I have been an Android user for over 10 years. I got my first Android in my early teens and I’ve been using it all the way to my 20’s. I recently got an iPhone XR and I want to share my experience as someone who has been kind of anti-Apple. I will be telling you the pros and cons of iOS compared to Android in my personal experience.
Before getting started
I got this iPhone XR from a family member second hand. Initially I wanted to jailbreak it and see what I could do with it but then I realized I couldn’t do it because there are no exploits yet that work the iOS version I currently have.
These are the devices I currently own and use:
- iPhone XR with iOS 17.4.1
- Moto G9 Power (cebu) with LineageOS 21 (Android 14)
Pros of iOS
- Privacy: We don’t really have a way to prove it since iOS is closed-source but it feels a bit more secure than the stock Android experience. Apple Pay: I can use Apple Pay on most places that accept contactless payments. I can’t do this on my Moto G9 Power because it doesn’t have NFC but of course I could use Google Pay if I had a phone that supported it.
- Built-in OCR: in most apps I can just click the Live Text button, it recognizes the text and lets me copy, lookup, translate and share text. Apparently it works on most apps’ photo viewers, not only on the Apple’s Photos app. I’ve used it on Telegram, WhatsApp and some other apps and it works great without the need of an Internet connection. I can’t do this on Android natively, Stock Android ROMs usually have Google Lens/Google Photos but it still requires an Internet connection so it’s not as useful.
- Camera: The iPhone camera is of course much better than my Moto G9 Power’s camera even though the Moto G9 is a newer phone. I didn’t used to care about the camera quality but now that I have a better camera I can see the difference. The Moto G9 Power’s has always been terrible, it’s not even worth comparing. It most be a different story with another Android phone with a better camera such as the Google Pixel or the Samsung Galaxy S series.
- Social Media Apps: I’ve noticed that the social media apps are better optimized on iOS. They are more stable and sometimes they have more features than the Android versions. I’ve noticed this on Instagram, Threads and Twitter.
- iMessage: I don’t use iMessage that much but it’s nice to have it.
Cons of iOS
- iOS default Keyboard: One of the worst things I’ve had to deal with on iOS is the default keyboard. Its predictor and the autocorrector are terrible compared to Gboard example. I think it makes sense that Gboard is better since Google has harvested more data from all of its users to make it better. Changing the default keyboard to Gboard almost solves the problem but it’s still not as good as the Android implementation (probably because of iOS’ constrains). Update: I switched to SwiftKey and it’s much better than Gboard on iOS.
- Battery life: The battery life on the iPhone XR is terrible. I have to charge it at least twice a day and I don’t even use it heavily. To be fair the Moto G9 Power has a 6000mAh battery and the iPhone XR has a 2942mAh battery but still, I expected it to last longer due to iOS optimizations. Also, the battery health is at 78% so that might be the reason why it’s so bad but I’ve heard complaints from other people that the battery life is not that great on the iPhone XR and now I can confirm it.
- No customization: I can’t customize the iPhone as much as I can customize the Moto G9 Power. Jailbreak was supposed to be my salvation but that’s not an option on this iOS version. I’m used to change the whole Operating System on Android but I can’t even do a simple downgrade on iOS to be able to jailbreak it because Apple doesn’t sign old versions of iOS.
- Terminal: I’m used to do a lot of things from my Android using Termux and I haven’t found a good alternative on iOS. I use Termius to SSH to my servers but I can’t really run anything locally unlike on Android where I can simply use Termux and be able to run most of arm64 prebuilt binaries either from Termux sources or third parties or I can even run a full Linux installation using AnLinux.
- No file system: I can’t access the file system on iOS like I can on Android using a file manager or Termux.
- No sideloading: Not being able to sideload apps is a big deal for me because I like to use apps that are not on the App Store and speaking of the App Store, it sucks because you don’t really get a big catalog of apps like you do on Android. I am used install modded apps such as YouTube Revanced.
- Blocking ads: I can’t block ads on iOS like I can on Android using AdAway. I can use AdGuard but it’s not as good as AdAway because some networks restrict the use of custom DNS servers.
- Internet browsing: The web browser is one of the worst if not the worst experience I’ve had with iOS. A lot of sites don’t work correctly and video players don’t work at all a lot of times. Since all browsers have to use the same engine as Safari, it’s almost the same experience on all of them but Chrome is still better than Safari in my experience. Hopefully this will change now that Apple is allowing other engines on latest iOS versions.
Conclusion
I think I will never be able to use iOS as my daily driver unless they at least allow sideloading apps. As a power user I need to be able to do a lot of things that iOS doesn’t allow me to do. I will keep using the iPhone XR as a secondary phone and I will keep using it for taking photos and using social media apps. I still have to try jailbreaking it but I will have to wait until there’s an exploit for iOS 17.4.1 which might take a while.