An iphone critique

In My Humble Opinion
1

So i’ve been on an iPhone for a couple of months now, iphone xr specifically, and just bought the vaderling one as well when his old 7+ audio chip went(I could have had it repaired for about $150 but, reasons).

Anyone else around here use an iphone x?
Are there any other transplants from android to iphone users?

If you use an X specifically what are your thoughts about the phone? do you have the optional larger battery?

If you are, like me, a former android user, what are your thoughts on iphones generally and the software that runs on them?

Here are my thoughts thus far; the phone is a phone, nothing special about it as far as hardware goes. Someone I trust to know told me the entire case is glass(i guess thats special) and even if he’s wrong, the phone is in a case.

The software…yeah the software, it’s…all over the place as far as quality in my opinion. By quality, I mean ease of use, how useful it is, how many options and features an app or function has. These things are all interconnected and dependant to some degree on each other.

So let’s start with browsers, since about 90% of my intertubing is done on my phone. Safari is ok for a very basic browser, and other browsers such as Brave either won’t or can’t be any better. Possibly (probably?) in part because it seem that Mr. Cook has decreed that only safari can have supporting apps and extensions on the app store. One thing I really detest though is the default keyboard. I haven’t yet found any sort of explanation or excuse as to why I have to shift to use numbers instead of just having a number row like a normal keyboard. Also, there is apparently no learning my word usage style or commonly used words by me and there doesn’t seem to be a library for the autocorrect/spelling suggestions. I can install other keyboards but in searching the app store, I’m pretty sure I looked at every single keyboard app on there (tried several)and there was exactly one that sorta kinda fit my needs and wants, sort of, but wanted to collect/ have access to info such as location data the camera and purchase history, which is a big no.
Ok on to the home screen. Iphone users are not allowed to put their icons where they want, arranged as they see fit, because being able to do that might be too confusing for some? This is the reason I was able to find while trying to figure out how to be able to escape the grid(can’t).

The learning curve for switching from one software platform to the other. Going from android to apple there is no curve, it goes straight up. Utterly unintuitive and a freaking pita for me. Things rarely work as described because there is some other setting you have to fiddle with first that they never mention, or some other restriction they don’t tell you about and you have to spend time trying to figure out what went wrong. Android was super simple and easy to learn those many years ago when I got my first smartfone, and actually kinda fun.

The apps on the app store. A lot of apps that have been on there for a long time with no updates. For many of them I’m sure there hasn’t been a need. To get the same level of functionality you get for free on google playstore, you pay for an app, and for most apps they collect the same information. It’s a real struggle to find apps, even paid apps that don’t collect info that they don’t need for the function of the app. On google play store it seemed like that was less of a problem and just a given for a free app that they were gathering your data.

Ok, some good stuff. Apple wallet/cash and family sharing is pretty cool and not something I ever saw on any android phone I had as a native function. I can text money to vaderling if I want. I have an almost disturbing amount of control over his phone directly from my phone. Sometimes that can come back to bite me. For instance, he wanted to use safari for some thing last night and it was just gone. Wasn’t found on his phone at all, not in the app library or settings or anywhere. Well, I had set time restrictions on that specific app and the time when he wanted to use it violated that restriction so the phone had hidden it. took me a bit to figure it out and release the app so he could use it.

The mail program, while a bit awkward seeming to me is pretty good. certainly no worse than the mail app on samsung for checking my gmail and way better for my work email. I use the mail app for all of my email accounts now.

Family sharing, I really like this. I can see what vaderling has downloaded and he has to get my approval from my phone before he can, unless he’s downloading something I purchased previously. I don’t know what hidden puchases is yet, haven’t explored that, but if it’s what I think it might be (make purchases that vaderling can’t see or download to his phone) I’ll probably like it.

Over all, based on my experience with this phone specifically and my extremely limited experience in the distant past with iphone, over all I’d have to rate it a meh!

there are a lot of neat features native to ios that I’d have to download as separate apps on android, but the overall limited functionality of some things like the keyboard or icon placement and lack of diversity in the app store or customization options really bring down the satisfaction. Not terrible, but not great, over all. Apple has a smashing great marketing team though, I’ll give them that.

Iclone is the perfect fone for those who fear the diverse and different.

2

I’ve been using iPhones foe a decade or more and I have no idea what you’re talking about, particularly with respect to not being able to arrange your Home Screen or not having a way to customize autocorrect. I do those things all the time.

But your general conclusion is one that has been a complaint about Apple for about 30 years now—insufficient customizability and options. Apple had always been about people who want to just use their gadgets instead of fucking around with them. That’s the basic premise.

3

Just press down on an empty space on your home screen. You can then organize the icons however you want. I have an X. I use a Chrome app for browsing and a gmail app for email. I didn’t buy additional battery power, but my iPhone X (about two years old) lasts longer without a charge than any other device I own.

4

I think you both misunderstand his complaint about icon placement. On Android you can put all your app icons on the bottom half of the screen. Or even not on the home screen at all.

On iOS you have to fill up space from the top left on down.

5

On iPhone you can move them to other screens, but you’re right that it stacks them from from the top in rows of four.

6

Yep, in all the years I’ve had Android phones I’ve never once had an app icon located above midway of the screen (home or otherwise). Especially as phones have gotten bigger, and I prefer the bigger phones anyways, it’s the best way I have found to use it one handed.

7

On the current OS (14.4) you can have larger widgets on the home screen that will push down the other apps if you so choose. I think it’s the same on older models? Not sure, I have the 12 Pro and I can do that on mine if I want.

8

More a workaround than a solution :wink:

9

Ironically, I had a Mac 512KE several decades back (essentially the original Mac but slightly better) which allowed me to put the various icons of the various files where ever the hell I felt like. There was one directory where one of the icons was so far off to the right that it did not even appear in the largest window view and you had to scroll way the hell and gone to get to it.

A single iPhone has more computing capability than all the Macs in existence, combined, at the time I owned that one, and yet it cannot do so much. All that capability seems to be going toward feeding shiny toys that have minimal value. A bit like sleight of hand.

10

I don’t think this criticism is correct. It’s not that it can’t do what you want, or doesn’t have the capability to do so, it’s that the developers don’t want the look of the phone to be messy. I have to say I also don’t understand people who have a jumble of random icons all over their desktop in no order whatsoever.

11

I was quite pleased when OS X offered the option to not display volume icons on the desktop. My computer desktop ended up completely devoid of anything other than a nice picture (that changed about every half hour). There are far better ways to facilitate access to stuff than to throw shit all over the desktop, and any installer that insists on cluttering it up has those icons summarily removed (fortunately, with Mac OS, a large fraction of apps are/were installed simply by dragging the app file to where you want it, and they never fail due to not having an alias on the desktop).

And, to be fair, when I use a Mac, Finder is always in list view, not icon view (which is also the case for when I use Windows or Linux).

12

I certainly don’t understand the random jumble either.

But on my android I have several pages of icons to group them together by rough categories. With the home screen favoring the most commonly used. And within each screen the icons are grouped visually into logical sub-pages: i.e a group along the bottom, a different group along the top, and perhaps a couple sub groups in the middle on left and right. With gaps between the icons to separate the groups.

It’s all about bringing my natural skill at spatial navigation into the interface. I can easily recall for example “App X is on page 3 upper section.”

When I see people with 6 or 12 full pages of icons with no internal landmarks I can’t see how they ever find anything. And watching them flip back and forth becoming increasingly frustrated until they happen to recognize the icon they want by shape or color tells me they actually can’t find it either, except by luck and exhaustive search.

13

I’ve been using an Android phone for the past couple of years. I had an iPhone for about 6 years before the Android.

I find both phones to be similar in terms of quality and functionality. There are some differences, but to opine on the relative quality of most differences would be subjective.

I also recently replaced my 11 year old and buggy MacBook with a PC laptop. But prior to that, I was using the Apple laptop, tablet, and phone all at the same time. And I think this is where Apple is superior to Android.

The Apple ecosystem is very good. I don’t think there’s a similar seamless integration between devices from other designers. While it’s obsolete now, I loved iTunes and the way it simply synced with my other devices to update libraries. The Android / PC file management isn’t so intuitive. I’ve ended up switching to a streaming audio service that doesn’t require me to spend time managing my libraries of MP3s.

Other than that, I don’t feel strongly that one device is materially better than the other.

14

One thing that I have learned about apple OS in general is that every app is only allowed to run in a ‘jailed’ sandbox. So within the app itself you can only do so much in that sandbox. For anything besides its limited sandbox environment you need to go to the warden, called settings, where you can grant special permissions and even with that permission the warden will only grant the app access in certain ways it sees fit.

That basically is how it was explained to me and why for some setting you can do in app, for others you have to go to settings, and even still when you do it still may not be able do the thing how it should be done (like accessing the damn settings from inside the app)

This gives Apple control and I suppose one of the arguable benefits is that an app can only cause so much mayhem which will be limited to its own sandbox.

I know it was common in windows (I don’t use Windows any more) for some programs to get way too cozy modifying windows files and embed itself everywhere and sometimes cause instabilities. Apple OS’s are trying to prevent that. Android seems to be more on the Windows side of that equation.

15

Pretty harsh thing to say about your own kid.

16

Thanks. I’ve been thinking about getting an iPhone for a while but it would require us to switch carriers (currently have Google Fi.) I only wanted one for a few reasons. The Kindle app seems to be better, it supports the Scrivener app, and it would make using my MacBook more convenient, maybe (I’ve been locked out of changing my password for weeks because I didn’t have a separate Apple device.)

But based on your review here, I’m wondering if this is a grass is always greener situation.

17

Didn’t mean to imply that the only people who use iphones are fearful of diversity and difference. If i’d had any say in the matter at the time I wouldn’t have started him off with an iphone. OTOH he dislikes change and is very resistant to new things if they are too different from the old thing.

As for arranging icons as I see fit, I’m not one of those who has them scattered willy nilly about the place. I actually like them organized in very specific ways and with a bare minimum needed for daily activity with the rest stored in the app library. I use pictures of my kids and grandkids as wallpaper and prefer to not have their faces covered in icons. On this phone that means I can have 3 icons and a folder with the rest of my frequently used apps in that plus the four most frequently among the most frequently used. That folder is freaking ugly and disorganised and messy looking to me and it’s a pain in the butt to have to open the folder every time I want to use one of those apps

18

Though, FYI, I have an iPad Pro and you can’t actually buy books within the Kindle app. You have to go to the web browser, log onto Amazon, purchase the book and then go back to the Kindle app to read it. It’s due to Apple’s insistence that any purchase from an app requires the app maker to give 30% of the sale to Apple - and Amazon is simply not interested in doing so.

19

It must be nice to be big enough to tell Apple to take a hike. The rest of the app developers should be so well-positioned.

20

Thanks, this is annoying enough to cause me to reconsider. I really just like the quote/share feature Apple’s Kindle app has, it’s much cleaner than Android (you can pick a nice background and everything) but that’s probably not a great reason to switch carriers. Plus I’m probably kidding myself I’d use Scrivener on my iPhone. I barely use my Android to read now, much less write.