SoylentNews

I've gotten a couple questions about why I switched from Android back to iOS, so I thought I'd write it someplace more permanent than a comment in an article.

Background: My wife and I bought iPhone 3GSs in March, 2010. In September or October, 2012, we upgraded them; my wife went with the then-new iPhone 5, and I got a Samsung S3. She bought an iPad 2 not long after they came out, and I bought an Asus tablet in February 2013, which I replaced a few months ago with an iPad Air. Also, a few months ago, my employer replaced my Blackberry with an iPhone 5S. So, I have ample experience with both iOS and Android platforms, and had the ability to do side-by-side comparisons in real-world use. My wife and I work in the same building and carpool together, so it's about as good of a comparison as you could hope for short of lab testing.

I only ever used the Google Play store and the Amazon app store for apps.

Also, I'm a long time user of Linux (since Slackware 3.x days), so I liked the concept of Android and I wanted to love it. It just didn't turn out that way.

The biggest problem I had with the S3? Battery life, by far. My wife's iPhone 5 simply destroys my S3's battery. The best example I have is one day when we got up, traveled to another city about 3 hours away, set up a campsite, then went to a museum for a couple hours, then went to dinner. At dinner, I pulled out my phone and was dismayed to see I was at ~30% battery life. The iPhone was at 60%. The kicker is that I wasn't using my phone at all during the time before dinner - I was the one driving, and I was taking pictures at the museum - while my wife was repeatedly checking hers for some news on something. It's THAT bad.

I've disabled notifications, and I had two widgets running, but nothing was set to auto-update. I even bought a new Samsung battery earlier this year, and I noticed zero difference. I had the power save mode on constantly. I used Llama to turn off Wifi and Bluetooth while we were at work. I did everything I could think of to save battery life, and it just didn't help. I usually had to recharge my S3 during the day at work: Yes, it would survive the entire day without being recharged, but I'd quickly run out of battery power if I tried to talk on the phone in the evening.

As an aside, yesterday, my first day at work with the iPhone, I left the office with it at 83% at the end of the day, with no charging, playing some music, and playing Tapped Out at lunch - and Wifi and Bluetooth left on all day. My S3 probably would have been around 30% in the same usage. It's absolutely stunning how bad the S3 really was, even with a battery only a few months old.

We've noticed during camping trips where we don't have a strong cell signal that the S3 seemed to suffer a lot more in areas of weak signal than the iPhone. I'm guessing this is part of the problem at work, too. But I do get two bars, so it's not like I'm right at the edge of signal either. I've never had a call drop or anything like that.

Beyond the battery life issue, the second problem I had was bugs. For example:
--During updates, apps would randomly disappear from the menus; I never could figure out why. Often I wouldn't notice for a few days until I needed the app, then I had to go looking for it. Annoying and rude.

--I never could get the S3 to be recognized on my Macbook Pro - the Android driver never worked for me - or a Linux machine. After two years of easy-peasy synching with iTunes, this was my first headache with the S3, and it turned into a lasting one. I ended up buying DoubleTwist's airsync option, which seemed fine at first, but then started showing its issues, such as always re-syncing every song every time, making it take many times longer than necessary. I eventually started putting music on an SD card and putting that into the phone instead, and I was afraid to hit that Airsync option again. (I could write a whole separate post on DoubleTwist's flaws.)

--I usually kept the phone locked into portrait orientation, but when I did unlock it and rotate it, I always held my breath, because often (maybe 25% of the time) it would lock up mid-rotate, requiring a reset.

--The phone was often very warm, sometimes due to a stuck background process, sometimes just because it liked getting warm as far as I could tell. This would happen at least weekly, if not more.

Flaws - these aren't bugs but issues with Android's design, implementation, or third party apps that mess with you:
--Apps can and will run in the background. At first this sounds like a good thing, and it sometimes is (for example, if you have an 3rd party alarm app, on Android it doesn't need to be in the foreground to work like it does on iOS). But, then you go into the process list - I cared because of my miserable battery life - and discover apps like Pandora have a background process running all the time. I only use Pandora occasionally, but often enough that I'd rather not have to re-download it every time I need it. Why does it need to have a background thread all the time?

--Random apps suddenly jump in and complain about something. I had this happen with the Android mail app the other day, an app that I haven't used in at least a year (and of course I can't remove it). We were driving home, my phone buzzed, so I handed it over to my wife, and she said there was some weird error message. The Android mail app had popped up out of nowhere and claimed an issue with one of the email accounts. Why? What? (The Facebook app got itself deleted vehemently when it woke me up one night demanding to be updated. Notifications, of course, were turned off.)

--A couple days ago I rebooted my S3 and the location service wouldn't turn off. After poking around I discovered a grocery store self-checkout app was demanding my location. Err, what? Why? I can see it needing my location when I was using it, but why would it need it any other time? I promptly deleted the app...only to have another grocery store app from a different company do the same thing a moment later. Many apps should have no need whatsoever to run in the background, but they do.

--In general, Android apps tend to be at best only as good as their iPhone counterparts, and are often worse. I can't think of a single Android app that was better than the iPhone version. But some apps were worse - Tapped Out, for example, provided no way to shut off notifications - you had to go into the Settings menu and disable it (getting a scarily-worded message about how the app might not work right) there. Amazon has no streaming video app for Android, but does for iOS.

--Updates to Android - you're beholden to your cell provider for updates, and whether they deem your phone worthy of the update. It means you have absolutely no idea when you might get the latest Android version even if your phone fully supports it. It could be months after the generic Android is released.

--Don't forget the crapware your cell provider installs which you can't remove, some of which fights for control of, say, your text messages. (It reminded me of buying a Windows PC back in the 90s.) I had one misbehaving Asus app on my tablet repeatedly pop up notifications for a few days after an update until I removed the update.

--I know these last two issues could be solved by using a generic Android installation, and I looked into it, but I never could find clear directions; but there were plenty of warnings that scared me off - I don't want to have to replace a several hundred dollar phone/tablet. I have no problem tinkering, but in the end I need the phone to work.

--I also know iOS has default apps that can't be removed, but in my experience they are far more polished and reliable than the stock Android apps.

--Stupid Android design decisions. The recent update to Kit Kat changed the status bar so that it's now all white...which is a problem because I have a white background image. Also, since all of the icons are now white, it makes it that much harder to discern what's what. I'm pretty sure iOS made that same mistake a couple versions ago and fixed the background of the status bar in the next point release...I couldn't believe Android did the same thing a year or two later.

--Android doesn't support RAW photo files natively; iOS does.

--Android doesn't enforce any kind of directory structure for things like photos and music. So the apps I downloaded to read RAW files (see above) required me to navigate through a bunch of directories to decide where to place them. The iPad, on the other hand, brings up the pictures, you tap on the things you want, and boom, they're imported into a separate album. iOS blows Android out of the water in this respect. There's just no comparison. If Android would have enforced a "pictures go in this directory!" rule, the app developers would have had much easier time and could make their apps much better for end users. (This also means that your music apps will search through the entire device for music, so if you have something on there that's not music but is, say, an MP3 or WAV file (like a voice mail, or an app that uses those for sounds), it'll often show up in your music catalog.) Sometimes, extra flexibility can be a bad thing. Why would I even want the ability to put pictures in my music directories?

--More recently I've heard that apps can no longer read/write to the external SD card if the user has one in their device. I don't know what the basis for that decision was, but it definitely makes life a lot harder for the app developers, and it limits the usefulness of something the users thought they had available. I only bought a 16 GB S3 because I knew I could add an SD card; if I could no longer use that S3 card to store music, then I'd need a 32 GB S3... I know I can't add storage to an iDevice at all, but I also know that limit before I purchase and can plan for it.

--Why does Android turn on the location services for a moment when I plug the phone in? Google needs to know where I'm charging my phone?

And, something that was actively drawing me toward iOS and away from Android, although it's possible some Android phones have this feature: the fingerprint reader on the 5S and 6. It's excellent. I love it. You can have a nice, complex password, but only have to type it rarely (my work phone requires a 12 character password, but I can use my thumbprint to log in most of the time).

Well, there they are - my reasons for switching back to iOS. Take 'em or leave 'em.

This journal shouldn't be read as me liking everything about iOS - it has some issues, too, like the aforementioned 3rd party alarm app limitation. But on balance I've had a much better experience with iOS - and what matters most to me is that my phone will work when I pull it out of my pocket. With the S3, that was often a problem.

I've already heard one argument: The S3 is pretty old; I should try a new Android phone, they're much better! First, that argument is the same one Microsoft used to make about Windows. Second, I'm comparing it to an iPhone that was released the same year as the S3. It's a completely fair comparison. Android has improved, but some of the fundamental issues that annoy me remain. So it's back to iOS land for me at least for a couple years.