Goodbye, iPhone

I just declared divorce from iPhone. I have just switched my cell-phone number from my iPhone 6S+ to my Google Pixel XL. It’s possibly the most earth-shaking change you can make in your life: moving your phone number (which I’ve had for more than 10 years) to a different digital ecosystem.

I got my first iPhone when the first one came out, in 2007. I have bought every new iPhone since then — except the iPhone 7. (My wife upgraded and loves her 7, but I didn’t like the bluetooth-only design for ear buds.) Now, ten years later, I have upgraded from an iPhone 6S+ to a Google Pixel XL. I bought the Pixel about a month ago and have been using both phones in parallel since. But the key to being committed to a particular phone is when you associate your mobile phone number with that device, which then becomes the only device you get phone calls and text messages through the cellular carrier.

What I will miss:

• iMessage lets me do group, threaded messages with other iPhone users, which right now includes almost my entire family, and provides other integration benefits between IOS and MacOS devices. Now that I have moved my cellular number to a non-IOS device, I have isolated myself from that community. I have become a Green User in the blue iMessage world; I used to sneer at Green Users and now I am one!
• Photo Sharing: I’m still using an iPad and the Macintosh so I will be able to see shared photos on those devices, but won’t be able to share or view shared photos from my Google Pixel. (See rants below about Apple Photos and Google Photos.) This is a big deal because all of my siblings and children use iPhones to share photos, which will be harder (but not impossible) for me to keep track of and participate in.

What I will not miss:

• Force Touch: I got my iPhone 6S+, what?, about a year ago. I read all about Force Touch. But it took me months to realize that the user must learn to apply different levels of pressure on the screen to get different results. In the interim, I felt like there was something wrong with the phone, that it wasn’t acting correctly. Now I see that what Apple’s product management thought was a neat new feature is actually feature creep, making the phone less useable and charming than it used to be.
• AirPods: I did not upgrade to the iPhone 7 because I don’t trust Bluetooth ear buds. I’ve lost a bunch; they never seemed to work anyway; and I think Apple was doing this to differentiate itself more than to provide what its customers want. They could have offered two models, with and without, and let their customers choose. Instead, they pissed off those who didn’t want them.
• Crapps: Apple will not let you remove their apps (often referred to as “crapps”, sort for crappy apps) and does not allow you to set a different default app than theirs. Combine with Force Touch (see above), this means that about half the time I open an address with Apple Maps rather than Google Maps. I don’t care which one is better, but I do care that Apple doesn’t let me choose which one I want to use.
• Apple Photos: One of the all-time worst apps in both Apple platforms is Photos. Apple has made so many bad product and programming decisions so many times in a row that they have frustrated their most loyal customers. Bad combination to make crapps and then force your customers to use them.

What I am looking forward to:

• Google apps. The inverse of Apple Crapps, Google has invested heavily in making their apps best in class on both the web browser (any web browser, Apple, not just their own) and in apps on both Android and IOS. I’ve almost stopped using Microsoft’s apps on the desktop (which doesn’t force you to use their apps) and look forward to deciding what apps I want to use on my Pixel, which so far looks like mostly Google software: Maps, Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Photos, Now.
• Google Photos: The inverse of Apple Photos! Google appears to have learned from its mistakes (including Picasa, which wasn’t really a mistake but was part of Google’s learning process, after it bought the startup called Picasa). I have now moved and consolidated 140,632 photo images from all of my hard disks (four different Macintoshes) and devices (iPhone and iPad) to the Google Photos service. That represents about 35,000 actual photos but Apple Photos managed to screw up so much that I now have 2–4 copies of most of my photos. Once I’m confident that I have all the photos, including all the duplicates, I will figure out how to de-duplicate down to a single set. Google doesn’t help with that either, but at least they didn’t create the problem in the first place.

What I’m still not sure about:

• Music: Apple has re-encoded all of the music I own. I have been willingly paying them for the privilege of having them do that to get it all upgraded to release-quality tracks. I don’t know how Google has dealt with music, and I don’t want to have to replace my entire library. But I discovered that Apple has an Android version of its Apple Music app, so I can keep listening to the music on my Pixel.
• It feels like the Pixel’s UI for simple stuff is still more complicated than it is on the iPhone. For instance, it takes me forever to figure out how to turn the WiFi on or off, and I’m never certain whether I don’t have a cell signal because there isn’t one or because I turned airplane mode on.
• Worst thing so far: Trying to take a screen shot. It’s really simple on the iPhone and I’ve taken hundreds of screen shots in the past 10 years. On Pixel: I can’t do it; it’s the smartphone equivalent of being asking to stand on one leg while touching your nose. (Indeed, the last time Itook a screen shot I used the iPhone to take a photo of the Pixel screen!)
• I took that photo to ask our IT support to figure out why my email wasn’t synchronizing correctly. The message from Android? “Sync is currently experiencing problems. It will be back shortly.” It’s a stupid message, since it doesn’t not tell you what problems and sync doesn’t just magically come back.
• In the month that I’ve had the Pixel, I’ve noticed that apps don’t work as well. They freeze a lot. The Internet connection is not reliable, whether by cellular data or wifi. Actions sometimes create unintended results. I haven’t had it long enough to be able to find a pattern, but it feels like Google just hasn’t paid as much attention to the details as Apple is famous for doing.

Bottom line: I was willing to switch from iPhone to Pixel because of one of my fundamental beliefs: the best devices come from one company that makes both the hardware and the operating system. Apple and Microsoft are the only two companies that have done that previously. Apple famously has been making the software and hardware since it started more than 40 years ago, and now makes both for both Macintosh and IOS devices. Microsoft changed its mind between Windows PC and Windows Phone, and the results are mixed.

Google is the third company to develop both competencies, and it still has a lot to learn. It started with the Nexus devices (which I also bought and played with, but never switched to). It has been through several iterations of operating system, user experience, and applications design. It has re-organized the people in the company responsible for these skills. What lead me finally to switch is the convergence between Google’s learning curve in OS and hardware and its now-unmatched competence in applications.

The Google G-Suite is an remarkable package of online productivity and information applications which Google has built up over the past decade from buying startups integrated with internal development into a well-integrated, well thought out set of capabilities. It all comes together on a state-0f-the-art device (many say it matches the iPhone 7 or Samsung Galaxy S8 in features and capabilities) running a first class OS (you get updates immediately rather than waiting for a hardware company to test and approve first) and a bundle of first-class apps (rather than bloatware from a hardware company, a carrier or a third party developer).

Back to my anxiety: I’ll check back in a couple of months to let you know if I’m still using the Pixel+Android or switched my number back to the iPhone 8, whenever that comes out.