iPhone or Android?

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When smartphones started being a “thing” I went for SymbianOS with the famous Nokia N95. A few more Symbian devices and one MeeGo device later, I remained loyal to Nokia and used a Lumia 1020 powered by Windows Phone, but we all know what happened to that operating system.

I think it was around 2014 that I was in the market for a new phone. At the time there were countless “dumb” phones that only had a fraction of the Lumia 1020’s capability. The only way I was going to get close was with a smartphone and at the time there were two major options: iPhone 5 or 6 on one hand and Android phones running Android Kitkat on the other. I hadn’t paid much attention to iPhones having remembered how slow they were to adopt 3G connectivity, so I went to Android and bought an LG G3. I’ve been using Android phones since then.

Only recently - within the last month - have I become curious about how green the grass is on the other side and I bought a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro from Apple 3 weeks ago. It has been extremely frustrating trying to “unlearn” all the Android ways of getting stuff done to learn how it’s done in fruit-land, but I’ve got there for the most part. iOS is definitely not designed with people used to tinkering with settings in mind. Instead it caters to people who want it to look pretty but want it to “just work”. And it does, for the most part.

Rather than just have it there to look at, I’ve installed the social media apps that I use on it and removed them from my Pixel 9 Pro Fold. That way I get to interact with it. I have set up alarms on it so that it has a practical application too. I’ve not gone to far down the customisation route, mainly because it isn’t very long.

I don’t think I could use an iPhone as my daily driver. Not yet anyway. Some people like small phones, I’m not one of them and the iPhone 15 Pro is far too small to be fully usable to me. I could buy a new iPhone 17 Pro Max but that strikes me as an expensive experiment. What if I don’t get on with it that well?

One thing for sure is that I am now much more open-minded about the possibility of switching to iPhone after 10+ years as an Android user. The integration with my MacBook and Mac Mini is understandably much tighter than I’ll ever get with an Android phone.

Let’s not forget that my day job is an Android app developer. Ironically, it’s this change in my job (I used to be a .NET developer before that) that introduced me to the Apple ecosystem. Android Studio works so much better on Apple silicon than it does on x86, which is why I bought the M4 Mac Mini and then, because I was so impressed with it, the M3 MacBook Air.

I’m not ruling out a switch to Apple later on, though.

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