This summer I ended up with an iPhone. Not because I had finally decided to switch after all these years, but because it was time to replace my work phone and this time there was no choice of platform.
My first Apple device was an iPod touch, bought before the iPhone was even officially available in Sweden. It is still the only Apple computing device I have actually owned. When Android arrived in Sweden in 2009, I moved over to Android, which was also my first real smartphone.
I never really felt any desire to switch my personal phone to an iPhone. At work we had, until recently, been able to choose between Android and iOS, but since I mostly used the work phone for email, calendar, meetings and authentication, the platform itself did not matter much. What did matter was charging. I did not want to carry a second charger when travelling, or keep separate cables at home and at work, just for a phone I barely used.
That changed once iPhones moved to USB-C. They already supported wireless charging, so by then both of my preferred ways of charging were covered and the last bit of friction disappeared.
As for actually using it, the hardware is nice, which is no surprise. I have handled enough iPhones over the years to know roughly what to expect, and even though this is just a fairly ordinary company phone rather than one of the expensive models, it feels quick and well put together.
The applications are generally polished as well, which is also about what I expected. What surprised me more was how buggy parts of iOS itself have felt. The phone actually hung during the initial setup, and one of the first things I had to do with my new supposedly user-friendly iPhone was Google how to force-restart it. I was probably just unlucky, but it was still a useful reminder that Apple is, in the end, a company full of ordinary humans, and probably quite a bit of AI these days, writing software and introducing bugs like everyone else.
That gets closer to my main reflection after using it for a while. iOS is often described as very user friendly, but coming to it after more than 17 years on Android I do not really agree. It is not necessarily difficult, it is just different, and when you do not already know how the pieces fit together surprisingly little feels obvious. The basic swipe gestures are familiar because Android adopted much of the same interaction model years ago, but beyond that I have often had to stop and figure out where something lives or how Apple expects me to do it.
I suspect a lot of what gets called user friendly is really familiarity. Once you know a system it may well be efficient and convenient, but moving into it from the outside can still be confusing. I am sure the same would be true for someone who had spent 17 years with iOS and suddenly picked up an Android phone.
That does not mean I dislike the experience. There are things I really like, and trying the other side has been useful in itself. Both Android and iOS have their share of dark patterns, privacy issues and attempts to lock users further into their ecosystems, and the uncomfortable part is that on phones we more or less have a duopoly.
On the desktop I have spent more than 20 years happily choosing the third option, Linux. On phones there is no equally practical third choice. There are projects such as postmarketOS, and GrapheneOS changes the Android side considerably, but it is still Android underneath. I even tried Ubuntu Touch as my primary phone back in 2016, which really was something different, but that experiment also showed how hard it is to live outside the two big ecosystems.
That makes trying iOS useful even if I never move my personal phone over. If Google one day moves far enough in a direction I do not want to follow, I at least now know what the other side looks like. Apple has historically been much more restrictive, while at the same time often putting more emphasis on privacy, so I am not sure which trade-off matters more to me. Probably both.
Either way, it has been interesting to use something genuinely new to me, and I am curious to see how I feel after another year or two of having it as my work phone.