Moving from iOS to Android

Haha... might have waited a little bit long for this one. Honestly for a couple weeks I just forgot about making a blog post at all, but then before you know it it's the beginning of september so... oops. My bad. But hey, a new blog post is finally here at least.

I just picked up a new Android phone recently (Motorola Razr 2023) after being an iOS user all my life after getting a killer deal on it and I gotta say, it's been amazing overall so far! But it was a bit of a process to get there so I feel like id share a post with my trials, tribulations and experiences switching platforms.

Unfortunately, the setup was a complete fucking pain in the ass, honestly the "transfer to android" app is beyond useless and im sure both Apple and Google have zero interest in actually maintaining it so I tried five. Seperate. Times. To use it and ended up giving up. Why is five tries a big deal? Oh, only because you have to FACTORY RESET THE PHONE EACH TIME TO DO SO! Just a little bit of an inconveinence. Honestly if you're thinking about switching I would not even bother with this feature, I would just copy over everything manually and install all the apps you had yourself (you're pretty much going to have to anyways, after all). This process is definitely a pain in the ass, and downloading, setting up, and signing in to everything SUCKS. Getting 2FA transfered, etc. It's a mess. It's not very fun. But, thankfully, once you're done with it... that's it. You don't need to worry about it again, and you'll probably that 90% of your apps (excluding Apple first party ones) are on the Play store as well.

Speaking of Apple first party apps, this is probably one of the biggest pain points from switching to Android, especially as Androids are treated like third-class citizens in the Apple ecosystem (soon to be second-class with the very, very slow of RCS messaging though, thankfully!). At first glance you're pretty much completely screwed out of these, but, thankfully, some third party alternatives do exist to fill in the gaps. My personal favorite is Bluebubbles, and while it does require a Mac to work, you can pretty easily buy an old Mac Mini for ~$50 on eBay, patch it with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, set it up and forget it. Once you have it set up, as long as your Mac is turned on and has an internet connection, the appp is honestly amazing! It brings a near-native iMessage experience to Android, Windows, and even Linux and I cannot recommend it enough. At first, I was running into some stability issues using it but ALL of these can be fixed by purchasing a domain name ($5-$10 usually, they are not very expensive) and using that instead of the constantly-changing "try cloudflare" thing. After I set a permanent domain, the app and server have worked near flawlessly.

There are also some other third party replacements as well, though not nearly as polished. I use this for iCloud photos and it works... I guess. Honestly it's pretty ugly, but it gets the job done if you just want to view your old photos. More of a stop gap then anything honestly... It kind of sucks. Theres also a calendar sync made by the same app dev though, which is actually pretty nice. Other options for first party replacements... Facetime? None that I know of. Apparently, you CAN Facetime with Androids... but there's a catch. They have to send you some sort of link where you can then join on a browser, which is obviously incredibly inconveinent for the apple user and extremely annoying for the Android user as they have no way of actually initiating a call.

A very weird, but interesting, issue to me is that seemingly a lot of Google apps... are actually better on iOS then they are on Android, which is absolutely crazy to me. Waze, for instance, in Apple Carplay gives you full GPS navigation on the car screen but lets you see a list of directions of upcoming turns on the phone screen, as well as the ability to type on there as well if necessary. It's a very nice experience. However, on Android Auto, not only do you not get the list of directions on the phone screen, but you just cant use it at all? Which is especially baffling to me because in Google Maps you do have the list of directions on Android Auto... Additionally, G-mail was not giving me notifications at all for some reason (even with them turned on), which is an issue I never had on iOS. I saw some reddit comment saying that android apps were about 90% as polished as iOS apps on average, and I think I definitely agree with that statement.

Overall though, actually setting everything up, I would definitely have to say the transition to Android has been rather painless and, if anything, has helped me enjoy and appreciate my phone a whole lot more. I actually like iOS, believe it or not, and was perfectly content with iPhones for the most part in recent years... but I also used to jailbreak iPhones a lot as a teenager, and I really loved that aspect of being able to do whatever the fuck I wanted with my phone. I can do all of that out of the box on Android, no root access required (or at least the things I want to do, anyways!) and I really enjoy that freedom. iOS is a very polished (for the most part...) walled garden but it definitely feels like I'm using training wheels every time I use it, even with gradual loosening of restrictions mostly thanks to EU crackdowns. I just wanted a phone that I wouldnt have to worry about what I couldn't do on it, and this one fits my needs spectacularly. Honestly most of the time I use my phone now, it doesn't feel like I'm using an "Android", it just feels like I'm using my phone, and I can finally do what I want with it.