Through a series of events caused by a combination of my partner and eBay's algorithm, I ended up with three modern-ish phones on my desk. Two of them are Android phones and one is an iPhone. This is a writeup on what my experience using them has been like, and how the debate between mobile operating systems is perpetrated by capitalistic greed and the desire to create walled gardens.
The phones from left to right are as follows:
I think it is absolutely insane that Android devices can come pre-installed with two calculator apps. The agreements Android phone manufactuers have to make with Google to provide play store support are predatory and stupid, but also create scenarios where a stock install of an Android phone can include the OEM's own version of calculator, calendar, etc., while also bundling the Google apps. It creates an unpleasant experience that makes the phone feel like modern Windows installs. Furthermore, why is LinkedIn and Candy Crush pre-included on my phone? I don't care for your brand deals, get off of the device.
These issues aren't as bad as the system apps, at least. The Motorola came with so much junk related to a "Motorola" account and its own settings app and feeds and I was so sick of it I went into the settings and disabled most of them. The problem is now, because most of them are disabled, customization of the small display is now partially impossible, and I have no way of knowing which of the "Motorola Experience" applications are actually required. I do not care for your bloat, and its inclusion is disgusting. These issues include the lock screen not using the right time format, which I can't tell if that's an issue with disabled software or just a bug.
The only OEM that seems to not carry these issues is Google itself. While Google includes a number of its own services (including YouTube Music, which is apparently a "required system app" that cannot be uninstalled), it doesn't have any third-party software, making the cleanup process just a bit nicer. iOS includes a similar situation, though at least on modern iOS you can uninstall practically everything except the settings and app store app.
I hate the default home screen view on modern phones. The grid of applications is not appealing to me, and provides an annoying and clunky interface that makes it harder to quickly find and click on the application I want. One of Android's biggest strengths is the ability to swap the launcher completely, with Niagra launcher being the only application launcher I used daily. The list of appplications in the lower-center of the screen was very much preferred over the stock home screen, and the inability to do something like that on iOS is very frustrating.
I don't use a lot of iOS specific applications in my daily life on my phone, but there are some that have their worth. Despite the popular consensus, I find that Apple Maps is a better experience for most cases than Google Maps, especially for public transit navigation. Google Maps is so unreliable for public transit that I made sure I had an iPhone on me to use Apple Maps if I was walking around town. Other applications like Apple News are quite nice as well, with its algorithm proving more reliable at showing stories I'm interested in than Google News, in my experience. And, despite my best effort, navigating away from iMessage in the United States is challenging, with several family group chats and school/work chats running entirely within the iMessage ecosystem. Thankfully I still had a Mac to cover these experiences, but it is a factor. Now that RCS is finally supported within iOS this issue will slowly fade, I just couldn't commit to swapping my main phone number over during my experimentation.
Despite Apple's walled garden, there are some applications I will miss from Android. The most notable one is Conversations, an XMPP client of considerable quality. The best XMPP client on iOS I've found is Monal and it pales in comparison to Conversations in terms of quality.
When deciding which phone I wanted to use, I found very quickly that performance and how it felt to interact with the software was very important. The Razr is notable among the selection of devices for not having a 120hz refresh rate screen, and for also having a weaker CPU that as easy to notice in regular use. As such, despite being my preferred form factor for a phone and having some interesting use cases for the foldable display, the performance difference was noticeable enough to make it feel like an inferior device.
The Pixel and iPhone felt basically the same in terms of daily performance, making them the two phones I used on a regular basis.
Discord and Bluesky's mobile apps are made with React Native, and on first blush it's immediately apparent to me that the Android variants of their apps see far less work than the iOS variants. While both work fine on Android, the Discord app just doesn't perform as nicely and even has some bugs that are corrected in the iOS builds. For example, the accessibility option to set role colors "Next to names" is an option that shows a dot next to the name of a user that indicates the role color. On the desktop app and the iOS app, this dot is not visible in DMs or group chats, as "roles" do not exist in these spaces and that color option does not need to be visible as a result. Android, on the other hand, will show a black dot next to the name for no particular reason.
