I'm starting a new thread so the other one can get back on topic.

Yes, I've done the unthinkable and migrated from Android to iOS. After 9 years on Android, owning nearly every Google/Nexus phone, I've decided to try out iOS. There are a few reasons for this.

The primary reason is hardware. As good as Android has gotten, and as much as that gap has narrowed, there's still a gap, especially in watches.

The second reason is that I'm tired of Google's ADD. They keep changing things up on me and I'm sick of it. It's gotten to the point that on Google's own hardware, I'm only using the services that are available on both platforms.

The last reason is HomeKit. Nobody else is doing as well as Apple is with HomeKit. Nobody. There are far more powerful and configurable systems, but none that are as easy to set up, use, and reconfigure. Google's approach is...well...I have no idea what their approach is but it's probably going to revolve around Assistant, and that doesn't give me much confidence because Assistant is terrible.

I've been setting up my new iPhone 8 Plus 64GB and playing with it and my Series 3 Watch. I'll post an update after I've given it a good amount of time.

Early positive impressions:

- the phone and watch hardware are just fantastic
- everything moves instantly, with no lag (Android has gotten rid of 99% of the lag, but it's still there)

Early annoyances:

- I'm REALLY going to miss LastPass on Android, which can automatically detect a login in any app and fill it for me when I use the fingerprint sensor - I have to switch back and forth in iOS
- I don't care about widgets, but I wish I could place icons anywhere I want on the home screen, not in sequential order
- the keyboard often doesn't have punctuation when I want it to

That's where I am right now. I'll post an update in a couple weeks.

Yeah, but is there an empeg app for ios?

I too have only had Android phones since the G1, and while I have various iOS devices (an iPad Mini 2 and wifes iPhone SE) I'm pretty interested to see how you get on.

Sorry to be ignorant, but what is Google's ADD?

You're right: Apple hardware is sublime. It's just the limitations of the software that I have a problem with. You say it yourself: you'll miss Lastpass, because it cannot work as it should because of Apple's limitations. There are dozens of situations like this on the iPhone, and this is what is turning me off from it. Eg. I like how on Android, Sonos puts a nice controller on the home screen. This isn't possible on iPhone. Sure, there's one on the lockscreen now, but that's not the same thing. It's just more integrated on Android. That's my beef with Apple: their own stuff is incredibly integrated and it all works seamlessly with each other, but it's a very different story for third party apps. Some of the times, app creators have to be very inventive to get around Apple's limitations. (just ask video player app creators) It's only since iOS 9 that add-on keyboards have become available. (but if you use them, the speech-to-text doesn't work anymore) "Desktop" tweaks are still not possible. Some apps, like eg. WiFi analyzers are flat out refused on the App Store.

I also have an incredible hatred for iTunes. I have a very big collection of tracks, and I do NOT want to organize them via iTunes because iTunes doesn't always follow the standards when it comes to MP3tags and I would have to retag 30.000+ files. I don't have the time for that, nor do I really feel like doing it because all my files work perfectly on all other software, except for iTunes. But I 'm stuck with it. And yes, I know there is something like CopyTrans, I've tried it and and found it's not all that either. I would love it if iPhone would simply allow me to connect it to a PC, copy the mp3 files to a folder on the phone and they would just play, like Android does.

So that's my story really. I won't discommend anyone from buying an iPhone and I still agree there's a lot Apple got right. The hardware, the ecosystem, it's second to none. It's just that I find myself more and more having a real problem with the limitations Apple imposes.

I can understand the reasons you're buying an iPhone, but those don't apply the me. The watch is still more a gimmick (albeit a nice one, I'll admit) than anything else to me. Homekit doesn't impress me. The home automation system I'm using (Loxone) is excellent quality stuff and it's dead easy to set up. There's no real "text" programming involved (though it does support it if you really wanted), everything is done graphically. It's hard to explain in a few sentences, so I'll just say it's simple, yet still very powerful and it works excellently. Loxone does things Homekit can only dream of. It can truly make your house run on autopilot. You can literally set it up not having to ever flick a lightswitch anywhere is your house ever again. Ever. Because the system knows what it needs to do at specific times and situations, and it adapts. (light scenes, heating, ventilation, etc...) And it works! Of course, Home Automation is the only thing Loxone does, so they better be good at it.

So that's the reason I'm now leaning towards Android. Maybe I'll make a mistake, I don't know. But I have used Android for a couple of months two years ago, and I remember really liking it. (but then work situations changed and I was back on iPhone again)

Oh Lord, how I hate iTunes. I haven't synced my iPad in a couple years because every time I try, it says I have to reset the iPad for some reason.

iTunes is my least liked software from Apple. Long overdue for a rethink. Even on Mac it is a weird beast. I imagine the Windows version is also not good.

The most recent update of iTunes on Mac shows signs of change afoot. iOS App Store is gone now, I think. Looking forward to iTunes becoming less terrible over time.

I do not really use iTunes for music management. Mainly device backups, OS upgrades, and restore backups to newly purchased devices.

I'm going to do my best to avoid iTunes, and instead do all my backups to iCloud.

No problem at all. Happy to explain. Google has a way of going one direction, and then completely changing course mid-stream.

I've been with Google Voice from the beginning, since it was Grand Central. It stagnated. Then they made Hangouts, which had a better interface and fully integrated my GV and cell numbers for voicemail and texting. Awesome! Then they split my cell sms and voicemail out and into Messages or whatever they called it. Oh, and then there's Allo, which confuses me to this day.

Then there's Keep. I actually like Keep a whole lot. It's my grocery list of choice, after playing with and hating every grocery list service I've ever used (and I've tried at least a dozen). Google launched Keep, then never mentioned it anywhere ever again. But I used it! And it worked SO WELL with Google Home. I could say "Hey Google, add bread to my shopping list," and there it would be in my Keep entry labeled "Shopping List." I could place keep as a widget on my home screen, with the shopping list pinned to the top. Planning and going to the store was a breeze!

Then it changed to "Shopping List from Google Assistant." Fine just a name change. But then it was gone entirely, with no notice. I was adding stuff all week, and none of it got into Keep. It turns out that they were shifting focus entirely onto the Google Assistant. Now, the shopping list feature of Google Home was "integrated" into the Home App. Want to know how to get to it now?

-open Home app
-slide from the left or tap the menu button
-tap shopping list
-wait for a chrome window to come up
-wait for the data to load from the cloud instead of the data Keep cached on the device inside the installed app

To add insult to injury, the new shopping list is also MUCH harder to use.

I know that these seem like small things, but they're indicative of the overall experience I've had with Google. They change things far too often, don't have a unified direction, and often make things worse.

For example, the unified vision of this year appears to be all about Google Assistant. It's all they talk about anymore. The problem is that it's awful. Before they rolled out the Assistant, I absolutely adored Google's voice services. It almost always understood me, even when I asked it for some really tough stuff. Most importantly, it was extremely consistent. I could be reasonably certain that it would give me the same result every time for the same voice command.

Google Assistant is completely unreliable.

I drive all over the northern Virginia area for my business, and I utterly rely on navigation with real-time traffic to guide me now. Google Maps is great at this! It's great at taking commands like "navigate to 1234 Main Street in Alexandria Virginia." That works every time. You know what screwed up 5 times in the last two months? "OK Google, navigate home." Google knows where my home is. It's never failed to take me home. There are settings specifically designed to inform Google where my home is. Yet almost a half dozen times it's taken me to a place that was about 8 miles off track. Given how the roads in my area are, and how the traffic is around here (pretty sure we're in the top five in the country), an 8 mile error adds 10 to 30 minutes of travel time. But it won't always do this. Sometimes it takes me to the correct Home address, other times it takes me to this other random place I've never been to, 8-12 miles southwest of me.

I've also seen the Assistant be consistently inconsistent. For example, I have a playlist in Google Play Music called "Alex's Favorites." These are the songs my son likes the most, and he asks for them fairly often. At home, with the Google Home, I can just say "Hey Google, play Alex's Favorites" and it plays the right playlist. In the car, without fail, it will play some album by a band called "The Favorites." Every time.

All of these things and more, plus the allure of HomeKit, are what drew me to try out an iPhone for the first time. I still like Android a whole lot, and particularly if it's on an official Google phone. But at this point the two platforms are so close it honestly isn't as big a jump as some might think it is (there's no huge delta, that's for sure).

Anyway, I know that was more than just the ADD comments I talked about. There are other things, but these are good examples.

That Lastpass thing is turning out to be one of the most challenging things to leave behind. I'm not sure if iOS users understand exactly how great it works on Android. It's sublime...when it works. I had lots of times when the window simply wouldn't appear to fill the data, and I'd have to go into the app manually anyway. It NEVER worked for my banking app, for example. Didn't know why.

Widgets...I honestly don't care. I stopped using widgets years ago. Even that Keep widget, frankly, wasn't that necessary, and it just added to the system's overhead and slowed things down. Maybe that's my imagination though.


This really is the biggest downside to iPhone. Like you say, Apple's stuff inherently works better than anyone else's. I've noticed a LOT of annoying things like how the keyboard keeps reverting to the standard iOS keyboard, particularly on the lock screen. I assume this is for security, but it's super annoying. And yeah, today was the first time I wanted to use the absolutely indispensable (for my work) WiFi Analyzer, and realized I didn't have a spare Android device. I think I'll keep my old Nexus 5 in my glove compartment from now on...


This is very much a subjective thing. I absolutely adore having a smartwatch. I had the original Moto 360, and it greatly improved my productivity. The ability to notice an email come in, skim it, then dismiss it or archive it, is actually vital to me. If business is good, I'm out on jobs all day, and when I'm fixing someone's computer I can't exactly sit here and read my email. To be able to quickly triage every incoming email means that when I get back home at the end of the day, I only have a half dozen emails in my inbox, instead of a bunch of junk mixed in among the action items. The rest of the features of the watch are, honestly, just icing on the cake. The whole thing really is worth the price of admission for that one feature.


It looks really nice, though also very expensive. And yes, HomeKit is extremely basic compared to established and more complex automation systems. But it does nearly everything I want, and does it with a superb interface. Also, believe it or not, there are times when I don't want my house to anticipate what I want it to do, or it can't. I have four different scenes for the main floor of my home. 3 of them are used purely when I feel like dimming the lights a little bit to different levels, depending on my mood. There aren't any prompts beyond my own subjective feel that could tell it that.

Also, my wife and all my family really prefers to have physical buttons and at least remote controls.


I really don't think you can "make a mistake." They're both great platforms, each with their advantages and disadvantages. Like I said in the other thread, it's far more subjective than most people want to admit.

I haven't used Lastpass on iOS and I do know that there is much more scope for password managers to be clever/more automatic on Android, but...

I use 1Password and that does its best on iOS to make things as painless as possible. From Safari I never need to switch to the app, there is a Safari widget (or whatever they are called) that lets me fill passwords from within Safari. Works pretty much the same as on the desktop, popping up the right set of passwords for the site I'm on.

There are also some apps that have added password manager support. 1Password published a protocol for people to use on iOS for communicating with password managers and sometimes in apps you'll see a door lock symbol next to the password that will pop up 1Password's UI (showing the passwords for that app). I don't know whether Lastpass are doing that too ?

But that's the thing. It works in Safari. I don't want to use Safari. And Lastpass works in every app and every browser on Android. It's really not the same thing.

Lastpass even has a more elegant intermediate step, if the automatic login field detection doesn't work. You can find the login in the app, tap on it, and choose "add copy notifications." This adds two notifications to the Android notification shade. One can be tapped to copy the username to the clipboard, the other one the password. Then you go back to the app and can use those notifications to fill in the app.

On iOS I have to open the app I'm using, go to the home screen, open Lastpass and find the login, copy the password, switch to the other app with a double tap of the home button, paste the password, switch back to Lastpass, tap on the site, choose copy login, switch back to the app, and paste that into the username. Each time, I have to touchID into Lastpass which adds a moment too. I've started anticipating it and opening Lastpass first to take one step out, but it's still a real pain.

As a contrast, on Android I just open the app I want, and as soon as I tap on the password field a box pops up with sites that Lastpass thinks match the app I'm using (usually only one). I just tap the site I want and the username and password are automatically filled in. This works on any app on the phone and any site in Chrome. I haven't tried it in other browsers but I assume it would work in them too. It's this insistence that everything on iOS use Apple apps that is one of the things that bothers me about the transition.

I assume you are using Chrome then ? It has the same support for 1Password and Lastpass. It is hidden in the three dot menu under the share button.

I know that doesn’t help you in other apps though that don’t have 1Password/Lastpass support baked in.

FireFox: Yes.

tanstaafl.

Thanks for mentioning it. I found it, but it doesn't seem to be working. I'll have to try some other sites, but the first two sites I tried failed. It didn't fill anything. It's a little less work than switching between apps, so if it works that would be good. But yeah, I wish it were there for the apps.

To illustrate how Lastpass works on Android, here's a 15 second video that's longer than the process actually takes.

Apple does this too. Eg. just now, with the introduction of iOS 11, they killed off all 32-bit apps. Doesn't matter if there is no 64 bit alternative. Doesn't matter if you even paid for if x number of years ago. You can't use them anymore, period. And you can't stay with iOS 10 either, because sooner or later you'll need iOS 11 features for something and you'll be obligated to upgrade. Or stop receiving security updates, something like that. There simply is no escape.

I've read you're entire explanation, and I understand your frustration. I would be annoyed too. But I'm annoyed with Apple too and I still think that for for *my* specific type of use, I would be less annoyed with Android than with iOS. As said, I have no intention to ever buy a smart watch. I don't care for voice commands, be it Siri, Assistant or other.

So I'm still VERY curious to see what Google will release the next couple of days. Oh, and if their stuff will finally be available officially in Belgium. Because up to now you could only get it if you imported it yourself.

The developers of those 32-bit only iOS apps killed them. Apple has required updates to existing apps to support 64 bit for quite some time, and prior to that was strongly recommending developers support 64 bit in their App Store submissions and app updates. AAPL has been pressing developers to prepare for a 64-bit future since 2013

Apps that do not support 64 bit on iOS are apps that the developers themselves do not support. At all. Even if you paid for those apps, the developer has fully abandoned the app, and did so knowing their existing customers would be affected.

In general, operating systems evolve and change over time. App developers often need to update and revise apps to comply with changing OS requirements and technical issues. Maintaining OS support for older and now non-compliant apps could expose the OS to limitations in robustness, flexibility or future capabilities.

You're correct. But that was just one example. There are other, like eg. since iOS 10, Apple no longer supports the PPTP VPN protocol. Yes, I know that's an old and not even all that secure anymore protocol, but it was also very easy to set up and use, and all other alternatives are a lot more work. For the little amount I used it, PPTP was just fine. But Apple decided to end it.

My point is, the thing Matt is annoyed with when it concerns Google, Apple does too. Maybe not so much, but when they do it, it's usually more drastic.

Apple kills things off, it's true, but as much as I've wanted to criticize that in the past, it's always struck me as the cutting away of the dead weight so they can keep moving forward. Sure, I thought they dropped the floppy drive early, but it worked for them and it helped move the industry along.

I feel like that 32 to 64 bit move is different than what I was talking about. Google basically has 4 ways for people to message each other, and two ways to video chat. Hangouts was the only one that did both in one app but they seem to be moving on from it. What the hell is that?

Again, the preference for one over the other is very subjective. This works for me right now, and Android appeals to you at the moment. It's all good.

Quick update:

Things are going pretty well. And by pretty well, I've replaced a bunch of my home automation devices with HomeKit compatible ones, and I've installed an AppleTV. I'm pretty much all in at this point.

I've been keeping a running list of my impressions as I get used to the phone. I'd say there's almost a perfect split of positive and negative impressions, but overall I'm pleased with the move. I'll have to post those as soon as I write them up as full thoughts instead of quick notes.