Yeah so that title's not clickbait, it legitimately did. I had tried a couple Android phones last year and ended up going back to the iPhone after a month or 2 both times, but this time I think it's gonna stick.
People have been complaining about iOS 26 all over the place so I won't deep dive into why it sucks, but I will point out the couple things that were especially bad for me. The first thing is that they absolutely ruined the look of tinted icons:
The left is how my home screen looked before the update, and the right is how it looked immediately after the update. I don't think anybody at Apple even tested how it'd look in dark mode with tinted icons, because the after is the most amateur looking graphic design I have ever seen. It's an accessibility nightmare in terms of text color contrast and the white borders on dark mode look like someone did a bad job at removing a background color on the icons.
In trying to deal with that mess, I tried the clear icons. I don't like the full color icons in light or dark mode as they're too saturated and bothersome to look at, so it was my only option. The clear icons, even with the transparency reduced in the accessibility settings, were flickering whenever I'd open a folder. I have chronic migraines and this ended up contributing to a migraine even though I had been avoiding using my phone because of the update. I took a video of the flickering but can't figure out how to add it here.
I ended up finding that if you change the tinted icons to light mode, they look marginally better:
As I was adjusting the color to my liking, at one point when I unlocked the phone, half the icons were the dark color icons. To get the tinted ones back, I had to change the icons and then change them back.
I ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy S25 in the fun coral red color. It got the newest Samsung UI update right away and I have to say that Samsung's UI has come a long way. Everything is pleasant to look at, including the default font. I of course went back to my usual staples of Nova Launcher, KWGT, and custom icon packs, so my home screen is working really well for me again.
I try to avoid google at all costs so using Android obviously makes that more difficult, but aside from google messages (I need to have my texts on the computer), I am not using any of their apps. I'm using a gallery app from F-Droid and backing up my photos with Icedrive, I'm using Bitwarden for passwords, and using DDG in Fennec. I am using Aurora Store from F-Droid as the play store front end for the stuff I need to get from there.
I have to give Samsung credit for making disabling the AI functions easy. They're all within the same menu and it's all pretty transparent about what the things do. I didn't love that so much microsoft junk, including copilot, was preinstalled, but I uninstalled and disabled everything I could without issue.
I'm still trying to get some things set up, but I opted to set it up from scratch rather than transfer stuff from my iPhone. I'm sure I'll have more to say in a few weeks, so I'll come back to talk about the switch with some time past.
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.