A few weeks ago I traded in my beloved and familiar Google Pixel 6 for an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Since then I have been challenged, surprised, relieved, frustrated, pleased, annoyed, dejected, and overjoyed. That’s what they call the whole gamut.
A quick bit of background:
An Apple Computer user since the mid-nineties, in the smartphone space I gravitated immediately to Androids. I don’t recall why, especially since I was such a fervent Mac geek, but I did and my first smartphone was a Samsung Galaxy 3. Then I owned several Motorola handsets (my all-time favorite smartphone is still the Moto X). And finally moved to the Pixel line with the release of the Pixel 3.
I have long been one of those people who looked down at devices running iOS. I had used many an iPod Touch and iPad over the years and felt I had enough experience with iOS to be emphatically condescending. The thing I appreciated about Apple PCs was how customizable the MacOS was and is (especially OSX). And that is exactly the advantage that Android has over iOS.
If one is aware of the green bubble debate (or debacle, perhaps) then an obvious conclusion as to why I’m now carrying an iPhone in my pocket for the first time in my life is because of that. Not so. No one has ever belittled me because I showed up on their phone in the “wrong” color. On the flip side, now that I’m communicating with an iPhone, not a single contact has remarked about my bubble on their end now showing up as blue. I truthfully fail to understand why this is such a big deal.
The reason I switched is that following someone’s location in Google Maps on Android, while perfectly doable, is frustrating as it can be slow to update and imprecise. Conversely, if both the tracker and trackee carry an iPhone, locating them is a thing of beauty. And with the latest iPhone models (the 15 lineup, as of this writing) it’s more accurate than ever. Like (most of the time) exact street address accurate. While neither confirming nor denying any level of juvenile delinquency on the part of a certain teen in my care, knowing the location of them ranges anywhere from handy to valuable to crucial. My iPhone-toting wife has historically been able to do the locating, but with her traveling for work more than ever, it has become necessary for me to become self-sufficient in the teen-locating department.
Because there is an endless discourse over which platform is better — I was so firmly rooted in the Android-is-better-than-iPhone camp that just the day before my switch I had cheekily said to my brother that I had no plans to “downgrade” to an iPhone anytime soon — I thought I’d chronicle whether or not there’s any validity to the two sides’ positions.
I have good news. The two systems pretty much do the same things. With regards to functionality, they’re damn near identical. I have yet to encounter a thing — not a single thing — that I can’t do on the iPhone that I could do on my Pixel. That said, the transition is far from seamless. The rub is that while the two systems do all the same things, they do almost all of them differently.
The most frustrating of these differences for me is how one takes a screenshot on an iPhone. on both phones the shortcut is very similar: Power plus volume button (down for the Pixel, up for the iPhone). The problem is that on the Pixel the power and volume buttons are both on the right side of the phone. For the iPhone, volume buttons are on the left, power on the right. So with the Pixel it’s usually necessary to use two hands. But on the iPhone I find myself accidentally pressing the volume up button with my thumb while pressing the power button with my index finger trying to lock the screen. Boom. Screenshot. Several dozen accidentally, in fact, and not yet one on purpose.
While there’s no way to modify how the iPhone takes screenshots, the sort of unexpected workaround that I discovered is in the Accessibility menu (Settings > Accessibility > Back Tap). I can now double tap the back of the phone to lock the screen. Now I don’t take accidental screenshots because I’m not using the power button to lock the screen.
There’s no reason to go into every nuisance that I’m experiencing. And actually, they’re less nuisances and more like opportunities to learn a new mobile OS. Not a bad thing.
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