Giving up on Android…? Really?

During the period my Z3 was away with the faeries – sorry, being repaired, I bit the bullet and bought an iPhone 6+. The Insurance2Go service wasn’t bad, the repair ended up being a replacement and the replacement took around three weeks to happen. All in all I had no problems with the service. However… In the meantime I flip-flopped again and moved to iPhone.

Why? Two major reasons.

1. My place of work has integrated email, desktop services, intranet, etc. with iOs, and rather than carry two devices (blackberry and personal phone), it’s a whole lot easier to just use the one. And the integrated email on iOs is so much better than the Good experience on Android. Yes Good pushes mail, but fundamentally, it is a sandboxed app that is separate from the rest of the devices function. The iOs integration is at the heart of the Apple approach and therefore so much better.
2. It just works better. I’ve been using Android for years (some 5 or so of them) and before that I was a Maemo/MeeGo user. While a lot of criticism is levelled at iOs for being “out of date”, the truth is that the control that Apple has over the whole ecosystem makes a big difference to the user experience.

But what does “it just works better” really mean? And how useful is it in the real world? When I take my tech head hat off, what I want is a phone/personal computer that just does what I need it to, without me having to do a lot with it. Apple seem to have nailed this down. With iOs 8, stuff just works. Like all OSes, there are a few things that are annoying, but the ease with which I can access the services I need, call people, start a video call, etc. It really does just work. I might add that the radio on the 6+ seems to be more effective than the Z3, from my muted observations and iOs definitely handles Wi-Fi switching a lot better than I’ve found Android to. I’ve also managed to spend a month without the iPhone rebooting or requiring a reboot. I can’t say I’ve ever seen that on an Android device!

In addition, the apps seem to turn up sooner and many of them have superior functionality on the iPhone when compared to the equivalent on an Android device. And therein lies the rub. When you code for Android you are coding to the OS with a variety of underlying hardware. You have to deal with a wider, potential, range of how it might work. With iPhone, you write it and as long as it works, it works everywhere. Overall, I think the end user experience is better on the iPhone and it hurts to turn around and say that.

While the underlying technology is important to some degree, the reality is that in everyday life, you don’t use the underlying technology in its raw state. You interact with it via swipes and taps and having a mechanism that makes that work easily and efficiently is the most important thing, and I think that’s where Apple has the upper hand.

So sad to say it, but I switched, after saying I wouldn’t, and I’m happy with having made the change. it hasn’t stopped me from doing anything I would on either Android or Windows, and has actually made my life easier. It’s the better productivity tool. And maybe that’s where all the Android manufacturers have it wrong. Make the productivity tool help you be more productive and you’ll win friends. That is after all, what a smartphone is. A communication device and a productivity tool. It is at it’s best when you can do less to be equally or more productive.

And that, I’m afraid, is where the iPhone wins.