I Love Android

Reading Time: 7 minutes.

After testing the HTC U11, I came to a shocking conclusion: I actually prefer many portions of Android to iOS 11. iOS is excruciatingly stale, infested with bugs, uncustomizable, and utterly boring. Android is fresh, exciting, endlessly customizable, offers a choice from a plethora of unique devices, and lets you make a smartphone that’s unique to you. Using a phone as fantastic as the HTC U11 finally had me convinced, Android is currently the best mobile OS to use.

So why am I still using iOS?

Mostly, it comes down to the apps, the ecosystem, and the consistency of the OS across apps. But how much longer will I be able to cling to those while iOS goes further down the drain?

About Me

This isn’t an easy admission for me. I’ve been an Apple fangirl for my entire adult life. I was obsessed with the Mac before I even had one. I’ve owned a wide range of Apple products:

• Three iPods (iPod Video, iPod Shuffle, and first generation iPod Touch)
• Three iPads (third generation, iPad Air, and 9.7″ iPad Pro)
• Two MacBooks (2006 MacBook and 2010 MacBook Pro)
• Five iPhones (4, 5, 6, 6s, and X)
• One PowerMac G4 (Upgraded it like mad too!)
• Two Apple TVs (second and fourth generations)
• Apple AirPort Extreme
• Apple Pencil, keyboards, cases, headphones, and a variety of other accessories
• Last, the Apple Watch, the wrist wear I can’t go without

I’ve had so many Apple products that I’m still not sure I’m remembering them all. And that doesn’t even include the Macs I’ve used for work or school. Starting out with An Apple II, including iMacs, PowerMacs, Mac Pros, MacBook Pros, and so much more. I have been one extremely dedicated macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS user.

You’re reading a blog written by me that has existed in various forms for over a decade. It’s about Apple. I write about Apple stuff for fun.

So when I say I’m frustrated with iOS and recently fell in love with Android, take it seriously.

What is Android Doing Right?

Customization

I won two HTC U11 smartphones from Android Central in February. I finally had a chance to use a flagship smartphone from the brand I had always thought about switching to. My friend got my other one. We had two identical HTC U11 smartphones. He took my suggestions on case and launcher, so our devices were identical, right? Nope. We have different backgrounds, sure, different apps, ho-hum. But we also arranged our apps completely differently. He went with a strict grid with plenty of empty space between app groupings. I used a zig-zag pattern set up with sub-grid positioning so I can have my apps to be within range of my right thumb, for one handed use. We have different weather-based live wallpapers, widgets, launcher gestures, edge sense gestures, and more. Our devices may look alike on the outside, but on the inside, they’re completely unique. Android enabled that.

Fun Functionality

When you squeeze an HTC U11, you can gain access to shortcuts. Mine will go to the camera on a short squeeze, perfect for pulling out your phone and getting a photo, and a long squeeze will take a screenshot, perfect for debugging problems in the app, writing about an app, or writing a how-to guide, all things I do frequently. This is a pretty unique feature, and it’s the kind of thing Android manufacturers experiment with that Apple wouldn’t.

There are phones and apps that offer hover gestures, hand gestures that perform shortcuts without touching your device, fingerprint scanner gestures, head tracking, and more. My HTC U11 and many other smartphones can crank up the screen sensitivity so you can use them with gloves on. Vivo made a phone with a pop-up selfie camera. Doogee made a slider phone so the front has neither a notch nor a visible camera until you slide the screen down. Android manufacturers are pushing innovation by trying new things, while Apple is the company playing it safe. Their latest innovation, Face ID, would have been better left on the drawing table.

Variety of Apps

My HTC U11 has a wallpaper that updates based on the weather. I’ve got old video game emulators, can use my android device as a keyboard or trackpad, and much more. Google made Android highly customizable, but they also enabled app developers to do some pretty crazy things with their apps. Sure, it’s not always secure, but it’s often handy for users.

What is Android Doing Wrong?

As I mentioned, security is a huge downside. When Android devices first started getting fingerprint sensors, they didn’t yet have a secure way of storing them in memory. The Google Play store is full of fake apps, scams, and malware, despite Google’s best efforts. The app has a few automated processes for making sure you’ve got a working app, but does little else to prevent malware, duplicate apps, or outright scams. As a result, the whole OS is insecure, and you’ll constantly have to be careful if you don’t want to hand away your data.

Speaking of handing your data over, even “legitimate” apps can open you up to vulnerabilities. Facebook asks for access to your contacts and messages. Perfectly reasonable for something that can be used to send texts. However, the app then took everything from messaging records to call logs and stored them. Facebook gathered as much information as they could, and, while iOS protected users from the most serious invasions of privacy, Android did not.

Fragmentation for Developers

Want to know something “fun” about being an Android developer? No, you don’t, but I’ll tell you anyway. Fragmentation is a weird problem that you don’t think about much while writing code, but often have to after releasing it. You can be writing a controller, writing up a wonderful view, and you just know that everything is going to work. All the pieces are in the right place. But then you find out that this one particular device, running this one particular version of Android, crashes when it opens the page. Oops! Maybe you made it using an Android standard library and that device doesn’t always play well with that library. Maybe you just didn’t account for its weird screen ratio. Whatever it is, this one device is a huge thorn in your side.

There are thousands of Android devices, running a myriad of Android versions. You can never quite get your app to work on all of them. You make an app that will work on most of them, but you’re targeting a patchwork. This should work, you say, as you take your perfectly solid piece of code and throw it at the Android operating system, only to find out the operating system is actually an assortment of parts, and not everyone agreed on what parts to use. It’s not a coherent operating system, it’s a collection of items that work like an operating system. That’s fragmentation. That makes development difficult.

… Becomes Fragmentation for Users

So why am I talking about development if I’m considering Android as a user? Not just because it’s my day job, but what affects the development lifecycle affects users. An iOS developer is able to create new features faster than an Android developer. The Android developer has to worry about testing on more devices, they have to worry about more APIs and libraries, and they have to support more versions of Android, including some that are very old. Android developers can’t even use the latest version of Java, and Kotlin development isn’t perfect yet. Meanwhile, iOS developers can use the latest versions of Swift and Objective-C.

Android developers have to deal with more bugs affecting fewer users. They have to spend more time fixing these issues. It makes Android a second class operating system for developers, and who could blame them? It’s more time consuming, requires more testing, and is therefore more expensive. That’s why Android doesn’t get apps as soon as their iOS counterparts, and often lack features as well. It’s why I can play Alto’s Odyssey on my iPad and iPhone, but not on my U11.

Lack of coherence between apps

With all the screen sizes, operating systems, and multiple platforms, developers don’t have time to create a coherent set of user interface (UI) principles. Google doesn’t help. Maybe swiping will work as a page back on this app, but it won’t on this one. Tap here and scroll to the top of the page in this app, do it in this app, and wonder if you tapped in the wrong place. Do it again and realize, this app just doesn’t do that. It’s not just a “foreigner in an unfamiliar land” thing, as I’m an iOS user in Android space, it’s worse. Android users don’t know their way around. Everything is the same, until it isn’t. That problem isn’t on iOS, Apple is great at telling engineers how to make their app fit in with all the other iOS apps and sit at the cool table at lunch.

Why Stick with iOS?

iOS 11 is the buggiest operating system I’ve ever used. I’ve never ran into so many problems with any operating system. I can’t trust this OS to stand on its own two feet. This past year with iOS 11 has been a nightmare, feeling like it has drug on for years (just like this winter). Now would be the perfect time to get me to switch to Android. But Google just hasn’t made it tempting enough. Oh, sure, the OS is customizable, and I love that. Multitasking is better. Notifications are pretty great. And I love widgets. I really do. But I typed this article primarily on an iPad Pro. I love my iPad. There’s nothing even remotely like it on Android.

What’s worse, there’s nothing remotely like a lot of iOS features. Chromecast is unreliable, slow, and generally pretty awful. Allo or Hangouts, or whatever Google chat client Google is pushing right now doesn’t hold a candle to iMessage. Everyone’s using different third party chat apps and half of them can’t even sync across devices (I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to not be able to use WhatsApp on my iPhone and HTC U11).

Syncing across devices on iOS is phenomenal. I could start writing a note right now, pick up my iPhone, and it would suggest I open the notes app to finish what I was writing. Phone call coming in? No need to look away from what I’m working on, it’s on my Mac (and, unfortunately, taking up the ENTIRE screen on my iPhone). I can download a game on my iPhone, go pick up my iPad, and it has downloaded it and loaded my game save data. Incredible.

Apps have consistency throughout the OS. A swipe is a swipe. Tapping on the top of the screen scrolls to the top. Tapping and holding or force touching brings up options and a menu. Even text selection is uniform and easy (though still not perfect, the force touch text selection is the best I’ve ever seen on a mobile device).

Speaking of apps, I have over 250 on my iPhone right now. I’ve likely owned a thousand apps since 2008 when I got my first iPod Touch. A decade of iOS apps. Many of those apps I bought, and many others aren’t even available on Android. I can’t leave all of them behind (although I should probably delete a few apps).

I’m sticking with iOS for now, despite its numerous flaws. Although, if I’m being honest, I don’t know if I’m sticking with iOS voluntarily—because it’s powerful and beautiful, or if it has me trapped, shackled in a dungeon beneath Apple’s fabulous walled garden.

Thanks to Face ID and iOS 11, I think it’s the dungeon.