A Lifelong iPhone User SWITCHES To Android! But Will He Stay?

I’ve been a lifetime iOS user for the better part of 11 years thought it would be a neat experiment to go through the experience of switching to an android phone for the last two months. I’m using a Oneplus 6T, to see what the experience is going to look like and coincidentally, that phone right now costs about the same as the iPhone 7 Plus, which I was rocking right before the 6T. The 7 Plus is about $789 or something like that for a 32 gigabyte variant, whereas the 6T is about the same price, but you get 256GB’s of  storage.

Before we get into the positive and negative experience switching to the android operating system, I need to set the stage as to what my whole smartphone history has been since day one.

I started with the HTC magic, which my brother took back after two days and then I decided to get my own smart phone, which was a Samsung, I forgot what the name of it was, but it didn’t have a touch screen that was pressure sensitive. It wasn’t like touch sensitive, like all these smart phones these days.

So I returned it to and I got my first iPhone, which was the 3G and at that point it just started snowballing from there. 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, 6S and now the 7, so i’ve basically been on the iOS bandwagon for the better part of 11 years.

Data Transfer

The transfer to android was honestly quite easy and really quick. As i’m using Google Drive, all I had to do was, check calendars, contacts and boom, all the information (well not all the information) but contacts and the photos were automatically synced to my Oneplus device.

Online Storage

Now I did have an issue with the storage space situation on iOS and Google. iCloud only grants you 5GB storage, whereas on Google Drive you get 15GB right away, which I thought was really interesting. You also have a better tier system. I don’t understand why Apple goes from 5GB to 50GB to 200GB. It’s like if I have 128GB phone, I’m probably going to need somewhere around a 100GB of storage of iCloud storage.

Whereas Google offers 15GB, 100GB and 200GB which is more reasonable in my opinion.

UI Experience

In regards to the UI looked, it took some getting used to with certain apps or getting to the settings menu ect,  but now that I’m used to it, it’s amazing and super fluid.

There isn’t that big of a difference between Android OS and iOS, you can still very easily find everything that you need. For example, the settings, it’s a little more confusing, but there’s such a degree of customization, it’s incredible. If you go into the battery tab, you don’t have just show percentages and turn off percentages. You have all of those things that you can do, like optimize your battery life.

I’m not proud of this but when I got the Oneplus 6T I was like, wow, this is so customizable. So I thought wouldn’t it be a great idea if I just took android and turned it into iOS and trust me, this was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.

I tried everything from icon packs to themes to basically replicate what an iOS device would look like on the 6T and it was just is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

One of the things that I really liked was the gesture controls. One of them is when your phone is asleep on the table. You can double tap and it will automatically wake up the screen. Another thing is the gesture control where you can draw something on your screen and it will automatically do something turn on the flashlight by drawing a V, so that’s pretty cool.

Data Migration

Moving onto the negative aspects of switching to android, i’ll start with what I lost during the switch. So the transfer was super quick and easy, but I lost my messages. I lost all of my apps and all of my purchases, which is to be expected, but it’s still something that you have to leave behind.

For instance, on the messages side of things, I now have no access to what I was used to on the iMessage app within iOS and the same goes for losing all your messages on Whatsapp which means you have to start from scratch or if you need to refer back to your iOS device. I will say that there is a way to transfer the messages, but it’s just way too complicated and not something that I want to get into.

Notifications

Notifications are pretty similar between the two where they both group, but iOS puts the newest messages or the newest notifications at the top. Android doesn’t which I don’t like, it doesn’t make any sense to me. If I receive a text message, I want to see it right on the top with all of the ignored messages under it. I’m not saying it’s terrible. I mean, I can find my way into it. It’s just that, you know, it’s the convenience. You swipe down and you want to see the newest thing right in front of you. And I don’t.

Digital Assistants

So there’s another thing that I don’t quite like, which is the Google Assistant. It is superior, and there’s things that I can do with iOS that I can’t do with Android, especially related to when the phone is locked. I can ask my iPhone to do a lot of things, like play my podcast, play my music, and all these kinds of things. And it will do it.

But on Android, as soon as I ask it, hey, can you play the podcast? It’s going to say, yeah, no problem. And then it’s going to ask you to unlock your phone. I don’t the point, the reason I’m asking you to do it is because I don’t want to unlock my phone. So that was one thing that was definitely frustrating.

So one thing that I noticed when I was making the transition between iPhone and Android was that my notifications were coming in on the iPhone about 1-10 minutes faster than on Android. At the start I was really perplexed as to what was happening and it turns out it’s actually because of the battery optimization. I had to un-optimized all of my apps that I have to fix the problem.

Hardware Differences

So let’s talk about your positive and negative experience of the hardware by itself. The Oneplus 6T was my first android phone and I can truly say that It’s amazing. I mean you get a huge screen with a small tear drop notch, which I have deactivated. You have a really nice cameras are and I’m at a point where I personally think that all phone cameras kind of look the same. It’s just small differences here and there. The alerts slider is definitely welcome, and the screen once again is AMOLED and it’s beautiful.

Speakers

The speakers are super loud which is a good thing for me. I can not sleep through an alarm, now which is brand new to me.

Battery Life

Something else that I absolutely love is the battery life. I mean this thing will last me two days. The iPhone, I could not last longer than 24 hours and 24 hours was pretty much pushing it. Sure, I’ve had it for three years, but it still says that the battery is performing well enough. On the Oneplus, two days and I just plug it in for like 30 minute and thanks to fast charge, it’s good to go.

Fingerprint Scanner

There are also other things that I don’t quite like about the hardware and that’s the inferior print scanner. It takes a long time to recognize my finger and sometimes it just doesn’t, and I have to use the a code lock, which I mean, we’re in 2018 this shouldn’t exist.

Face Unlock

The face unlock is amazing! I don’t even have to look at the phone. The phone could be on its way to in front of my face and it would unlock instantly.

Camera

iPhones are notorious for being super quick on the trigger. When you press the shutter button, boom you have the photo, but it’s a lot slower on the Oneplus 6T and by a lot, it’s not actually a lot, it’s more like a few frames but it does make a difference when you try and take a picture.

Verdict

So the ultimate question is would I go back to an iPhone? I absolutely loved my time with android and I would not go back an iPhones for two very specific reason.

The first one is Android. It seems to be where all the innovation is. You have pop up cameras, swing out cameras and whole phones that slide. You have folding phones, phones with screens in the front and the back. All these things that you’ll never see on an iPhone or at least it’s going to take years before you see them. I would like my whole experience to be sort of based around Android, so I never have to worry about making the switch again.

The second reason is the price. iPhones are getting way too expensive. The two phones in this article are exactly the same price except the iPhone is 3 years old and you are getting 32GB memory and with the 6T you are getting 256GB of storage.

If you look at the Android market in general, there’s a phone for everyone out there at a specific price point. Whereas if you switch over to the iOS side, it’s just one or probably the baseline iPhone.