Got an iPhone some months ago because it was cheaper than getting a Pixel or S24 and I hate it.
The apps suck, sideloading sucks ass because of both apple restrictions and the lack of modded apps, browsing sucks because the adblockers suck because the extensions suck, FOSS is pretty much dead of iOS, call spam detection sucks, keyboard sucks.
I never saw an ad on android for the past three years because of how good my setup was with modded apps and Firefox+uBlock but iOS is pure Advertisement Hell.
The OS visuals and responsiveness are better than most android skins but 60Hz is trash as well and 4GB ram means that I can not even open like 3 tabs at once without the others shutting down.
The photo management sucks the most. Any photo I save goes straight to my Camera Roll and has ZERO organization which memes no more epic funny memes are getting saved on my phone anymore.
The integration with Google Photos is also non-existent and images get saved only when I manually sync them and I will never buy iCloud because I hate the locked down apple ecosystem.
Modded apps also suck and nothing is as good as revanced plus the 7 day refresh limit sucks because of course apple wants 99$ per year to have the godlike ability to install your own apps.
Airdrop is maybe the only positive I remember about this. And maybe the battery life which is better than my previous phone's battery.
I always buy a new $200-ish Android phone every 4 years. The huge benefit is that I don't have to stress my $2000 phone breaking. Repairs are way cheaper. Also FOSS apps are cool and good. I guess posher friends than me have gotten used to the iOS ecosystem. I'm not gonna give them a hard time for it, but it's an expensive addiction.
Still rocking my 3 year 11 month old Pixel 5 with no issues, Google lists a few refurbished ones at about $150 though I can't speak to what that experience would be like since I got mine new and managed to not break it this whole time.
I have a pixel 6 rn and am pretty happy with it. Just checked backmarket and they're going for ~$160 USD. Solid battery, pretty quick, great camera, no 3rd party bloat, 128GB ssd. You could do a lot worse for the price
Fyi you can save images to your files instead of the camera roll. That way you get more traditional file management (eg you can make a meme folder and save images to it).
Idk if I agree about the apps, most apps are nicer on iphone imo, mainly because developers seem to care more about iphones. But there are some gems on Android.
The ad blockers suck on iphones, and side loading sucks as well. Hoping the eu regulations put an end to that shit.
I think a lot of your issues come from not being used to it. At this point both platforms are so similar that outside of the side loading issues they're basically the same.
these also can be added to android dns for no resource no install no root adblocking and privacy
Blah, PubHole, Libre - all independent and support openNIC domains regular dns does not
AdGuard, Mullvad - corporate, in theory should have better uptimes so usually recommend for normies but using the above three for years and never had issues, ymmv
Yeah going from android takes a lot to get used to. I went from iOS (iPhone 3G) to Android (HTC EVO 3D) then back to iOS (iPhone 6) and I’ve never looked back. I’ve still always kept at least one android phone around, and carry that phone with me almost everywhere.
But you couldn’t pay me to go back to using Android as my main phone OS. To the point that I paid nearly twice the price of my iPhone to import a model with a physical SIM card slot.
I mean they're the ultimate normie phones because they're so fixed and easy to pick up. So I think you either go all in on the ecosystem or you get a different phone. Apple can suck my ass no doubt but none of this is a secret lol.
Yeah, I had to switch to iOS recently, for reasons that I won't get into, and it blows.
People say the UI on these things is preferable, but you can't even reorganize your homescreen without having to solve a list ordering puzzle. And the settings app is a maze; good luck figuring out which of the three password pages the thing you want is on. And you can't install real Firefox so you can't have a real ad blocker.
I picked up a windows phone for $40 right around its death and I honestly loved that thing. It had a shitty CPU but damn did it feel snappy™️ for the price.
Interesting, I daily drove a Lumia for a couple years and I distinctly remember being excited for (the upgrade from 8) and then happy with windows 10 mobile. The experimental was top notch, the lack of apps not so much.
Yep, and those Nokia windows phones were top notch hardware too, for their time. I used my windows phone until the digitizer gave out, tried a couple android phones, and ended up on Apple. Then I got into phone repair, and I know I made the right decision from what was available after seeing the internals of every brand of phone, but I still miss my windows phone a lot. Nothing comes close to that Home Screen.
You could probably sell it as used right away and not lose too much. There's a ton of android phones that are incredibly cheap and have are a lot better than iphones... oneplus, redmi, xiaomi, oppo, redmagic.
Yeah fair enough, I guess my phone use case is also much different than most because anything more than messaging, doomscrolling, and quick google searches, I just pivot over to my computer. Most people use their phone primarily, so some of the gripes with iPhone are lost on me.
I switched iOS to Android and in general preferred the user experience on iOS out of the box, but the inability to load what you want to load is a non starter. I know the blue text thing is a meme as well but I did lose a couple of group chats which unfortunately has value. Hopefully regulators address this.
Android and iOS are both trash; both are built for data harvesting, but none of them are private. Can we stop with the "my team is better" BS, your simping for billion-dollar conglomerates; I thought y'all were better than this.
Idk why anyone would want better functionality from a smartphone because i personally hate having it be the center of my tech life.
I dont want put someone’s spaghetti code on my phone, i dealt with enough of that when you could jailbreak these things. That experience sucked. Nothing worked well together, and the novelty of it wore off.
The ads suck, but every app is just it own browser to a webapp, so the ad blockers feel like barricading a freestanding door.
The camera is awful for stills, i carry a point-and-shoot most of the time anyway because i cant turn off the processing i loathe so much.
I never use airdrop because my experience has been there’s always one wonder app in the ecosystem that doesnt work for me.
Android’s os looks miserable to navigate, but being able to load someone else’s poorly designed, thought up, and/or implemented navigation browser is a nonstarter.
these also can be added to android dns for no resource no install no root adblocking and privacy
Blah, PubHole, Libre - all independent and support openNIC domains regular dns does not
AdGuard, Mullvad - corporate, in theory should have better uptimes so usually recommend for normies but using the above three for years and never had issues, ymmv
Idk what blocker you’re using, but you want a dns adblocker. If you want to figure it out yourself go ahead, but if you’d prefer a recommendation I can do that too.
When you’re in your photos app you can tap select in the upper right hand corner, kind of half tap and drag to select a bunch of them, then add to album using the bottom left button.
You can choose what pictures get backed up to iCloud. There’s only like 5gb or something on it by default, so you’ll probably want to.
If you’re not using iCloud for phone backups then make manual backups. You will be unhappy if you need backup and don’t have one.
I took the Android leap from Apple about six years ago and never looked back. Androids are superior in almost every way when it comes to privacy and customization
Apple stopped being innovative around the time Steve Jobs died; each update is just more ways to spy and spam you with a slightly better camera. I will say iPhones are very user friendly, so there is like a 20 min learning curve converting from Apple to Android.
Also not sure where you are getting your phone plan, but there's only 3 tower providers in the US now. Verizon, At&t, and T-Mobile. I'd avoid any of those as a carrier because they tend to overcharge.
Low cost carriers still operate service under 1 of those 3 company's towers, so you'll still get the same service but at a cheaper price. I use Boost Mobile, $50 a month with no hidden fees, month-to-month and somehow the price hasn't gone up in five years.
Android is only good for privacy if you explicitly install a custom rom or do a bunch of stuff to modify your existing rom. And you can’t do that on every phone. Shit you can’t do that on most phones.
By default android is as bad as you can get. The only thing worse is like red star OS.