I think these are accurate. Siri is better at being summoned and doing quick tasks but I feel like Google has a lot more features.

And for having to tinker less, absolutely true so far

The only reason I chose this phone is because I determined that the interconnected apps and services were more worth it in my social circle. Without that, the value proposition basically becomes even to me.

I guess my thing is that technology is important to me and at some point having tech work better overall even if it’s more expensive is more important to me. Plus a lot of Apple stuff is well made and has great resale value so it becomes more manageable that way.

That is odd. But I can definitely tell you that most of the solutions for casting your phone to a tv never worked for me on android. Smart cast almost never worked for me at all. But I will slightly miss the Dex software which was occasionally useful.

I think the best solution for me was getting an NVIDIA shield and using 3rd party apps anyways. It’s better than casting and works more consistently.

I have devices that already use USB C so now I have to have two cables in the same location where before I only needed one. And also transfer and charging speeds are much slower with lightning. I think my phone takes much longer to charge, especially at lower battery percentages.

Overall, pretty much every device should have USB C by now. Apple only stays this way to further lock people into the ecosystem.

I think it’s less about the speed of the animations and just the consistency of them animating in the OS. I mean, even settings in the menu animate nicely with sliding toggles and page swipe gestures. Those may exist on some android phones or can be added, I don’t know, but I noticed them since my Note definitely did far less animation. I know it’s not for everyone, but the iOS animations seem on the snappier side to me. I also used to remove them on my android phone and I put them back because it caused issues for me with some apps just looking rough when they launched. So yes, YMMV.

And it’s a great point about the specific android OS. So yeah take this as a comparison of OneUI on a 3.5 year old phone compared to an almost 3 year old iPhone. If I was to go back to android, it would not be back to Samsung. Both phones I bought from them were overpriced and aged rather poorly imo.

My objective isn’t to crap all over these phones or a certain OS. Each has their downsides. More my point was that if you switch off of a similar OS or have some of the issues I had and go to an iPhone, what might you expect?

So yeah, blame Samsung but for me it won’t make a difference until someone forces RCS as a standard which may very well bring me back to android. Just thought I’d see what it’s like after nearly a decade since I’ve used an iPhone. The last iPhone I had was an iPhone 5.

Well for photos I’m currently using Google photos to transfer stuff but I’ll be moving away from that pretty soon so im not the person to ask probably. The hope is that I can find an app to either directly transfer photos or have my own cloud storage going forward.

I’d prefer to move away from Google services but it does make backing up photos very easy so there’s that

Apologies, its an exaggeration on the ‘full minute’ part of the spectrum but I have noticed that the assistant is faster by quite a bit. I’ll change that part. While using the assistant and asking it to play music in my car, it would often take up to 30 seconds to get from me finishing saying the prompt, it uploading to google, coming back, and playing the music I want. Siri takes about 10 seconds at most.

I have had many times where the assistant just gave up on me though, especially while driving. It would stop my music when I summoned it for about 20 seconds, appear to be listening, and then tell me that it was sorry and couldn’t complete my request or would say nothing and resume the music. I got so frustrated with the assistant in my car that I stopped using it entirely. Could just be my experience, seems like some people think Auto and the assistant work just fine for them.

I like this kind of input because it displays use cases and problems that I haven’t thought of which is exactly why I made the post, so thanks for saying all this and taking the time for that.

That being said, I’m not trying to fight but I’ll give my perspective of how I feel about the issues you raised as an average user just to provide some context in case anyone is concerned about this stuff.

The keyboard is absolutely something that, if android keyboards are a must for you, you might be upset by. I have yet to customize my keyboard at all so I’m trying the default layout for now. I don’t mind the app bar because it isn’t any worse than the few keyboards I used on android. Swipe to text works fine for me but autocorrect does occasionally get words wrong. Not any worse than my android keyboards though (I’ve tried all the major ones out there too). However, I’m fine with my typing pace on iOS, so that doesn’t bother me. I have a couple UX complaints with it but nothing to make me ditch the phone. Might just take time for me to get comfy.

As for messaging, I noted a lot of what you said in the previous post I made. Not having RCS is their fault, it sucks, but if the EU gets it figured out it may tempt me back to Android. I don’t mind the messaging app so far because it does provide a lot of functionality for socializing that Googles alternatives just don’t have or are done poorly. Not everyone will use the entire messaging app but a lot of the complaints are niche to me. Ive never even heard of AMR files. Also I believe searching for messages is being added but I agree that its absence is rather odd.

Connectivity does suck. Hopefully it will improve on newer models but again, I hardly ever have a reason to connect my phone directly to my PC. I back up all of my photos over wifi so I have no need. In fact, my previous phone was used only a handful of times for file transfer. So it isn’t important to me and I don’t think its important to average users, but its a good note and I hope a switch to USB-C will improve that.

Also your situation with PDFs is odd. I’ve had the opposite experience as I actually took a short vacation the past week with my device. It brought up and stored the event emails, tickets (in the wallet) and maps that I needed for the event pretty easily. I definitely had to open a couple of PDFs but maybe it used my connection. So I’ll say that I’m not sure what thats about but I’d bet an app can solve that problem.

Your last point is a mixed bag. Community support is hard to find but if you’ve ever looked at forums asking google how to fix something its pretty much the exact same thing. Only difference is that a workaround is usually possible but requires a bit more effort. Like uninstalling their default apps for instance. Or changing the per-app notification sound (may be fixed now idk). When I tried to search for those things, all the google responses just said “pound sand, we’ll add it to our totally real feature request list”. Still, adaptability is more an Android thing for sure.

I’ve started to realize that the android platform is wider than I thought when posting my original comments. There were features I wasn’t aware of, had incorrect perceptions of, or had variance based on my specific model of phone and car. Another user here pointed that out to me about their screen layout being different. I’m happy to correct things though if you think that I need to. I’m only human :)

I’m not a fanboy, quite the opposite if you read my original post. I’ve been on android for a long time before this. So not trying to circlejerk. I felt like this could be valuable insight for people wishing to change platforms. I even put at the bottom of one or both of my posts that I don’t want a platform war, that’s dumb and isn’t the point.

I really appreciate your response, it’s exactly what I was hoping to add to the post here. I want people to hear what is working for others in the Android ecosystem. I’m just hoping to add some valuable input about why I didn’t want to be on android anymore and how that went.

To respond though, the animations thing like you said had to do with my phone slowing down. Why? No clue. I don’t think it was my fault, I don’t mess with my phone and I kept my apps minimal and storage wasn’t close to full. I’m not saying it’s impossible to get smooth animations on android, my phone used to have them, but I will say that most UI features animate more consistently and nicer out of the box with iPhone. I’ll also give a nod to what I said about people who tinker. That was me and I enjoyed the freedom of android for a long time. But I didn’t want to spend the time to get it perfect anymore. I setup my phone in a couple of days how I wanted it and now I don’t feel the need to touch very much on it. Different strokes. I should also note though that my phone was only about 3 or 4 years old at that point and was chugging more than I expect at that mark.

The assistant thing is anecdotal, but Google does a pretty decent job. Unfortunately their integrations with my model of choice were subpar so I didn’t enjoy using it but I can see why people would prefer one or the other. I like the simplicity of Siri I guess (common theme) whereas Google has built an assistant with a million gizmos to it. I’ll get back to you on the smart home stuff eventually :)

CarPlay is going to be another anecdote. My car is not old, a 2017, but I don’t have a similar interface. Maybe it’s the smaller screen or something? But it’s only changed UI like once I think. Either way, for me and my car it works better and I commented what I did as I noticed it. So I guess YMMV on that.

It’s always seemed to me like android prioritizes new and flashy stuff and easily forgets their older legacy devices. Support being hit or miss is why I gave up android, but it could just be on Samsungs side. Just a thought, Cheers!

It’s interesting you bring that up. It annoys me slightly about the notifications but also I thought that my android phone spammed me with them. And they all got equal priority. So at least iPhone does do that better. I think for me it’s about equal there as well because I never took time on android to customize the notifications and I’d rather they all just act consistently.

I should also mention that the other dominate force is misogyny. It’s the icky part you’re alluding to.

It’s not just a problem with our community being unaccepting or calling us fence sitters. Most men will not identify as bisexual due to the much different overt homophobia that men deal with imo (not to diminish hate against women which is a big problem).

I’ll give examples. Guys will often be perfectly fine dating a bisexual woman and tend to think that they’re more adventurous or that it’s more attractive because they fetishize lesbianism. Whereas with women, women just assume all sorts of stuff and tend to not want to date you if you’re a bisexual guy. They’ll think that being gay is gross, that you’ll cheat on them, that maybe you were submissive (gasp), etc.

At the end of the day, they’ll say they aren’t homophobic and support lgbt issues as an ally but the moment a bisexual man wants to date them it makes them uncomfortable. This makes me want to hide who they are.

I think it’s similar for a lot of bi men too when their family gets involved. A lot of toxic masculinity means that if you can choose to identify as straight and hide it, you might as well.

This is not correct I don’t think. He’s always been right wing, it’s not a new thing. The more important thing is to look at his intentions right before being forced to buy the company.

And those intentions were clearly to use a large amount of cash to bully the company into following his orders. He didn’t like them censoring things. He didn’t like they’re politics. And it was where he spent most of his social media time.

People seem to underestimate the absolute power of elites. He bought an entire company to kill it because he can do that. How many lives will this impact? A ton. All due to the ego of one awful man.

Did they… did they ban a list of banned subreddits?