pls dont kill me…
im just curious, in 2023 what exactly does ios have over android.
the only two things i can think of is the longer support and apple ecosystem.
otherwise androids just have far far more features than ios does.
can anyone help me understand if theres more to it or if thats it.
Mostly personal preference. iOS just feels so much faster and optimized to me. Also the hardware looks more attractive and feels better in the hand.
The simplicity and smooth operation in IOS combined with robust hardware is the main difference. It may be trying an used iPhone for a short while to experience it.
I really don’t like the iPhone, but I got tired of my Android sending telemetry to a hostile country. I also can’t choose what photos an app can access. If I need to grant access to a photo, I’m forced to grant access to all photos, whereas in iOS I can restrict it to specific photos only.
Sure, Apple also sends telemetry, but they’re pretty upfront about it, and I can turn it off.
This is not a scientific result, but when I’ve seen friends / family with modern-looking android devices, the UI seems laggy or unresponsive compared to my experience on iOS. They often have to try 2 or 3 times to get the swipe / tap they were after. I find iOS pretty much always does what I’m expecting, and even when it doesn’t, I can put it down to me missing the edge of the screen / icon.
I’m curious what ‘features’ I’m missing by sticking with iOS though?
iOS may support longer but older versions of iOS stop supporting a lot of apps while many apps on android work for like android 7 and above or something like that. And to use the ecosystem you need to fill Apple’s pockets with cash and buy more of their products. They have premium hardware but honestly most people use a case so that doesn’t offer many advantages. And yeah no advantage over android is the answer. You can say iMessage but RCS exists on android and also most people just use WhatsApp or telegram or some other messaging platform.
And for the love of god green bubbles exist on iPhones not androids. Tried talking to my friend after buying my first iPhone on iMessage. It had green bubbles. He told me to activate iMessage from settings. Then the bubbles became blue. Made me realise apple is just brainwashing people into thinking that android has limitations lmao.
Apple loses as soon as they step out of their own turf while android can work with basically anything.
The OS is just seems to be more smoother and more cohesive.
Something I noticed when I made the switch was when I was playing a fullscreen youtube video and swiped to go home on my Samsung, it would take me to a janky landscape version of my home screen, then glitch for a second and rotate back to portrait.
On iPhone it just goes back to the home screen without issues
Most apps run better & has less updates on iOS than on Android.
And even when apps on iOS does updates, it updates three apps at a time if you have more than three apps needed to be updated, where as on Android, it only updates one app at a time.
Limitation of choices. Android has many choices and 90% are going to give shitty experience and hence bad impression.
- Face ID is superior than on any other android. When I switched to iPhone I was concerned how will I manage without fingerprint sensor, but this thing turned out to be waaaay better.
- Although many people hate notification center, I actually really like it. You can read ALL messages someone sent to you without opening them, while on Android it shows just like the last 2-3. It helps a lot if you ask me.
- Apps auto-update. You don’t get those boring notifications “Reddit and 20+ apps are ready to update” like on Android.
- Everything is just a bit more fluent. You don’t have extra steps and questions for everything like on Android (eg. Do you want to open document with: Word, Google Docs, Google Drive…). iPhone just opens it straight away, and that’s what is important.
- GPS and location services just work better than on my previous Galaxy S20.
- On 15 you have noise cancellation for calls.
- It’s better optimized, hence battery lasts longer.
- Screen rotate sensor is WAAAAY better on iPhone. I never had a problem that screen randomly turned horizontally like on Samsung. It turns when it really needs to.
Notification center: No, I was able to see all the notifications, I think this was a problem with your phone only.
Apps auto-update: Ehm, no it was silent and done in the background as well?
Extra steps: Yeah, once you have to choose the app you want and never have to think about it again, on iPhone you have to do this extra step to get an other one you prefer than the one built in.For the rest I pretty much agree at 100%.
- Notification center: No, I was able to see all the notifications, I think this was a problem with your phone only.
I meant more in a sense if you have longer conversation with someone and they send you lets say 10 messages, on iPhone it shows all 10 when you expand them in notification center, Android shows only last few and cuts them.
As for auto-update, I must say it’s completely opposite for me. On S20 I have every day received notification “Something is ready to update” even though I had enabled auto-update on google store, but iPhone does it in the background, it never bothered me with that.
GPS works like crap on almost all the iphones i had
Android also has apps auto update
- i dont use face id
- to check a notification i have i need to drag down every time cant see while using the phone
- not really had to update myself many times
- slower animations phone feels slow to do some jobs like downloading something.
- i cant change my default maps to google. Irks me.
- ?? You have it on android too i guess never had problem on my calls
- better optimisation my ass u just have lower resolution lol
- did not notice difference
Pros
- air pods pro is just the best
- typing under rain is much much comfort
- haptics are so good. They feel real.
- feels expensive in hand i enjoy using the phone
- less useless apps
Cons for me
- cant close and open location fast i literally had to create url shortcut lol never done such thing in android
- front facing camera is awful and cant close deep fusion
- 9 gag app is awful for me i cant open links directly from comments. Need to copy paste and delete.
- need back gesture really really hard this phone. In order to cancel something and keyboard i needed to use my second hand.
Edit: i use 15pm my first ios device.
People hate on me for this, but I miss way less notifications on iOS. I like how it shows everything that I got notified for since I last looked at my phone. Not just jumbled mess of notifications with a 100 little icons that could have been there from 3 seconds ago to 3 days ago.
They say “dude don’t you ever take care of your notifications”. No, I don’t want to swipe and click each one to get them to go away
To add:
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On Android, apps install their own notification services to the device which constantly checks for notifications from the developer’s server. Which is honestly bloat.
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On iOS, developers need to set up their notification servers so that they push notifications towards an Apple server, and then the Apple server handles the rest of the process by sending it to the correct device. Which in result only requires a single “notification daemon” running on an iOS device for the entirety of apps, which also in turn is safer because the process is purely on the hands of Apple.
What? Google Cloud Messaging, Firebase handles them on Android.
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I regret switching to ios. I switched from old midrange samsung phone and at forst i was surprised how good was iphone, but then i realised there isn’t many advantages. It is just different.
The UI, hardware, and app quality. Less intrusive advertisements. Most importantly no preinstalled Google shit.
Better garbage collection implementation in a better language. Every advantage ios has over android is due to decisions made at the start of these projects. iOS is smoother, more reliable, quicker, efficient. This software will always take less energy and be really really reliable because the developers put the hard work of using automatic reference counts.
So the eco system. It’s pretty much just that. Not talking about the phone just the os.
At this point it’s basically only personal preference.
There were times when iPhones were objectively better than most androids. That was rather in the earlier days.
IMO since 2017/2018 Androids which are in the same price range as iPhones offer the same or more features while also being of good build quality and software quality.
Regarding features; Androids tend to offer more features, but in 99% these are rather experimental and are often not even transferred to the successor.
The only consistent feature I can think of is personalization, and googles AI progress with their current Pixels.
One could argue that Androids are a tad more interesting, since you can do so much stuff through 3rd party apps or by default, or you have crazy camera setups and SPens and whatnot, but in the end it’s not an advantage if you won’t use those features or if they are messy.
So yeah, if you want an S-Pen or a crazy 200mp 10x space zoom Setup you obviously won’t go for iPhone.
I personally prefer the simplicity and mature design language of iPhones.
But If a future Android offers a feature I deperately want I’d switch again. And also switch back. I don’t lock myself to a brand.
So you think a Xiaomi 13T Pro with its similar price tags worth the same as an iPhone 14, right? LOL
The thing is, when you say “longer support” and “apple ecosystem” you are already talking about a ton of features equivalent to the amount Android provides. Except the ones on iOS are all built-in.
The coherency of software and hardware is a world of it’s own. There are specific features of every device and every new release which blow people’s minds (Vision Pro reference). Some say Apple didn’t invent these “features”, and some of these claims are correct. But innovation is not the thing special about Apple products, it’s consistency. Shit works beyond expectations, and Apple designs them in a way far better than any competitor. For example, Face-ID as one of the replies said.
The simple and minimalist design of the OS, which is worth opening a paragraph for. Honestly, compared to Apple OSes, the design mentality of Windows and Android feels like they were quickly glued with things during a rainy night of 1980 and left like that. Sure you can change those on Windows and Android, but then it’s bloat, which is an unacceptable term for Apple devices.
Also system specific things such as absence of garbage collection and using ARC instead (which is one of the reasons why iPhones come with half the ram compared to Android devices yet provide the same performance), the power management and processor efficiency, the unmatched security for both the device and ecosystem. Also neither iOS nor MacOS come with built-in adware compared to Windows and some versions of Android. Nor nothing on Apple OSes can use trackers without your consent.
As for the ecosystem itself, for me, Airdrop and Handoff are one of the best things. If you own a Windows pc and Android device, you’d normally need to setup a bluetooth file sharing server to send a jpeg from one device to another and god knows if it’d work. But if you own a Mac bundled with an iPhone, forget sharing whatever file type you want to whatever application; you can just “copy” anything on one device and instantly “paste” it to the other device, at crazy speeds independent of your bluetooth or wifi tx rate thanks to the built-in Airdrop Receiver which uses P2P tech. (Unlike a FTP server, you don’t even need a router as a middleman to use Airdrop).
Oh also, there’s this another topic about what can you accomplish with a jailbroken iPhone, but I won’t write it here.
TL;DR: iOS be screaming “QUALITYYYY” all over.
except for copy pasting when do you ever really use handoff? i never get to use that
Mail, and safari also. Notes pretty rarely.