The Warm Embrace of Apple

I recently dropped my Pixel 3a perfectly flat on the bathroom floor and utterly shattered the screen. This broke the OLED too. I tried to repair but it failed[0]. I took this opportunity to shake up my tech stack and buy an iPhone.

Here are my observations so far:

  1. Everything is just buttery from a UI perspective. It’s hard to describe but it animations feel smoother.
  2. Password manager integration is amazing. Autofill has worked every time on iOS where as on Android I’d constantly be copying and pasting stuff around like an idiot.
  3. FaceID, just wow! I’m late to the party here and was fairly critical of it in the past but it’s utterly frictionless. Much more reliable than the finger print reader on the Pixel 3a.
  4. Apps take longer to install. I think iOS apps are larger on disc so just take longer to download
  5. OS updates take much longer than Android.
  6. My bank has Apple Pay integration where they didn’t have Google Pay. Nice.
  7. The MagSafe charger is lovely, no fumbling around with cables.
  8. It’s annoying that the damn thing has a Lightning cable rather than USB C (which is at the other end of the charging cable!!!) but I suspect that the charging port will be going away soon anyway.
  9. The cameras are solid but I miss the Google AI magic that makes things pop with no effort on my part.
  10. The camera app applies some sort of sharpening that sometimes makes things like miniatures look quite different.
  11. Apps cost money, which I think is nice? I’m happy to pay a few quid to have ad free experience.
  12. Google apps look nicer and feel smoother on iOS which feels weird.
  13. All my images (photos, memes, rando stuff from pals) go to one big folder? This is terrible.
  14. The first time I connected it to a car via Bluetooth it clearly asked if I’d like to turn off notifications while driving in a way I don’t remember Android ever doing. Nice.

[0] I replaced the screen but it wouldn’t lie flat no matter how much I cleaned the glue or wiggled things. I also managed to ruin the speaker grille removing the old screen. Once I booted it up I noticed that the touch response was all kinds of messed up. At this point I’d spent as much as the phone was worth so I gave up.