Played around with the Ultra for a few hours. It's back in the box ready to return unfortunately. The experiment lasted way shorter than I anticipated. I'm glad I gave it a go.
Hardware is GREAT and I was surprised how much the S Pen was useful for some tasks like cropping and selecting text. The screen is amazing, I'm going to miss the anti glare stuff the most. I can't speak for long term durability but anyone saying Android phones can't match Apple's build quality haven't picked up an S24 Ultra. The only thing that was subpar was the fingerprint scanner, I had to add the same thumb three times to get a seamless experience.
I just can't get on with Android. Don't get me wrong I can see why people like it, I'm not a hater, there's so many adjustments and tweaks that are desperately missing from iOS. Being able to go back by swiping from the right side of the screen is really nice but the compromise is you can't swipe right to go forward in whatever app you're using (Chrome for example).
It's the overall polish and design language that's inconsistent for me vs. iOS. Font sizes are all over the place. In Twitter the font is massive, in Chrome the font is medium size, and in other apps the font is too small. I played around with the screen zoom and font size settings on the device but couldn't get everything to look consistent. I agree with MKBHD, even Google's own apps look better on iPhone. The system integration with my password manager didn't work so great either, I have to jump between the password manager app and the app I want to fill in with my credentials because not every app recognized the password manager for some reason. I didn't like the multitasking menu, it didn't feel smooth. Some of the animations felt very unnatural and disjointed. Overall so many apps felt like they were using totally different design and animation principles.
My conclusion is that Android has a lot of things I like but most of the prime advantages over iOS (specifically multi app split screen usage which is what I really had high hopes for) weren't enough to sway me. There was nothing on the S24 Ultra that could justify owning and using it over my iPhone. Now a folding phone where split screen apps make more sense might be a big enough feature boost over my iPhone...
You might think this is a sin but my takeaway is I want the S24 Ultra hardware with iOS as the software 🤷♂️
I might wait to see what the Pixel 9 Pro is like and try again with Google's stock Android. That or wait for the next generation of foldables. I really want a foldable iPhone but that's years away (or potentially never coming)
