I’m sorry Apple, I tried. Android is just better now.

I’ve been an Apple user for a very long time, my first iPhone I owned was an iPhone 5 and it was great. I had been given an iPad Mini gen 1 from my university and because iOS was still in its infancy (it had only been about for 4 or 5 years at that point) the OS wasn’t too advanced, it did everything I wanted, there appeared to be zero bugs because iOS 6 did not have the sheer number of features that iOS 18 now has and Apple at the time were focussing primarily on creating an ecosystem that “just worked”.

Something I liked back then was if I broke my screen or had to replace the battery then I could. I wasn’t tied down by some bullshit software lock for no reason. I had that iPhone 5 screen replaced a few times as well as the battery and I had no issues. Now, that’s almost impossible to do. You’re locked out of basic features all because Apple says so.

Granted, in iOS 18 they have rolled it back a little, so if you swap screens or batteries from another iPhone it’ll “recalibrate” and show it as a used part, but it still doesn’t really feel like you own it. It very much feels like Apple’s been forced to do this.

The last iPhone I purchased was a 14 Pro. Felt great to use, did what I wanted it to do, cameras were okay, but iOS just felt a bit shit by this point. Apple were focussing so much on “what can we add to the system” they forgot about “oh yeah, we should probably make this easier to use”. I hated the stock Mail app – sending an attachment on an iPhone was totally different to the desktop Mail app, it never added it properly so ended up being a pain point. The Notes app is a pile of garbage that’s never worked the way I want. Wife and I have a shared note to used for a shopping list, it never updated when either of us added to it, she’d have to message me the list or send me a screenshot, and it’d update days later.

I thought I’d try Android again. Unsure of what mid-range device I’d ultimately be unhappy with I got a Galaxy S23 Ultra. Cameras, UI, look and feel of the device, screen, battery: all amazing. It made my iPhone 14 Pro feel a little inadequate. I could customise what I wanted, though in reality I don’t customise much, I just move the app icons where I want and show a widget or two. But the problems… can I use my iCloud mail on Android? No. Can I sync my iCloud calendar? Absolutely not. What about Apple notes? Also no. You can log in using Chrome but it runs so fucking poorly it’s effectively useless.

I have also used a MacBook for a long time too – 13″ Intel 2016 with the shitty buterfly keyboard and a tendency to just turn the screen off for no apparent reason, then an M1 MacBook Air which I didn’t like and swapped to an M1 MacBook pro, sold that eventually for an M1 Pro 16 inch and it was a total workhorse. It’s now on eBay. Why? I use Windows more becuase Apple don’t seem interested in fixing what’s broken, they seem to focus more on “here’s this shiny new feature, ignore the stuff that doesn’t work properly”.

Here are some examples

  • In dark mode, when you’re performing a destructive action, the colours are very hard to read. See this Reddit thread. I’ve already raised feedback tickets on this… none of them even looked at
  • Window management is rubbish – I want to snap windows to the edges/sides where I want them much like in Windows. I know there’s an app to do that, and macOS Sequoia has it but it seems to be poorly implemented
  • The finder app is hard for me to use. Trying to manage photos was a pain in the arse. In Windows Explorer I can preview a photo in whatever view I want by toggling on the Preview Pane and just flicking through it. I can’t do this in Finder. I have to put it in “album” view, but then I can’t see the photos in a list. I gave up, put the photos on my Windows PC and was able to organise and edit them much faster
  • The video encoder when using OBS is beyond inconsistent. I want to use the available hardware encoder that Apple provide. It worked first time when I test the recording, test again to be sure and lo and behold it’s now an invalid encoder, and OBS doesn’t accept any encoder after that. It might be an OBS problem, but it was consistent through every version of OBS I used

The only good part I liked about Apple was how good the Apple Watch is, but it’s locked to the Apple ecosystem (specifically you must have an iPhone running a compatible version)

So I’ve stuck with Android, and I don’t think I’ll be going back to Apple

  • Google Keep (notes) works perfectly, it actually updates in real time for shared notes
  • Camera is insanely good
  • I can put my email on any device I want
  • Samsung’s WearOS offering is just about comparable to Apple’s Watch OS (I’ve not had a fun time with Pixel Watch or FitBit)
  • Google Takeout is brilliant – I want to clear my 15GB of photo storage so I used it to get all the photos in one dump and I can delete and start again (I know I can do this in iCloud but it’s so clunky, only 1000 photos at a time)
  • I have so many devices to choose from. If I want a mid-range device for £300 then there are loads. Flagships? Also lots of them. Android has come so far that they’re almost all the same so the differences between them have got smaller

I’m not completely done with Apple, though, I have a used iPhone 8 simply to receive iCloud emails and stuff like that, and an older used iPad Pro to run Zwift on as it’s pretty consistent, but I don’t use Apple’s products any more.

I watched the September Apple event and their sustainability approach was missing one key aspect

I love the iPhone.

The fact “it just works” with pretty much everything else Apple is something that I’ve enjoyed for years. My favourite one was the iPhone 5 – it had a small but awesome form factor, the camera was decent and battery was brilliant. It was also fairly repairable by almost anyone.

Since then, their phones have got more water resistant and much more difficult to take apart, but were still repairable for things like the battery and screen in some models. Now is a whole other ball game as Apple introduced software locks to the battery, screen and cameras since iOS 13.1.

Touch ID and Face ID is has always had a software lock on it as it’s the biometric entry to the phone so I see no reason why that would ever change, but replacing the battery and screen – the two most commonly replaced components – should be easy to do by anyone with the right parts. But no. Apple have been fiercely defiant and refused to remove these software locks making it impossible for anyone other than Apple to repair.

Fine, you can repair it yourselves

Apple did release a self-repair program but this is basically worthless. You pay just a tiny bit more than taking it to Apple themselves to do, and you still have to call up Apple and confirm that you’ve put the correct part in and for them to remove the software locks remotely, as shown by Hugh Jeffreys and Quinn Nelson (Snazzy Labs). It’s still hampering repairability because nobody in their right mind is going to attempt to do this themselves because of how much equipment is required to do these repairs and then having to call Apple to remove the software locks.

Apple claim this is due to security and to prevent non-genuine parts being put in the iPhone, but even genuine parts will trigger this lock – see the Hugh Jeffreys video where he swaps batteries and boards between 2 identical iPhones, so their claim is rubbish and in my eyes is a way to just force out any third party repair out of the market.

But please don’t talk about it

Apple also launched a third party repair program, but it’s so aggressively secretive that Louis Rossmann made a video showing the T&Cs of this meaning that anyone in the program is under a non-disclosure agreement not to talk about the repair program, and in order to enter the program you’re effectively going in totally blind. Put this into perspective for a moment. This isn’t some military hardware that could threaten the national security of a country, this is a phone screen, a phone battery and a phone camera. Three very simple parts to replace, being artificially locked for no good reason.

We have Daisy?

Daisy is Apple’s open source parts dismantling robot, and it’s really rather good at dismantling and stripping down an iPhone into the raw parts in order to recycle it as demoed by Lawrence Llewellyn from the Fully Charged show.

Liam – Daisy’s predecessor

This is fantastic, it means that for new iPhones fewer and fewer raw materials need to be mined, and several older iPhones can be recycled to make one brand new one, or an iPad or MacBook.

So when Apple did their whole sustainability skit in this year’s iPhone event, they helpfully missed out the one glaring issue to sustainability: THEIR HARDWARE IS NOT REPAIRABLE BY ANYONE APART FROM APPLE. Devices not being repairable by anyone apart from Apple simply leads to tons of e-waste, as the cost of repair often outweighs the price of a new device so people don’t bother.

My dream would be fore Apple to keep the software locks but not display the message if you’ve put in a genuine part. Apple know about every single serial number of every screen, battery and camera, so it wouldn’t be beyond them to show the non-genuine warning first time, ask you to confirm and it checks against their serial numbers remotely, and then it works.

I get fed up with Apple’s holier than thou approach to repairing everything. I want to be able to repair my device, or have a small repair shop do this.

I hate the fact I get bored of tech so fast, and Apple’s ecosystem is so good.

I have used almost every iPhone in the last 10 years. I have also used quite a few Android phones during that time. The reason for this is that I get excited about technology but I get bored of it just as fast.

I had an iPhone 6S and Apple Watch, got bored of the iPhone and went through various Android devices before landing on a 7 Plus for a while. Got bored of iOS and tried various Android phones again, ended up with an OS iPhone SE, it was faulty so used a rather shitty iPhone 7 til I traded it in for a XR, sold that for a XS. I had an Nokia for a bit after that. I don’t remember what I had after that but I landed on the iPhone SE 2, and then the 12 and stayed there for a while. I did trade between models because I wanted the 12 Pro Max after that, it was too big, so sold that and went back to the regular 12, and stayed with it til the 14 Pro.

In comes the Samsung S23 Ultra. The phone is genuinely wonderful. The screen is a great size, the cameras are unbelievably good. I was taking what I felt were DSLR quality photos at a wedding and on holiday in France. So much better than iPhone in terms of image processing, integration with Google is so good, it all just works, and Google Assistant vastly better than Siri. Siri just needs to, um, die. I will still keep the Samsung and have a secondary SIM to put in it, so I won’t be selling it.

iOS and the majority of the Apple ecosystem is great. I’ve got the iPhone, watch, MacBook, a couple of sets of AirPods and some AirTags. It all just works. The Apple Watch is genuinly the best fitness smartwatch I’ve ever come across. The iPhone is the easiest phone to use for me. The MacBook is an absolute titan. The Airpods are expensive for what they are but they work well. AirTags allow me to know where my things are. Leaving that ecosystem means I lose out on the seamlessness of everything. It’s a complete pain in the arse.

The thing that doesn’t bother me much when I’ve switched out between ecosystems is iMessage. iMessage is great, but here in the UK it’s not used as much as it is in the USA. We can use WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Discord, Telegram etc. etc. But when you’re the odd one out in a group of people who use iMessage, it can just get annoying. Apple just keep adding features to it which are kinda nice, like stickers. Android doesn’t really have this, or if it does I’ve not seen it.

The Apple Watch includes all the premium features that are often paywalled on other fitness watches and it does it well. The watch bands are expensive, but they last forever. Integration with other services like Strava are nice, and it’s really simple to integrate.

I guess one of my main influences is the vast plethora of YouTube videos telling you that “OMG IOS IS SO AMAZING LOOK AT ALL THE STUFF YOU CAN DO” and “IOS IS TERRIBLE ANDROID IS WAAAY BETTER DITCH ANDROID PLEASE LOOK AT WHAT THIS PHONE CAN DO!”. A lot of these videos are often from the same content creators, so they influence a load of subscribers to switch and then a month or so later they do another video about how wrong they were and have switched back.

If these YouTube influencers stopped making these kind of videos influcencing people to dump a perfectly working ecosystem for another, and then switching back again a short time later in a video that’s supposed to seem sincere. Given that, Apple need to keep up with the likes of Samsung and Google in terms of image processing and types of cameras. Apparently Siri and autocorrect will be improved in iOS 17. We’ll wait and see.