Things about the iPhone that are weird to an Android user

My first smartphone was a Samsung Galaxy SI. My father bought it for me back then. It was 2011. No I was not a teenager… I had just turned 28… I just loved my Nokia so much back then. But I liked my Samsung as well. A hole new world opened to me. I used it for quite a while. After a small accident however, my brother gave me his iPhone 3G. My first iPhone. I hatet it and gave it back after using it 1 week. Since then, I’d been using Android in different shapes, but mainly in shape of a Samsung or a Sony. My latest was a Sony Xperia Z5.

The one thing that was annoying with Android phones was that at one point they started to get slow and to freeze. I was complaining about this all the time. Why would you want to have a phone if you couldn’t do a phone call or write a message to anyone. Imagine an accident, and right in that moment you can’t reach out to anyone.

Friends, colleagues and family members tried to convince me to switch to the iPhone. It never freezes, they said. It never gets slow, they said. It’s so easy to use, so intuitive, they said.

Well……

They said so many nice things about the iPhone……

I had to try it out…..

Although I knew the hardware and some features were way behind an Android phone…….

So I purchased the iPhone 8…..

Well… I don’t swear less than before. And I got so mad that I had spent so much money for something that is not better than an Android, that I decided to make a list of everything that I find annoying and absolutely not intuitive about the iPhone.

Here we go:

• The keyboard. You can set up several languages but the keyboard will a) show you only characters included in that language‘s keyboard. And b) for any punctuation (except the dot) you need to switch to the numbers keyboard. The android keyboard has set the most common punctuation marks on the letters view of the keyboard.
• The keyboard – no2. The position of the keyboard is so low that you can’t use it with one hand. You need to turn on the one hand keyboard. Even then it’s hard to keep the balance to not let fall your phone down. My Sony was much bigger and wider, but I was always able to use one hand without any problem.
• Autosuggest or language detection. You can load several languages but suggestions will be only in that keyboard‘s language that you’re using in that moment. This gets particularly tricky when you try to write a mix of languages with special characters. Like Turkish. It just won’t suggest you to use the ş instead of the s if the German or English keyboard is turned on. An Android keyboard suggests you always words in all languages that you’re using your keyboard in.
• OMG wifi! Why the hell should I want the wifi go on by itself if it didn’t turn off by itself?! I turned it off, so it should stay off as long as I don’t turn it on again! Same with bluetooth btw…
• The alarm clock. Got it! Steve Jobs decided one day that snooze has to be 9 minutes. Why?! I want to set 10 minutes! And I want the alarm to rise smoothly so that it doesn’t shock me. No problem on the Android. No way on iPhone. Unless you download an alarm app.
• Volume. Funny thing, when you turn volume lower so that it’s kinda mute (speaker sign in control panel is crossed but the physical mute switch is still on normal) then this simply means that you’ve muted the apps sounds, not the phone itself. Don’t get tricked by that, dear switchers.
• Volume – no2. On Android you can control the ringtone, the app’s sounds and the volume of the alarm separately with just two moves. As well as you can turn on and off vibration when you’re on mute. On iPhone, the alarm and the ringtone have the same volume. The app’s sounds and volume can only be changed when an app is running. And to turn on and off the vibration, you need to go to the settings every time.
• Contacts in my address list. It’s difficult enough to remember the first names of those hundreds of people in my list, how to remember their last names?! But you have to if you want to find them by scrolling because iPhone sorts them by last name instead of first name as on Android. And you can’t even change that.
• Widgets. You can’t set widgets to your home screen. You can kinda set them but you can quickly lose the overview as it shows them in a list view.
• Switching from portrait mode to landscape mode takes ages, no centuries, and sometimes it doesn’t even work at all.
• Videos. Did you know that the iOS photo app doesn’t allow you to send your videos to an app? I’ve tried to upload two videos on gdrive, on dropbox, on slack, on Evernote, but nope. Can’t upload them. And I don’t even know why. I’ve googled it of course. Turns out you need to compress the videos to be able to send them around. Seriously?! Can’t see them in high quality this way anymore!
• NFC. Well, there is no NFC. I can’t share picture or videos uncompressed with friends.
• The home screen is flickering.
• There’s a weird clicking sound when having phone calls. Is big brother watching me??
• Sometimes the clock on the locked screen disappears. Just like that. Need to restart the phone to get it back again.

Let’s talk about apps now…

• Back. Back isn’t always back. And even if it is, you don’t always see that back is back. Because back looks always different. Sometimes, back is an arrow, sometimes an x, sometimes you have to swipe to get back, sometimes the back icon is on the top left corner, sometimes on the top right and sometimes bottom left. Definitely if back is there, it’s quite uncomfortable to reach it with the thumb. And the tab space is so small that you have to tab several times to make back take you back. And it stops where the app has a tab to change the page. On android you can always tab the big triangle on the bottom that is easy to reach and tab, it will always take you back, even if the app has its own tabs. Just like the desktops browser back button. Very convenient.
• Notifications. On Android, the notifications are grouped by app. On iPhone however you see a list of notifications on your screen that you can scroll through, sorted chronologically, not grouped, very demotivating to scroll through, and very annoying to delete them: you need to delete each one separately. But not for Twitter.
• Yes twitter. When I receive a notification from Twitter, and I tab on it, on android the tweet opens and that’s it. The other notifications stay until I tab or delete them. Grouped of course so that I do a bulk action. On iPhone however, once I tab one of the tweets, the whole list of notifications disappears. But not always. Sometimes it’s still there. I couldn’t figure out when it does what. Since unfortunately twitter doesn’t show all those tweets in its notifications either, I lose the followed tweets and need to scroll all the way in the app.
• Facebook. On android, when I share a post out of any app, I can still select each group I don’t want to share the post with, just as I would share it using the Facebook app itself. On iPhone, I only see „custom“ without any details on the groups that are included in „custom“. Which means, I can’t adjust “custom”. I don’t even know in that moment what “custom” contains.
• Gmail. Freezes. All the time. That’s annoying.
• In WhatsApp on iOS you can’t search for a term inside a chat. Or maybe I couldn’t find it. But then it’s really bad UX on iPhone. On the Android app you can find it easily.

End of the story: I want to sell my iPhone and I’m looking for a new Android phone now. Any tips which one I should buy?