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The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.

I dislike the new Safari layout in iOS 26 too. https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/iphone/ipha9ffea1a3/io... -- change it from "compact" to "bottom". I assume this choice will disappear in the future, but for now, you can make it more familiar.

Unfortunately, I don't have any advice for the Clock/Alarm; I don't typically schedule one-off future alarms. That would be a useful feature.

> The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.

But it IS Apple's choice. The problem is they have a mixed up conflict of interest, and it's even worse when Apple themselves is trying to sell you their own services.

IMHO the company making the hardware, the company making the software, and the company selling the cloud services shouldn't be allowed to all be the same company. There's too much conflict of interest.

I don't see how it's Apple's choice?

Google sells PiP, background playing etc. as part of YouTube Premium (not Apple!). Google serves browser clients a player that can't do those things, because they want you to pay for them. Vinegar is a browser extension that replaces Google's player with Apple's plain HTML5 player. Apple's plain HTML5 player does all that stuff for free.

With Apple's default apps, i kind of feel like the apps themselves are strategically designed to not be the best place to look for lesser trafficked use cases.

Visual customizations get upstreamed into the system accessibility settings. Extra functions are exposed exclusively in Shortcuts for you to hack together an automation feature yourself. For a fully feature supported app Apple would probably say go pay for an app (and them through fee) on the App Store.

For example with your future alarm.. you could get another app or you could create a 'Time of Day' Shortcut automation which checks everyday to see if the date is the date you want the alarm on; if it is the day create the alarm. Delete the alarm on the next day. A (not so) fun fact about automating Alarms before iOS 17: you could only delete alarms through Siri and not Shortcuts lol...

> I fucking cannot set an one time alarm for a future date (Repeat = Never means just today), so I had to stupidly set up weekly alerts and change it whenever I need a new one-time. I hope I'm too stupid to find the magic option.

I think you're supposed to use the calendar for that.

why do you have to go to calendar to set alarm ?

The alarm and the calendar can both alert you on a specific date and time. But like a bedside alarm clock, the iOS alarm is limited to a time in the next 24 hours.

On Android, why would you not use the calendar when you want to be alerted days from now?

Wat? Because a century old device can only set a repeating alarm, the 2025 $1k smartphone should, too?! I set so many one of alarms on my android weekly, I would be infuriated if I had to use the calendar for that.

You can set as many non-repeating alarms as you like, as long as they're within the next 24 hours.

What kind of event are you creating an alarm for that's more than a day away? On Friday, do you create your alarm to wake up on Monday? Does Android have a calendar-like view of your upcoming alarms?

(Sorry for the barrage of questions, but this is interesting to me.)

>You can set as many non-repeating alarms as you like, as long as they're within the next 24 hours.

Any color as long as it's black, eh?

I frequently use one-time alarms for early morning travel a few days away. What makes them great is that the alarms in general are much more robust in their requirements to turn them off; I can accidentally dismiss a calendar alert, but I have a much harder time accidentally deactivating the clock alarm in a sleep induced stupor at odd hours.

More importantly, alarms don't get silenced by my nightly do not disturb schedule.

Because on my Android phone, the alarm accepts a date and rings only on that date

Which is broken, because I want to be able to say “set an alarm at for next Wednesday at 4:30 AM“ the second I find out I have to give someone a ride to the airport.

If I have to make it a calendar entry, I may not notice it in time.

I'm with you. I got an iPhone 15 a couple of years ago after only ever using Android. I was expecting great things and it's just.. confused!

I never have any confidence it will notify me of things. Often I just miss stuff. I actually have no idea how all the different "Focus" modes work. Notifications pile up and then seem to disappear without any action, and then reappear a week later.

The keyboard is really awful. I recently pulled an ancient Galaxy phone out of a drawer to test something and was reminded of just how much better the Android keyboard is. It just always guesses the wrong things!

And the settings are equally jumbled. Sometimes they're in the Settings app, sometimes they're in the app I'm using. It's just confusing.

It was honestly eye opening because I'd spent so many years assuming iPhones were better. I moved across because my Android phones kept having hardware issues. I think I'll probably go back to Android after this experiment.

I recently bought an original iPhone SE in hopes of using a smaller device. But I can't use it for anything worthwhile because I can't sign into an Apple ID due to having encrypted backups on my account, which was introduced in iOS 16.2. The SE only supports 15.8.5. So I'd have to disable encrypted backups for all of my other devices in order to sign into my account.

Why am I unable to use Apple Music on my device while I can use it from a web browser or from an android phone that don't have encrypted iCloud backups enabled?

Unfortunately this also prevents me from jailbreaking the device because I have to sign into an Apple account in order to trust a developer certificate on the device required for the jailbreaking tool. It's my device! Let me approve of the certificate without an Apple ID!

Oh, that sounds annoying. I also bought an SE 2016 128GB as "Offline-First" / de-Appled device. I think what I did was just signing in to App Store, not fully adding my Apple ID to the device. It now serves as a time capsule, has all the classic apps like Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, MiniMetro etc and some resource-light open source apps like CoMaps, fileexplorer with connection / offline sync to Nextcloud. Jailbroken via Palera1n (Think I didn't have to approve install any certificate)

Where are you located at?

What are your actual complaints? And have you tried the trash fire that is Android?

Do you think they just got a smartphone for the first time a few months ago?

I updated my reply ^

I switched to Android in 2021 after almost a decade using iPhone and I was surprised to find modern Android is actually very good. I remember the early days of Android being a trash fire but since around ~2020 it seems to have gotten a lot better. For various reasons im looking to switch back to the iPhone but I know it'll be a case of giving up some good things on Android in exchange for other things being better on the iPhone.