A Pixel's user perspective on the iPhone 17 Pro
I don't know if this is allowed but here it goes.
Context: I'm an Android developer at a company with multiple hundreds of millions of users. The company gave me a phone and I chose the iPhone 17 Pro as I wouldn't buy it myself and thought it was a good opportunity to have the other platform in a physical device.
Observations after two weeks:
iPhone pros:
The hardware feels incredible. The power button on my Pixel 9 Pro is wobbly and softer now, the iPhone's is rock solid.
The 5G modem on the iPhone is a dream. My Pixel probably has a faulty one because 5G usage makes it hot, so I keep it on LTE.
The speaker on the iPhone has a better tone to it but the Pixel is louder and has a better stereo effect for me.
The animations of the UI feel veey nice, albeit a bit much.
I adore the quick search option and how it actually offers to search in your browser instead of Google only.
Swiping to the right to have a drawer of widgets is genuinely useful and paired with the iPhone widgets, a much better widget experience than Android.
iPhone video is unbeatable. Switching lenses is smooth and you can't really tell that it's happening. I don't know if that's the portrait mode kicking in but I found the subject separation better for portraits and the colors to be less HDR-y.
The phone app. Just wow, we need this for pixel. Every app has to provide a phone UI if they want to provide calling function on Android but on the iPhone, it's one app for all.
The planet wallpapers and how they switch from Locked to unlocked state. Also, lock screen customization is top-notch.
Password managers are more proactively showing up when I log in, which is amazing. On Android, it sometimes takes a little time.
Thinner bezels, although at this point we're splitting hair.
iPhone cons.
Notifications: The notification system is garbage. I only have Whatsapp and work apps on it to intentionally avoid distractions on my work phone but it's just so incredibly bad. Not easy to see things at a glance, not easy to spread individual notifications, no notification summaries, quick actions are clunky and the notification panel is annoying to deal with.
Why on earth do I have to swipe down the entire way (I can't just flick) and have to do it from the top left corner only to see my notifications? Why do I then have to swipe up from the very bottom?!!!
This is even worse when notifications can't just ring without waking your screen up. Either I have to disable lock screen notifications or I have to deal with the screen waking up on every single one.
Keyboard: You can't resize it!!!! WHY?!!!!! The keyboards available are also hot garbage compared to Android alternatives. Even GBoard is bad.
Why does the layout differ so much, why do we not have the comma next to the space bar, why do we have to dig two levels deep for quotes, why do we have to settle for such a subpar experience on a phone that dominates major markets like the USA and UK???
Finally, dismissing the keyboard is not as fluid as it is on Android, where we can either do it by the back button or the separate button we have.
No universal back button: This is absolutely deranged. I have to mostly use the phone with two hands or do hand gymnastics because of how annoying it is to sometimes be able to swipe to go back and sometimes not.
The iPhone asks me to verify my age?!
Camera: Pixel has Pro mode and you can actually control most important things about it. The iPhone camera doesn't allow that, so it tries night sight on most night photography and you end up with a blurry mess if the image includes anything moving.
I guess this one is a Pixel con but I can't use my AirPods Pro with the iPhone and Find My without also triggering Android to tell me I have a tracker following me.
And the last thing that comes to mind is of course being unable to use modified APKs or open source stuff because of no side loading support (at least where I live).
All in all, I guess a lot of these are complaints coming from the fact that I have been using Android since 2010 and have developed and modified a lot around it. If it was my only device, I wouldn't know what I was missing.
For now, it serves as a perfect minimalist phone, since I can just have work apps and WhatsApp and avoid distractions during work time.
Notice how I didn't mention anything about performance or battery. I actually think the Pixel is a smoother device overall.
Edit: I forgot to add. The iPhone vibration motor is better for calls and notifications but the haptics while using the phone, especially typing, feel better on the Pixel.