What It's Like to Switch to iOS in 2015
Recently, I did something that a lot of bloggers that fancy themselves technologists have done. I decided to switch from using an Android phone to an iPhone. This is a topic we just can't seem to stop talking about, we technology types. We'll tell you why we switched, why we're not switching, and why we switched back. War breaks out online between iOS and Android fanatics, leaving iOS users crudely painted as luddites who need their technology with training wheels and Android users as bitter, impoverished souls who would surely submit to the superiority of the iPhone if they could afford it. When forums started seeing little cartoons of the Android logo eating the Apple logo or subjecting it to certain bodily functions, well, it just confirmed what we all expected deep down: the smartphone wars would be fought at a level of discourse about even with stickers placed in the back window of pickup trucks accessorized with Truck Nutzâ˘.
I have always maintained that iOS is a fine smartphone platform and is suitable for the vast majority of people. I have, at times, suggested that it would be unnecessarily expensive for at least 50% of smartphone users. When I first became an Android user, I had to admit the platform was still a little half-baked. But an iPhone would have been about four times as expensive. Per month! I was happy, but I wasn't about to recommend it to just anyone. Things are different now. Android has matured. So has iOS. And, of course, each of them has plagiarized the bejeezus out of the other, so the modern buyer will enjoy much more parity between the two. So why switch? I'll tell you why.
Earlier this year, I encountered a particularly first-world problem. The iPod I was wearing as a watch broke. I had to decide if I would try to replace it, repair it, or move to using my phone as my primary source of music and podcasts. I decided to try the third one. Less devices to worry about. This was a change of heart for me, since in the past, I enjoyed the thought of having a device for music that did one thing, and did it well. I was especially concerned about draining my phone's battery by playing music. This problem had become rectified in part by the fact that you can buy phones almost the size of salad plates these days, and these gargantuan phones come with large batteries. My hands are large enough to accept these as a solution.
Unfortunately, my musical needs are... specialized. I have a lot of music. More than I can keep track of. I am trying to work my way through it and throw out albums I don't like anymore (in particular, I've come to find using an electric keyboard to imitate another instrument increasingly grating with age), but I still rely on my "Neglected Songs" playlist to make sure I'm actually listening to everything and figuring out what to keep and throw out. Neglected Songs is an auto-playlist that selects the songs I've listened to least recently. Naturally, this can't work unless my music player can keep track of what I've listened to and syncs it back to the library. The iPhone is a foolproof solution to this. On Android, I had options, but all of them came with drawbacks. I'll talk about it more later on.
Another reason was my car. While Android Auto is starting to take off and promises an unparalleled user experience in new vehicles, I don't have one of those new vehicles. I like my car and intend to keep it for some time. It just works better with iPods and iPhones. If I want to improve my car-and-phone audio experience, the car's not changing, so I'd better get to changing the phone.
Apple won't be dropping the price of the iPhone 6 until the next one comes out, so I won't save money by waiting. When a promotion popped up to get a free $150 gift card with the purchase of an iPhone, I jumped at it. I got a 64GB iPhone 6 Plus.
So far, I'm very happy. I believe that the iPhone is indeed superior for my use case. But let me be clear about this: the iPhone is not objectively superior to everything else, as some of my friends would claim. If you want a smartphone for Angry Birds, Snapchat, Facebook, e-mail, and Spotify, there's a good chance you'll be just as happy with a Nexus 5, which costs about half as much as an iPhone. In brief, yes, the iPhone is probably the best phone for me, but that's for very specific reasons, so that probably doesn't mean much for your decision.
Maybe that's all you wanted to know from this, in which case I give you my blessing to close this tab and spend the remainder of your day looking at cat pictures instead. But if not, here's the blow-by-blow on the strengths, weaknesses, and differences:
iOS has just emerged from a design reinvention. It would seem that the current leadership at Apple have become confident enough in their staying power to begin breaking the inviolable rules of Steve Jobs, and skeuomorphism is dying a rapid death as a result. Most of you will remember the iOS of two years ago, where every button had a glossy veneer that said, "I'm a button! Press me!" The clock app looked so much like a certain real clock that the people that invented the real clock sued them. The voice recorder looked like a tape recorder. Eventually, this style crept into Mac OS X Lion, and people began to wonder if Apple skeuomorphism had gone too far. The Calendar app was remade to look like a leather-bound calendar. The Address Book app was remade to look like a physical book. The most amusing, in my opinion, was Game Center, which looked like a poker table. Like, in a casino. Chips and all. Jobs was apparently in charge of these changes, which was not a surprise to me. Jobs was obsessed with usability and user-friendliness. He would insist that users know how to do everything the first time, without coaching or instructions. Skeuomorphism is a generally reliable way to accomplish this. Everyone who knows how to work a tape recorder should be able to use a voice recorder app if it looks and acts like a tape recorder. I, personally, think he went a bit overboard. The design of Game Center says a lot. I have little doubt that he put a lot of thought into what real-world object best models games. Unfortunately, this was probably about as foreign to him as farming. Steve Jobs didn't have time to furnish his house. He didn't have a life outside of Apple, and he didn't care about games at all. So I theorize that Game Center became the Golden Nugget because his conception of what a game would look like on a phone came from the games Apple had made for past devices, things like chess and solitaire. That's what games looked like to him, even though the rest of the world had caught on to the fact that video games are more likely to feature cute, merchandizable protagonists than cards.
Anyway, that's all conjecture. The point is that Steve Jobs loved loved LOVED skeuomorphism and in his absence, Jony Ive used iOS 7 to change the official Apple position on skeuomorphism to #ByeFelicia. We laughed at "iOS Lisa Frank edition" and the fact that the Newsstand app went from being a richly textured 3D bookshelf to literally just five gray rectangles. Still, it had to happen. Tastes have changed. Windows Phone showed that flat, simple designs could be beautiful. So now Apple is all about gradients, blur, layering, and Helvetica. It looks nice. The only real problem is that now that developers are discouraged from making their app icons glossy rounded squares, many of them are just making their icons a logo on a white rounded square. Google does a lot of this. The problem is no doubt exacerbated by the Android design guidelines, which say, in essence, "Don't make your app icon a rounded square. If it's headphones, make it headphone-shaped. If it's an apple, make it apple-shaped." I suspect some studios are just putting their Android icon on a white square. The end result is that my home screen has just enough white squares for it to look repetitive, but not enough for it to look intentional.
Android has also undergone some changes and is currently in a state of transition. Up through the Android Gingerbread version, Android was defined by green checkboxes on white backgrounds and pop-up menus with gray gradient icons. It was the bare minimum of design, and while it worked, it wasn't about to win any awards. Honeycomb introduced Holo, a new design scheme in which everything was black with white text and cyan highlights. It hasn't aged amazingly well, and it gets compared to Tron from time to time, but it was a big step up. Then, with KitKat, Google started turning backgrounds white again, and with Lollipop, Google has introduced a new design language it calls Material Design. It emphasizes bright colors and the use of shadows and motion to suggest that your phone contents are made out of paper or some other material. It's pretty.
I have no real preference.
Music is the area in which the differences between Google and Apple really shine. iOS, of course, has a preferred way for you to listen to music. It's called iTunes. Apple would love for you to buy all of your music from there and use it for radio. (Or at least Beats Music, which they just bought.) They probably call it the best mobile music experience ever. Magical or perfect or effortless or some other word off of the Apple "approved adjectives" list, which I estimate to be about 50 words long. Despite the fact that Apple marketing copy makes me dry-heave, I do like the iOS Music app more than any of the music players on Android, because it works seamlessly with iTunes, which is where I happen to have all of my music. The only music library I'm aware of that can really compete with it is the dead Zune software and the practically undead Winamp. It's understandable. The world has moved on to cloud-based music. 99% of the population can listen to everything they want on Spotify, Google Play Music, Amazon Prime Music, or some other streaming service. I happen to have a sizable collection of obscure soundtracks and other albums that aren't on any of the services, so I remain anchored in the past to my physical collection in order to be able to listen to them. Android, to its credit, has several fine music players, including Apollo and DoubleTwist. DoubleTwist even syncs with iTunes and will maintain my oh-so-important play count. Unfortunately, it lacks integration with Google Now. You can tell an Android phone "OK Google, play The White Stripes", and it can do that, but it will try to use Google Play for any media you ask it to play. Google Play Music is a fine music player, even for tracks transferred from a computer, but it doesn't synchronize play counts, and that's a dealbreaker for me. On the iPhone, Siri knows all about my library, and I can ask her to play whatever I like. Well, almost. I'm still figuring her out.
Podcasts work as before, which I find satisfying. iOS might have a slight advantage here, because as far as I'm aware, Google Now does not have any podcast voice commands. Siri, on the other hand, is fully aware of podcasts synced from iTunes. Forgiving that omission, both have a wide selection of excellent podcast apps. From what I read online, the iOS Podcasts app is unpopular, for some reason. I don't understand why, myself. It seems to do its job just fine. My only complaint is that it doesn't have a landscape view.
For a long time, my most strenuous objection to getting an iPhone was the keyboard. I was an avid SwiftKey user and later an avid Minuum user, and the iPhone was stuck with this primitive one-letter-at-a-time-no-predictive-text keyboard. If there are any of you reading that I haven't texted before, know this: I type how I talk, pretty much regardless of context. I don't abbreviate. This isn't a value judgment on those that do; it's just something I never got in the habit of. So for me, predictive text is love. Predictive text is life. Drag keyboards are awesome. It makes swiping over "be right back" faster than pecking out "brb". Switching to the iPhone keyboard would have been the textual equivalent of acquiring an aggressive stutter. This was, thankfully, rectified in iOS 8, which introduced both support for third-party keyboards and enhanced the stock iOS keyboard to do predictive text. This means I can again swipe to my heart's content on SwiftKey or tap with reckless speed with the stock keyboard.
Unexpectedly, I find myself sticking with the stock iOS keyboard over SwiftKey or Minuum. Minuum was my favorite on Android because it was so small. Covering half of your screen with a keyboard makes it hard to do anything else. However, iOS Minuum isn't very small at all, and iOS is a bit smarter about hiding the keyboard when it's not in use. iOS SwiftKey is just unstable. All in all, iOS and Android are pretty close in this category now. I'll give a slight lead to Android because the third-party keyboard ecosystem is so mature.
I've heard a lot about how iOS is supposed to be more stable than Android. This hasn't been my experience. In particular, the Messages app seems to bug out a lot (even with stock keyboard), and in general, I notice about the same number of crashes on my iPhone as I did on my last Android phone. I've already talked about how SwiftKey likes to crash, but it's new, so I'll let that pass for now. Podcasts has an odd bug where every time it syncs, it creates a new copy of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me in its menu. I'm less inclined to forgive that because Podcasts is system software. I guess that, on average, iOS is more stable because of how many cheap, awful Android phones are out there, but given that you get a good Android device (and there are many at the price point of an iPhone), I consider this category another tie.
I use Google Voice. I like it a lot. It transcribes my voicemail, it lets me text from my computer, and it lets me change phone numbers without actually having to change phone numbers. For the uninitiated, Google Voice essentially gives me a phone number that's independent of the number actually programmed into my phone, which I can call/text to/from from as many phones or computers as I like. It would take a lot to convince me to buy a phone that doesn't support it.
A certain unnamed Apple fanboy I have as a friend describes the iPhone's support for Google Voice as "pretty robust", but, with all due respect, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He has not tasted true Google Voice support. On iOS, you can make calls through Google Voice by using the Google Voice app to dial the call. If you use the "Phone" app, you will call the person using your phone's real number, and they will be confused. You can send texts from the Google Voice app, but if you use the Messages app, again, it will use your phone's real number and you will confuse your friends and loved ones. If you tell Siri to call or text someone, she will use your phone's real number, and they might put the real into their contact for you, and then they might text you from it, and you'll get that text on your phone but nowhere else and then you have to correct them and it's awkward.
Android supports deep Google Voice integration. The Google Voice app lets you set whether it should use Google Voice to place all calls, just use it for international calls (useful because Google Voice has cheap international calling rates), or prompt you before every call. If you say "OK Google, call Mom," it works with whatever number you picked. You still have to use the Hangouts app or the Google Voice app to text from Google Voice, but because Android lets you pick which app is the default for sending a text, it still works with "OK Google" and other features. It just worksâ˘.
Google Voice still used to be a little painful on Android because the Google Voice app was really old. Earlier this year, they added Google Voice support to Hangouts, which solved this problem, to me, completely. It let me text from Hangouts the same way a Nexus 5 user that doesn't use Google Voice would. I could also call people over Wi-Fi through Hangouts. Best of all, all of my texts would show up in Hangouts across my phone, my work computer, my home computer, and any other computer I could access Gmail from. It was awesome and I miss it. The idea that someone sends me a message and it just goes to my phone and lives and dies there seems silly now.
I have a small cheat code in my arsenal for this feature. Sprint has an arrangement with Google Voice where they can integrate your number with Google Voice at the carrier level. In other words, regardless of what your phone does, Sprint will make sure its calls and texts go out through the Google Voice number. So I got a Sprint phone. It's good enough, but it's still not the full Google Voice experience. For one thing, Hangouts integration doesn't work, so to text from my computer, I have to open the web browser and go to the Google Voice website, instead of being able to use the Hangouts app on my computer or in Gmail. iMessages don't show up anywhere but on my phone because they're not SMS, so I've had to turn that off. Now, it bears mentioning that Apple recently unveiled a feature called Handoff that allows you to use your Mac to call or iMessage from your iPhone, and this comes pretty close to what I had with (and loved about) Hangouts. Unfortunately, this requires a Mac running OS X Yosemite. My work computer doesn't have that version of OS X yet, and my home computer is a Windows machine because Steve Jobs hated fun and Mac gaming don't real, so Handoff doesn't do me a lot of good. Now, it's true that not so long ago, text messages were just text messages and they went to your phone and that was it, and I survived. This is clearly no worse than that. But the fact remains that there's already a system where all of my text messages can be sent and received by literally any device capable of running Google Chrome and which doesn't make people who can't afford Apple products second-class citizens, and I can't use that anymore. It seems a little ridiculous. (And that's not even scratching the surface of whether or not I'm really OK, deep down, with Google having a copy of all of my text messages.)
I have a 2013 Hyundai Sonata. This advice is probably only relevant for people that have a late-model Hyundai. The iPhone works much better for two reasons.
First, the iPhone has some sort of mechanism for informing the car over Bluetooth that it needs to tell me when to turn. My Android phone would also play its navigation directions over Bluetooth, but the radio would not interrupt the music for it, so my Android phone basically could not speak directions unless I was also listening to audio streaming from it over Bluetooth. I can hear the iPhone directions regardless of what I'm doing.
Secondly, Siri knows the music on the phone. I'm still figuring her out a bit, but for the most part, she lets me play whatever I want with a voice command. Effective voice commands were not something I had with either the Android phone or the iPod. I can also use the stereo to navigate my music, but since I'm carrying around about 50GB of music, voice commands are a big help.
Poor Apple. The only company producing an integrated mapping solution worthy of the iPhone was their new arch-rival, Google. So they had to try to make their own. Who doesn't remember the hilarious adventures the early versions of Apple Maps sent hapless iPhone owners on? Who could forget the fascinating Salvador Dali masterpieces that early Apple Maps made out of famous landmarks and bridges? I'll be honest. I enjoyed seeing Apple fail so hard. I was sad for the people that worked on it and the more reasonable users forced to live with it, but seeing the fanatics try to hold a straight face while saying that Apple had revolutionized or reinvented or whatever animal-derived fertilizer their marketing department came up with warmed my heart.
Apple Maps looks better, in my opinion. Part of this is because I like the Avenir-esque font that it uses, which is probably a little unfortunate, because I imagine that this choice was made by Steve Jobs to emulate London Underground maps, making it a prime target for stripping away in new, non-skeuomorphic world of iOS. Apple also put a shocking amount of work into reproducing highway signs in the app, so the icons for state routes match what you see on the sign instead of just a circle with a number in it. I'm sure this is helpful for some, but I just like it because it looks neat. These icons happen to be glossy. I wonder if they will also eventually be changed or purged or if they will instead remain, like the iOS Emoji, a glossy reminder of the days of iOS past.
There are things I like about it that aren't probably outdated, though. The navigation interface looks more like the rest of iOS than Google Maps. Animations are very smooth. And, of course, it's the only maps app that Siri knows about.
Still, Google Maps remains incredibly hard to beat in the mapping space. Apple Maps doesn't give very clear directions in the complicated interchanges of East St. Louis or West Pasadena. Google Maps solves this with lane guidance. Google Maps also benefits from Google's significant efforts to become a player in the local media space, so listings tend to have more photos and information, including a brief summary sentence that will tell you, for instance, that Subway is a "casual counter-serve chain for build-your-own sandwiches & salads, with health-conscious options", in case you've somehow never been to a Subway before. Google Maps will also keep your search history across devices.
All in all, Apple Maps is pretty, but Google Maps is more helpful. Apple wants you to use Apple Maps, so you'll have to go out of your way to use Google Maps. It's a small amount of friction, but avoiding small amounts of friction is exactly why a lot of people buy iPhones. I, personally, stopped using Google Maps because of an experience I had where I asked Siri to navigate somewhere when I was already navigating. Unfortunately, I was navigating in Google Maps, but Siri tried to open Apple Maps to find my new destination, and the phone crashed as a result. It is a shame that Apple Maps is about as useless as it is pretty. I wonder if there might be more vibrant competition in this space if Apple had bought Waze after all.
Finally, a few other observations that don't really belong in any specific category:
Touch ID is crazily convenient and I can't wait for Android to steal it.
I miss Android's advanced app-to-app sharing and can't wait for iOS to finish stealing that (they've already started).
Putting back buttons in the top-left corner made sense when iPhones had 3.5" screens, but now some of them have 5.5" screens.
The iOS Wikipedia app is way better than the Android one.
I hope you've found this walk through the modern smartphone landscape edifying. Now, I'm off to not buy any apps and contribute to the continuing miserable state of mobile gaming.