A Journey From Android to iPhone

I have been using Android since Android Froyo. I am a great fan of Android and I still am very enthusiastic about Android. I have been tinkering with phones since the early days of Gingerbread / CM7. I wrote blog post back in the days when I first bought Motorola Atrix. I also wrote a tutorial about installing CyanogenMod7 on Atrix back in the days.

My journey with Android started with a bang. I loved every minute of the thrill. I loved modding. Flashing custom ROMs, overclocking kernels and trying out different ROMs helped me to explore the openness and possibilities of Android. I even flashed Ubuntu on a phone. It was pretty wild back in the days.

Why I have fallen in love with iPhone and iOS

If you don’t want to read the whole thing, just read the last paragraph.

I do not like Apple as a company for overpricing pretty much everything. After Atrix 4G, I bought another Android from Motorola, the infamous Moto G!

The Moto G sold like hotcakes for $199

The Moto G was one of the best phone I ever used.

Nevertheless, when my Motorola updated the Moto G from KitKat to Lollipop, I was utterly frustrated with the overall experience. Lollipop was shipped even before it was ready. It had horrible performance issues and the new material UI didn’t look or feel as good as the demos/YouTube videos.

Google released Android 6.0 Marshmallow to fix these situations. It improved the situation but I didn’t like the whole design language Google took for Androids. The Android material design seemed like a mess and the animations were not smooth back in the days. Due to the design, the system required more memory and efficient processors.

I used MM and Lollipop for like a year and at that point, I often felt frustrated because of the plastic UI and app performance. The Facebook app on Android still lagged on the most high-end phones at that time.

What’s the point of a high specs phone if your phone can’t handle apps like Facebook and Gmail together? So I decided to jump the ship. I was very hesitant since I was totally hooked up with Google ecosystem. (Google contacts, Google play music etc). I also needed some key apps like SwiftKey, Keep. They were already there so I decided to switch.

Why I switched to iOS

After using Moto G for like 2 solid years, I thought about upgrading. I never liked Lollipop and Marshmallow. I believed they were released without proper stability and testing. The software was half done. The apps lagged. The frame rates dropped across the OS. Apps crashed. It was a bad experience.

I wanted to get another stock Android but at that time – the only available options were Nexus. Nexus 6 was way too big for me. And all the other non Nexus phones had a custom skin on top of Android which I had never been a fan of. Stock Android all the way, right? ??

This video from Mrwhosetheboss sums a lot of my thoughts. You might give this video a go.

I bought an iPhone 6S sometimes back in January 2017 and started using it from around March that year. I agree that the first month in iPhone has been bad. I didn’t quite figure out how to move all my photos to my 16GB iPhone.

I moved the photos from iTunes to iPhone then I figured out, I couldn’t delete the photos I moved from PC to iPhone. I mean wtf Apple? If I copy photos from pc to iPhone, I can’t delete them? What kind of rubbish is this? And Apple still is an arrogant prick about this.

My first iPhone was the iPhone 6S

Then I figured out Google Photos and since then it has been a must-have app for me. I used Google Play Music to play all my local songs via cloud.

Since the initial hiccup, the experience has been fantastic. The apps run way better in iOS. Facebook Instagram and even some Google’s stock app run better on iOS. They released YouTube dark mode on iOS first. I always get security updates. Although iOS 11 was pretty bad, however, from 11.1, things mostly are as good as before. (Although I liked iOS 10’s design better). Who misses the dotted network bars?

There are somethings which Android does better like downloading stuff to mobile. iOS can download too but in the app’s own sandboxed space. However, with iOS13’s Files app it has been a breeze. Anyone can download anything in Files app and can import in other apps. The Files app has been a great addition to iOS.

No central storage access for user was a bummer st first for me. In iOS all data must reside inside an app. There’s no storage which all app can access. This seems like a hiccup at first, but it’s a great way to make sure other apps can not access the data of another app.

I am really loving the iOS experience and didn’t expect this type of smooth performance from a 3-year-old phone. It can easily go another year or year and a half. So no wonder why people keep buying the Apple phones. Mostly because they work so smoothly, without any hiccups (exceptions happen but let’s ignore them here) and the user remains very satisfied. On the other hand, major apps still lag in high-end Android phones (Mi5 lagged while running Facebook app).

That is very frustrating. I remember using facebook lite app because the Facebook app lagged like hell on my phone. Mostly because the app wasn’t optimized properly. Not Android’s fault at all.

At the end of the day, I am amazed and very satisfied with iOS because how reliable and efficient it is with its resources.

I recently upgraded to iPhone11

This smoothness is there because all codes run native on iOS and do not need JIT Compiler like Android (Java compilation). Android would never be as smooth because of JIT.

Why I upgraded to iPhone 8, then iPhone 11

Now when I’m thinking about moving, I’m afraid I won’t be able to be satisfied outside iOS. Well I guess that’s how Apple wraps you up in their web of ecosystem. After using 6S for a while, I only upgraded because I needed 64GB of storage.

I used an iPhone 8 for about a year. The phone was great. It served all my purposed. A fast processor, great screen and great performance. The camera quality was great too.

However, I recently upgraded to iPhone 11. Mostly because I loved the green color of the new iPhone 11. Nothing else. iPhone 8 was perfectly capable of serving me another year for sure.

The experience has only got better. I do miss iPhone 8/iPhone 6S small footprint a lot – but gosh I love that green color of iPhone11.

Why iPhone SE is a big deal for the phone industry

I love the strategy Apple has chosen for its newly released #iPhoneSE. This might be the most important phone releases in the industry for a while. It doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. But it does everything pretty damn well for $399 as mentioned by Marques Brownlee.

We have been seeing the “Services” move by Apple for the last couple of years. Apple TV+, Apple Music, iCloud needs more customers if they want to earn big from SaaS services. Giving an iPhone to mass audience with spectacular build quality and the latest & greatest chip (A13 Bionic) only reiterates how serious Apple is with its services. This should also boost the sales of already loved Airpods. (Fun fact: Did you know if Apple separated Airpods as a different company it would still be a Fortune 500 company?)

I’m keenly waiting for 2021 when Apple should be introducing MacBooks with ARM chips. The future should be very interesting. That would be a major blow for Intel who has been in a major competition with AMD Ryzen chips.

I still don’t like Apple because of their aggressive pricing but I will think twice before buying other phone.

(I wrote the whole post from WordPress app from mobile. Pardon me if there was some grammatical errors)

7 thoughts on “A Journey From Android to iPhone”

  1. “ The number of cores or the higher clock speed is not the only thing when comes to performance.”

    I hate that it’s 2020 and people still think such raw specs translate to better experience. It’s not until someone actually uses and sees the optimized experience when they realize raw specs don’t mean much when the software is not optimized. Raw hardware is half the story.

    Reply

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