As many of you here may know, I'm a big Android fan. I like it way more than iOS, mainly because on Android I can do stuff that iOS never allowed me to do (downloading torrents, youtube videos, playing emulators, theming, etc). But I got tired of having to adjust everything on my phone to get good battery life or performance. Sometimes you can install an app and you might get wakelocks which destroy your battery life, and then you get crazy searching for what app it is and other annoyances.
I've been wanting to try iOS again for a while now. Last thursday I saw a nice deal on a second hand shop I usually check to see nice deals on latest phones. There was a new 6S+ 64GB in like new condition for 735 euros, 148 euros cheaper than brand new here. I decided to buy it and try it to see if I could adjust. My previous phone was an S6. First few days I was happy.
Positives:
- Performance is excellent (way faster web page loading times and haven't seen any lag). The A9 is seriously an awesome chip.
- Battery life has been unbelievable!! I can get like 6 hours screen on time with brightness at 50%. It's difficult to measure screen on time on iOS, but the battery like is just the best I've ever seen. This was one of the main reasons to switch back to iOS.
- The screen is the best I've ever seen. I love loooooove IPS technology. Makes my S6 AMOLED panel look terrible next to it! The brightness level is almost double! And the colors are way nicer for me. This was another key point to make the switch. It's impossible for me to find such a good screen on Android. Almost no manufacturer uses IPS, except LG and Huawei, but their aren't this good.
- Build quality is also the best in the industry. I love the slight curve in the edges of the screen.
- TouchID is just awesome. Never misses. So so comfortable to use. On the S6 it could be a pain because it failed a lot, so I never had it enabled.
- Siri is way more useful than S Voice.
- I love the looks of iOS 9 overall. Very clean and pleasent to look at.
- I really like 3D Touch. It's a great new feature and very useful on iOS, like when you force touch on the phone app to dial one of your favorites. It's like widget functionality. Very cool and easy to use, but not so much the multitasking gesture from the side of the screen. It's a pain to do. Really, really terrible.
Problem is iOS does so so many things worst than Android, and I mean little things. Here's a brief list:
- Notifications are a mess here. Sometimes I get a notification from Gmail of a new email before the stock Mail app, because it still has push notifications (I have it set up to check every 15 minutes for new emails). It's redundant needing two separate email apps, and both work terrible, just terrible compared to the Gmail app in Android, where I can easily swipe to delete messages, whereas in iOS I need to swipe and select "move to trash" in the stock Mail app and in the Gmail app I have to select the email and the click the delete button. With whatsapp I get every single message in a sort of list view, instead of showing them in less space like Android does.
- I miss a lot the back button. It makes everything so much easier. Some apps allow to go back with a gesture, but others don't (like Keep), and you still need to reach to the top of the screen to click the back button. There's no consistency. It's annoying not knowing how to go back in every app.
- Most apps don't allow to swipe through tabs or menus, like on Android. Take the Tapatalk app or Facebook app. On iOS you have to click the tabs to move to them, but on Android you just swipe left or right to access them. Some apps on iOS allow this, but very very few.
- On Android, when I get a facebook messenger message or whatsapp message on the lockscreen or anywhere on the phone, the notification shows me the picture of that contact in said apps. On iOS it shows you the app icon. It's a small thing, but these small things add up and make everything worst.
- Multitasking seems improved, but not much. Google photos can upload photos in the background it seems, but it takes ageeeeeesssss. It even tells you to keep the app open to upload the photos faster. On Android I can forget about this. Every time I make a new photo it is automatically uploaded in the background, so when I open the app it's already uploaded. This may consume more battery, but it's more convenient.
- Third party keyboards are TERRIBLE on iOS. This might be the biggest reason for switching back. I've installed Swype (my favorite), Swiftkey, Go keyboard, etc. They just don't work well at all. Swype even freezed the other day and I had to restart the phone. Switching keyboards is a pain compared with Android (which you do through the notification panel). There are certain features that are not present compared to their Android counterparts. For example, none of them allow to use dictation. Just the apple stock keyboard. Also, deleting text is slower than on Android. Also, the way to move the cursor over the screen is terrible. On Android it's much easier and faster. Overall, having to type on iOS is a pain. I take 3 times more time to write the same amount of text on iOS than I normally do on Android, which is just wicked fast.
- Widgets in the notification center are just useless. I have over 100 apps installed and there's not one single widget useful there.
- Extensions are a big jump forward for iOS, but still there aren't many. I hoped to see much more.
- The vibration on the iPhone is really, really weak. Can't even feel it on my pocket. I tried making a vibration pattern that would keep the vibration on as long as possible, but still makes no effect. I never notice my iPhone vibrating on the table when sleeping or in my pocket, and I'm not using any case. The S6 vibration is like 4 times stronger.
- More small things. Whatsapp on iOS doesn't allow you to send messages if it's not connected to wifi or 3G/4G. Sometimes I'm out of cellular coverage but I send the messages anyway on Android and when the phone get's coverage again the messages send themselves automatically. Also, you can't hear whatsapp audio messages on the background like on Android. If you hit play on the audio message and leave the app to do something else while your listening it will stop. On Android I can play the audio message and keep doing other stuff, and then go back and answer it with another audio message.
- Some apps look weird on the 6S+. My college app, for example, which I use to check classes and more, looks really weird. It's not optimized, clearly, but on Android it looks great on every phone and tablet I've used.
- On Twitter you can't download an image from inside the app. On Android you can.
- Facebook messenger doesn't have the heads up feature on iOS. At first I hated it when it was released, but it's great because that way I don't forget about it.
- I missed a lot looking up the screen and seeing if I had any new notification shown with the icon, like on Android. It allowed me to know always if there was something new.
- There's no control panel toggle for enabling 3G/4G. There's also no option to select 2G, just 3G or 2G/3G/4G automatically like on Android. Where I live, I need to select 2G to have good enough coverage to receive calls.
There are other small annoyances I've experienced this week with the 6S+. I want to keep the phone, because the screen, battery and performance are awesome, but using the phone is more annoying than my S6, where I could do everything 3 times faster, like answering a message with the better swype keyboard and going back with the back button in less than 10 seconds, whereas on iOS I take a lot more time because Swype doesn't work as good and there's no easily accesible back button which works across all apps and across all the system.
I'm waiting to sell the iPhone and will go back for now to the S6. Next phone might be the S7, M10 or next Nexus. All I need is more battery life and an IPS screen and I would be happy. Android has some very, very cool features. The S6, for example, has the KICK football app preinstalled which I love. It brings up a widget whenever a football match is about to start of your favorite teams, but is hided on the side of the screen like the edge software of the S7 edge, so it doesn't bother you. And whenever a goal is scored a crowd screaming sound sounds, making it easily recognizable. Vibration is also stronger and as a phone it works better for me in almost all aspects. Shame the fingerprint reader doesn't work as good and battery life is terrible. Everything else is almost perfect. I like the screen, but I prefer IPS and more brightness.
Also, the 6S+ is too big. It's my second phablet (after the note 4), and it's just too much. I wanted the better battery life and the 1080P screen over the 6S, which was too small with a 4.7 screen. 5.5 screen is too big also to swype comfortably with the swype keyboard.
Well, this has been my experienced after one week with the 6S+. I guess I won't be coming back to iOS in a while again. My previous iPhone was the 4. There are many, many little things iOS needs to work to catch up to Android.
