You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
But man, the notifications are a constant thorn in my side. I have missed so many work notifications due to the lack of persistent notification indicator (other than on the lock screen), and the overall weirdness of iOS lockscreen notification panel (segmentation between "old" notifications that can be mass dismissed and "new" notifications that pile up individually-ish). I use an Apple Watch and somehow still miss Teams notifications as they come in, I'm not even sure how that happens...
I'm so close to abandoning the iPhone as my main phone and going back to my S23 Ultra pretty much entirely because of notifications, it's been a disappointment...
This is the only reason I'm using Android when the rest of my family is on iOS. uBlock on Firefox Android is essential.
Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.
Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)
That used to drive me nuts especially as they grew the phone to size 5+ inches
This is actually hilarious because Android had all-screen phones with only virtual buttons long before iPhones did :)
I never use the multitasking stuff. Too confusing. I regard the loss of the single physical home button as a tragedy. One of the best UI elements ever created. Not joking. So simple, imposible to confuse because there’s just one, basically nothing about it that requires training, and it acted as the perfect “oh shit, get me back to something normal!” button for the tech-unsavvy, which is one of the things they most-need in a UI. So good.
But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.
But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.
Hilariously, those things actually did work back in 2017, and Apple has since broken all of them in various OS updates
It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).
I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)
NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.
I have yet to experience that. The biggest reason I have mostly stayed with iPhones over the years was because the tight integration with my MBP was useful, and iMessage is way better than SMS.
RCS helps even out the playing field a bunch, but just about the time that went mainstream I hear that it's a regular source of trouble for everyone (Android an iPhone both) because the carriers suck. And Apple did at least finally add some equivalence for one of the Android features I had wanted (call screening).
For some people in the HN social sphere, maybe. My sisters have had iPhones since they were first released in the naughties. They used to make fun of me for using Android and then Windows Phones (I'm on iOS now). The notion that my sisters would ever switch over to Android is risible; they don't care about phones "making advances" or having "security commitments." They care about iMessage, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
There are no other phones that are not iPhones for them. The blue/green gap is real.
The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.
People say that the faster charging will degrade battery life, but my last phone was a Samsung and battery life was massively degraded after two years without any kind of fast charging. The one I had before that was a Redmi, much faster charging and the battery was fine after a couple of years.