Switching from ios to android android#
Switching from ios to android software#

Want to get back to Twitter from a link you clicked on? Hit back. OnДЄndroid, I could always count on the Back button, always in the bottom right corner and built in at an operating system level, to take me one step backwards in my thought process. The iPhone SE 2020 mercifully still has a Home button, which I treasure, but in my eyes it's just no match for Android's three-button menu design.

Switching from ios to android android#

If there's one thing I well and truly miss about Android - and which I'm not sure I'll get over - it's the back button.

Switching from ios to android software#

The downsides of this approach surface elsewhere (like Apple's increasingly contentious 'Apple tax' on developers who sell software in its store), but the privacy features are real, good, increasingly important and reason enough for me to make the switch. While Apple has dabbled in selling ads to supplement that income, and perhaps isn't as militant on the subject as its rhetoric may lead you to believe, it can nevertheless push on matters of privacy that don't endanger its bottom line nearly as much as its competitors. Apple, meanwhile, has a business primarily built around selling hardware and, increasingly, services like Apple TV+, Apple Music, and iCloud storage. Google, while it does not technically sell your data, uses it to fuel a significant portion of its business by helping advertisers target you with ads.

It's a weapon that Apple can use to bludgeon its competition - to your benefit. Over the past few years, Apple has been weaving some pretty aggressive privacy-protection features into iOS, ranging from 'Sign in with Apple' as a way to create accounts with various other services while shielding your personal information or new app permission features in iOS 14 which have revealed the way some apps suspiciously peep on the information in your clipboard. So if Android and iOS are roughly compatible, why switch? For me, it has very little to do with software features, or even hardware options, so much as a bigger principle: privacy.

The reason I want to switch is way under the hood And now that I'm a 'blue bubble,' I can imagine getting sucked into Messages-based groupchats that would make switching back to Android a dicey proposition. Part of the ease of going to Apple from Android is that Google's apps are all available cross platform. I do worry, however, that I might be making a one-way trip. I've found only one obnoxious but extremely nerdy exception so far. The convergence of app availability means that virtually all my favorite apps were on iOS. Because features like the Notification and Control Centner pretty directly correspond to Android's combined Notification Shade, I was left with the much smaller task of merely locating a functional equivalent, and retraining my muscle memory to call it up instead. This general, long-time convergence mostly removes the biggest pain point from switching operating systems on any device - having to engineer completely novel alternatives to do the things I'm used to, or change how I behave. And iOS 14 will let you hide Home screen apps all together for die-hard digital minimalism, and even set non-Apple apps as default for mail and browser. In iOS 10, we got the option to clean up clutter by removing default apps from the home screen. Apple's own keyboard picked up a 'swipe' mode in iOS 13. iOS 8 introduced third party keyboards that support haptic feedback - a small detail I don't think I could live without. In part, that's because iOS has, uh, 'borrowed' a lot of the quality of life features that had previously kept me loyal to Android. And I was delighted to discover that switching over to iOS - a completely different operating system - was barely any harder to get used to. Since Android tends to be heavily customized by phonemakers, switching between Android phones still requires some adjustment. Over the years of my tech blogging career, I have switched between dozens of Android phones. 6 Tricks All Sonos Owners Should Know Switching was way easier than I expected