awash with these phones, for a reason.
The iPhone doesn't have the ability to disable this at all. If you want to get your location, Apple will get it too.
For browsing, it means that even phones which perform better in CPU bound benchmarks than my old iPhone 11 have random UI stutters & non-smooth scrolling in browser mostly while content is still loading, and these make me miss-click somewhere where I didn't want to, frequently enough to notice (compared to iPhones where it rarely happens)... 120Hz displays on Android make the UI smoother, but random janks & stutters still happen a lot more than on iPhones...
When I'm taking photos most of the time I want to take a good picture as fast as possible, sometimes I want to take more in quick succession, this is also somehow easier on iPhones from my experience.. (although I admit it's been a long time since I held a top-tier Android phone, my only contact with Androids is with my friends & family phones which are mostly Xiaomi/Huawei/OnePlus priced around 300-400€ which is half the price of my iPhone)
Also, switching to a newer iPhone is seamless compared to buying a new Android, and UI/UX/Settings don't change much with new versions, compared to Android version updates (although from what I've heard this has gotten better in Androids recently)
In your analogy I'd be talking about a power drill that just makes me work faster because it's better designed and more intuitive to use, even though it might have less RPM and less bits support.., if I did a lot of drilling just on Philips and Flathead and it saved me enough time, it would be worth the saved time I can use for other stuff...
Switching the iPhone I was struck by how damn smooth everything was. Years of XDA tweaks couldn't touch my iPhone 6 out of the box despite specs I had always seen as inferior.
My tongue in cheek saying will always be: I'll switch back to Android when you can rotate an app correctly.
For those not familiar with Android internals, the UI "framework" the OS provides doesn't support that basic use case. Phones are fast enough that it can be hidden with an animation, but unless an app explicitly signs out every view is torn down and redrawn in a new orientation.
It's a tiny thing, but to me it's the iconic symptom of Android vs iOS. That's a decision Android made to support devices with 256mb of RAM, but never prioritized improving on, and now Android UX is stuck with that nit for eternity.
Android seems to fixed only one of them (updates) while becoming more and more locked as iOS, quality photos with good shutter speed are offered only by pixel with bad availability in most of the world and pretty bad VFM besides A models
Coming from the Essential PH-1 which I’d grown tired of maintaining past it’s official support life and looking for something the same size or smaller, I settled on one of the few options on the market that offered both small size and performance: the iPhone 13 mini.
Barring a vastly inferior notification experience, it’s a stellar device. I suppose I wish for something that was both small and well-supported on Android. If the timing was different, I may have gone with the Zenfone, but then again seeing Google send texts as me to their numbers sat wrong with me, so I may have switched systems anyway.
If someone doesn't mind slow shutter and mediocre battery life then S22 is good option for smaller phone with good camera, updates and good VFM with trade in bonus (could be had around 500€ with any phone from drawer).
Many indicators of quality of life face diminishing returns past a $30k/yr (2005) threshold.
I imagine some people who genuinely think stuff similar the latter won't say it, and others may have it written off as deathbed delirium / psychosis and ignored if they do
I remember calculating the optimal amount to work, to maximize non-work non-sleep healthy life expectancy, and it was somewhere around 2 hours per day in my case. Accounting for retirement, it'd be around 4 hours.
If you work more than optimal, you lose free time.
probably the same reason why it's never the year of the linux desktop.