After 3 months on Android, I am making the switch back to iOS, and this time it actually came as a surprise to me.
I really thought this switch was going to be the one that sticks; as my last post notes, iOS 26 was that bad. The switch was going well for the first 2 months, but throughout this month the small annoyances became too much.
These are some of the things I was annoyed by but living with:
- Poor battery life:
- It'd be off the charger at 7am and below 10% at 7pm with light to moderate use, whereas with the iPhone I'd have like 40-50% battery life left after 12 hours with even more usage
- Missed notifications:
- This is due to the icon dots disappearing if the notification is swiped away, which happens accidentally very easily
- The difficult to use and ad-ridden Play Store:
- Google's sponsored clutter and nonsensical search results make it impossible to find anything. Even when I search the actual name of something, it sometimes doesn't come up in the results
- Poor call sound quality:
- I use wi-fi calling because my service is not great at home, and it still has the "clearly on a cell phone" sound quality. I don't know how the iPhone does call quality better, but it does by a long shot
- Having to re-take photos a few times:
- This is due to the weird blur Samsung applies to them, it's like it can only focus on the very center of the subject unless you're more than 2 feet away. No amount of touching spots to focus on helps
- This has also greatly lessened the amount of pictures I take because capturing spontaneous moments with the dogs often fails due to the blur weirdness
- Having to use Waze and its terrible routes for navigation:
- I don't want to use Google maps, and yes I know Google also owns Waze, but Waze allows you to use it without logging in, so I'd install it and use it, then immediately delete it after
- Waze has thousands upon thousands of users around you at any given time in Chicago and yet it still does ridiculous things like try to make you turn left at intersections with 30+ cars waiting to do the same thing during rush hour, or to turn onto streets that are closed
Earlier this month, I got access to Android Auto, and this is what started the descent over the edge. I don't know if it's the car or the phone, but whether it would work or not was completely hit or miss. It would connect immediately on some drives, and on others it wouldn't connect at all. I always drive with navigation for the ongoing traffic monitoring and route adjustments, so it not connecting to be able to do so was incredibly annoying. I didn't have a phone mount so using it on there was not an option.
The aforementioned poor battery life was so much worse when using Android Auto in any capacity. It would use a significant amount of battery even on a 20 minute drive, and even though the car has a Qi charger, it doesn't charge it fast enough to counter the battery drain. I don't know if a USB cable would have been able to keep up though, I didn't have any to try it with at the time.
I don't want this to become a novel, so I won't go too deep into it, but the gist is that the state of push notifications on Android is abysmal and it also decimates the battery. You have to edit individual app settings to keep them from going to sleep and use an external system like unified push to even get the notifications in a lot of cases. With the iPhone you don't have to do anything when it comes to notifications. You sign into an app, enable notifications, and never touch it again. I don't know the tech specifics that allow for iOS to use push notifications across the board without draining the battery, but Android really needs to figure that shit out.
Yesterday I decided to try to set up iOS 26 in a usable way on my "iPod" (iPhone 12 mini) and I was hoping maybe software updates fixed some of the awful glitches that I experienced upon its release. I went through every home screen and accessibility setting in various combinations til I finally got something I liked:
The magical combination:
- Disable reduced transparency in the accessibility settings
- Set the system UI to dark mode
- Set the home screen icons to tinted and light instead of dark
- A lock screen wallpaper with a lot of black in it
The "iPod" only had music apps and a couple of word games on it, so I installed the apps I used before and have been using it instead of the Samsung all day. The magical combination seems to be working for me; the icons aren't glitching out to full color or flickering like they were back when iOS 26 came out. The mostly black lock screen wallpaper with the enabled borders make the notifications readable. It didn't take long to decide to go back to the iPhone once I got that all sorted.
I have used both Android and iOS extensively since the iPhone first hit the market, and for a long time, the two systems were pretty close in terms of user experience (for me, anyway). Now, Android feels a lot further behind, and I think it's because of all the added technology and bloat in the phones and the software. You have to do so much tweaking and tinkering to try and make things work in ways you'd expect them to, and it feels like using beta products in comparison to the iPhone. I'm not an Apple fangirl by any means, so I will stress that this isn't a matter of the typical Apple user snobbery. I really wanted Android to be better! I wanted to be able to continue to use custom themes, icons, fonts, and have access to a bunch of independent/open source apps. I'm just tired of the shitty and frustrating aspects of the experience and am calling it quits.
A new phone will be here on Friday and this weekend my Samsung will be put up for sale. It's unfortunate but it is what it is.
GenAI is trash. ChatGPT is trash. Copilot is trash. Every other GenAI product is trash. You suck and you should feel bad about it and the fact that you are stealing from me. You should apologize to the world and then self-destruct for the good of humanity.