¡Ajipirijou! josé albornoz's blog

Life with Android

I started using iOS in 2011. Six months ago, I switched to Android.

When Apple decided to remove the headphone jack I got so pissed that decided to move to Android. A big part of my coworkers at Shopify use it, and oh boy I could buy almost two One Plus 3s with the same money you get a basic iPhone 7.

I can spend the whole day talking about the amazing hardware you get (my phone has 3x the memory of my iPad Pro; my screen is AMOLED; ludicrous fast USB C charging), or about the amazing software features Android has (real multitasking that actually works; notifications are super smart, and the main way you interact with your phone), but I thought I'd do a more tl;dr version of switching to Android.

It just works. It really just works.

I wanted to be skeptic and say to myself "oh, i tried it out, but it went bad", but I'm actually liking it a lot. It's like getting a glimpse of the future with really innovative features. Yes, it's not perfect, the general quality of the apps is lower, but very often they're more powerful than their iOS counterparts, and power-user features become addictive. I honestly feel I can do so much more on my Android 7 phone than my iPad Pro. Some shit really sucks, though like having really slow OS upgrade cycles (unless you're in one of the official Google phones), and the phone is slightly more unstable than with iOS. There are minor glitches, but nothing that really stops you from getting shit done. After all I'm an advanced user. With three minor exceptions...

There's no fucking Tweetbot. There's no fucking Tweetbot, and I miss it a lot.

I think that over the past months I've been using twitter in general less and less, and I'm blaming not having Tweetbot in my phone. I've tried a huge amount of twitter clients, and they're all sub-par. Sometimes you don't even get push notifications for DMs!

If you don't use Google's services, some things suck.

I host my email using fastmail. Any IMAP email client (non-Gmail) is sub-par compared to iOS's Mail app. Lots of people hate it, but I really love it. At work we use Google Apps, so I get to use Gmail and it's ok. Another one is Siri. I actually find Siri quite nice. I haven't even had the chance to try Google's voice assistant, because enabling (Google Now) would mean Google will have your location all the time, among other things that just horrify me. Without Google Now you can only do limited stuff, with a really odd interface. Things like setting a reminder are sometimes simply impossible. Which leads me to...

The Clock app is bullshit

I've never used such a bad app. Period. I fucking hate it. Alarms turn on your phone if it's off though, but who the fuck cares. Fuck the clock app.

Summary

Overall I still love my Android phone. Maybe in the future I'll switch back to iPhone, but so far I've re-learned how to love my phone for it's innovations, something that didn't happen when I switched from iPhone 4 to iPhone 5S.