My dealbreakers:

1. No proper file management on iPhones.

2. No sideloading allowed on iPhones.

3. No playing back local music files without doing the cumbersome syncing through iTunes on iPhones.

4. No headphone jack, no MicroSD slot, huge storage markups on iPhones.

• Firefox with ublock and a normal engine

• Newpipe for downloading stuff off YT

• OSMand for offline navigation

• f-droid for foss software

• Rethink to carefully ban everything that doesn’t need internet from connecting

• a phone with a nice amoled screen and all-day quickcharging battery that costs 180€ (motorola g52)

• not one ad anywhere

a better question is, why would I want anything else? An iphone seems like a sharp downgrade.

• proper adblocking with AdAway
• ability to patch official apps to remove ads and improve the usability with ReVanced
• being able to root the device and use HttpToolkit to analyze the data that flows from apps to the web
• extensive customization (I can choose my own launcher and keyboard application)
• proper file management, especially with Total Commander
• watching Dolby Vision .mkv files with mpv
• price (iPhones are all way too expensive)
• Apple’s stance against repairability

And this point is more hardware-related, but I’ve started to really love my Nothing Phone and its LED lights on the back, which produces amazing photos because it’s much softer than the small flash used by other phones. There isn’t a single Apple device with a feature like this. You could probably get a case, but it’s nice to have this integrated into the phone.

Apple. I want nothing to do with a closed ecosystem and I loathe how central AppleID is to absolutely everything.

I have fdroid and a few custom apks that wouldn’t be available on their store, so those would be hooped as well.

Apple’s walled garden is anti-consumer, anti-developer, and pretty much anti-everyone-but-apple.

It just doesn’t make sense to me to use or develop for Apple under those conditions.

Apple and I have very different notions of what it means to own something.

A central nervous system

The phones being worse than the ones I prefer to use.

Like, they’re objectively less functional devices. I can’t pretend the features drops for every new model/OS aren’t just things android has has for years.

I’m a developer and android is more friendly to developers, i have more control over my device. I can use any browser without being stuck with Safari. If i don’t like my phone i can choose from many more manufacturers without losing my apps and subscriptions.

I think most of all i have problem with Apples culture, their smugness and acting like they invented everything. I don’t think I’m their target audience.

Honestly, just navigating the phone is a giant pain in the ass. I bought my wife an iPad and finding basic settings or locating an app is a nightmare. Any time she needs help with it I feel like I’m pulling teeth.

• Actually being the owner of my phone. Apple decides everything for their users and allows them little freedom. I want to be able to put random apps on my phone, including maybe even my own.

• Price. Shit’s expensive. I now got a Pixel 8 for less than 500 euro’s. Before that I had phones around the 300 euro price range.

• Their ecosystem. They try to lure you into an everything Apple ecosystem. Stuff like iMessage is horrible for consumers. With an Android phone I have choice of apps, smart watch, earbuds, etc. Apple will always try to force you into buying their fancy but expensive things.

• No benefit, there’s plenty of cool Android phones.

Etc etc.

Why would I pay more than 3 times more for a Brick, that gives me less freedom to do what I want and doesn’t have app support and features I require.

The OS

I’ve been forced to use iOS for my work phone and it is absolute dog shit… it feels like Android from 10+ years ago. The lack of customization and dumbass work flows drive me crazy every day.

So many screens in different apps. make you reach way to one corner or the other to go back a screen. In Android, back is one motion that can be done anywhere from any edge. And that behaves consistently across every app. In iOS some apps behave differently, even the same app with a different screen will handle the same gesture differently. It’s an absolute shit show.

Want to open my app list, I just swipe up from anywhere on my screen. Want my notifications, swipe down from anywhere on my screen. In iOS I have to perfectly hit the top edge and slowly drag it down.

There are plenty of other reasons.

Access to the filesystem. Wtf! Lmao. I download a PDF and can’t just open it? I have to basically share it with the app, it’s so dumb.

Split screening apps.

Complete lack of customization. The launcher is ass.

Horrible keyboard and the one I like, SwiftKey is completely neutered and lacks the customization of Android. And some apps will use the apple keyboard even though I changed it to use Swiftkey. Again, no consistency.

Messages will pop a notification then when I open the messenger app they are not there. I can read the message in the notification area, but there is a period of time that it doesn’t display in the actual app. Lmao. Dog shit.

Many, many other things.

Apps and services dying to backgrounding like the hotspot for one will just stop working after a certain amount of time.

Want to know how I change my brightness in Android? I just slide across the status bar in any app on any screen.

When I want to turn my flashlight on, all I do is hold my power button down for 3 seconds. Don’t have to turn my screen on and click anything.

So many things. The settings in iOS are also a joke and the way they are organized, I just hate everything about it. It feels like I’m running Android from 2010 with less customization.

Basically iOS is complete ass.

I wouldn’t buy a car that could only drive on roads approved by the maker, so same goes for phone.