u/Interpol_Qotsa

New album "You're Gonna Need A Little Music" just dropped, 11 songs. What's your first impression of the album?

I'm writing this text for two things: share my experience/somewhat disappointment and search for tips on how to improve it.

I've been an android user since I had my first smartphone. Despite working in tech nowadays, I never historically had great phones, my only requirements were that they had to be cheap and have decent batteries. From huawei whatever phones, to an Asus Zenfone Zoom 3, moving then to a Xiaomi 9T Pro and finally landing on a Samsung S23+. That was my first flagship smartphone and it took me a bit to adapt to it but I learned to really love it. Samsung's OneUI allowed for proper customization (and by that I mean mostly gestures and automations) and I finally had a phone that "just worked", no bugs, no issues, just a not that lasting battery but I learned to live with it. I had a smartphone, smartwatch and earbuds from Samsung. The only thing that was not amazing was the watch (Galaxy Watch 6), it was slow and unreliable, failed to get the location sometimes etc. Sooo, since I had a Macbook Pro M1 and an iPad, I decided to try the iPhone and the Apple watch. 

The first decision was the model and phone size (and where I think I made my first mistake). My S23+ was 6.6" while the iphone 17 is 6.3" and the iphone 17 pro max is 6.9". I thought 'sometimes my S23+ seems too heavy and 6.6 is the biggest phone I had, 6.3 should be fine' so I went for the 17. Plus, since I don't care about the cameras and the iphone 17 screen checked the 120Hz box, I went for the iphone 17. What I didn't consider/know is that apple reserves much more space on top for the dynamic island (and on the bottom, there's a much bigger padding). So the screen actually feels much smaller.

Anyway, here's the summary of my experience. The good:

1. The phone is just great, as a product. Amazing screen, better than my previous Samsung, and the phone is smooth, reliable, very responsive. Basically works really well;
2. I'm able to do most basic things such as organize apps by folder, put my most used apps on the main screen (but leave some empty parts), etc. App library is awesome, spotlight search works really well;
3. The main cameras are fine, or of course less zoom than my previous phone because I didn't go for the pro, but the outcome photos are similar. The front camera is amazing, I've never seen anything like it
4. All apps I used on my previous phone exist on ios, I'm able to do essentially exactly what I did before
5. The sync between the iphone and the macbook is awesome. Sharing notes automatically for example is great, no more sending stuff to myself through whatsapp lol
6. The health app and workout app are awesome and I really enjoy doing the rings. I run so there's a lot of medals and good analytics there. 
7. The apple watch is amazing. Super reliable, beautiful screen, offers me all the functionality I need and much more. 
8. The find my is awesome and I'm gonna for sure start buying airtags, this is something I want to explore further

The little things I just learned to accept:

1. After many years of having 6 icons on the bottom of the screen (with my 6 most used apps), having to move back to 4 max was a bit more annoying than expected
2. The notifications are far more confusing in general. I also always joined notifications and control center in one view, on android, can't do that here so need to adapt to the second gesture (already used to, but if I ever get the option, I'll join them again)
3. Some gestures are deeply missed, the main one is swiping down in the middle of the screen to get to the notifications/command center. This with the back gesture (that on android I could do on the right side) allowed me to use the phone always with one hand except when writing. I could do everything with my right hand. Now, despite having a smaller phone, I need to use both hands in most scenarios.

The not so good:

1. The screen size is really too small for what I'm used to. Never thought it would be this important, this one is on me to switch to the Pro Max.
2. The performance of the iphone is impeccable until I open the only game I play on the phone (Slay the Spire) and the game kind of stutters (it feels not smooth at all). Very disappointing for a 2025 flagship phone, but from what I searched, the game is just not optimized for ios. Bummer.
3. The keyboard is much worse. Not having the possibility of pressing some letters to write "!" or "." is the main difference (more than the numbers row) and the words suggestions are absolutely horrible for my language (portuguese). I thought "it's ok, I can just put the SwiftKey keyboard with all its customizations”. Unfortunately, the keyboard has far less customizations than it has on android (it makes no sense to me why that is...) and the keyboard is basically too big and ugly honestly. So I'm trying to just use apple's keyboard, get used to the differences and just ignore words suggestions, just write everything myself.
4. The lack of universal back action/gesture like we have on Android is something I don't think I'll ever fully adapt to. I'm just rooting for more and more apps to support it. For those who don't know, on Android, no matter what app you had opened, if you swiped to go back you would always go back to the previous screen until the point that if there's nothing to go back on that app, you would go to the system main screen. This made your experience much more simple, no matter what you're doing, what you have opened, that gesture always works. In iOS some apps support that, others don't, which means sometimes I do the gesture and it works, other times it doesn't. This leads to a bit of frustration. I see that now I tend to have my left hand near the screen just to press some back button very occasionally, which again annoys me since I would prefer to only use one hand.
5. Shortcuts don't work as well as samsung's routines or I might be doing something wrong on the setup. I added some shortcuts to, for example, enable screen rotation for some apps and disable it back when I close them (it's supposed to be locked otherwise). But sometimes just doing the gesture to open the command center is enough for the screen rotation to become locked and doesn't go back to unlock when I go back to the app. Other times I'm doing whatever and suddenly the screen rotates because the routine to lock it back didn't work as expected.

 

Again, overall a good experience, these are great products. I think my disappointment is that I always heard that one of the main reasons people paid so much for iphones, was the system, of how great and better ios was compared to android. This might've been very true until recent years, but currently I think android is really much more complete. I think iOS is amazing for people that have never had a smartphone before because it gives you something that is simple and works really well right out of the box. It's also far less confusing in terms of options, so it's probably much better for elderly people. But for others, it can be a tough experience, if you've tried other things before. On Android, the system adapts to you, on ios you have to adapt to the system. 

So, after all this, anyone else had these issues after the switch? What were your main strategies (other than give it time) to adapt better to the new system? 
And for any iphone/ios user, what other pluses I should get from my phone that I'm not getting right now? What are the things that are great that I'm not using yet?