Termux/X11, sideloading, native Godot, file management, devic recycleability/reuseability, THE FUCKING BACK BUTTON, and crazy enough sometimes privacy even against apple’s marketing stance (this is a bit more controversial, but in a high privacy situation things like universal android debloater just can’t exist on apple - and having Icloud ‘helpfully’ store your encryption keys for you has felt as private as keeping it in my garage server)

But hey for some people the fisher-price option is the best option

I wouldn’t buy a car that could only drive on roads approved by the maker, so same goes for phone.

A central nervous system

Notification light. Repairability (I can practically op this thing open like the hood of a car). Far cheaper options. Headphone jack. Side loading. Fingerprint sensor. Dedicated shutter and focus button. Non proprietary charger that isn’t terrible. Emulators. Firefox plus adblocker. Customisability (least important for me honestly).

I am just happy that I have options. I can do whatever I want with this hardware. I own this device and have complete freedom. I work in repair and I am thoroughly aware of apple’s anti-consumer practices and it disgusts me. I could never buy a device from apple out of principle.

It sickens me when I have to tell customers “your totally repairable device is fucked because apple makes it arbitrarily impossible to repair.”. It makes me even sadder when they just buy another apple device, rewarding them for their behaviour.

• Firefox with ublock and a normal engine

• Newpipe for downloading stuff off YT

• OSMand for offline navigation

• f-droid for foss software

• Rethink to carefully ban everything that doesn’t need internet from connecting

• a phone with a nice amoled screen and all-day quickcharging battery that costs 180€ (motorola g52)

• not one ad anywhere

a better question is, why would I want anything else? An iphone seems like a sharp downgrade.

Battery life. Forced ecosystem. Lack of options. Apple watches suck. I love my s pen. I can watch YouTube for free with no ads. The refusal to integrate the messaging system compatibility. How they refused to move to usb-c until they were literally forced to by Europe. Spearheading the removal of audio Jack’s and micro USB slots.

I dislike Apple as a company. I’m still miffed that Bill Gates bailed Apple out and saved them from bankruptcy in the 1990’s. All he asked was that they would be more charitable if they got back on their feet. They obviously did that, but then proceeded to continue being one of the least charitable companies in the fortune 100.

Then there was the crap with forcing an update to underclock their iPhones in order to hide hardware issues causing reboots from their still under warranty batteries failing to provide enough voltage to supply the apu. Or the time when they told customers they were holding their phones wrong when they designed the antennas in a way that would kill their reception if part of your hand was on the side of the phone.

Apple and I have very different notions of what it means to own something.

Sideloading apps

Paying x4 times the price for a device

Apple’s walled garden is anti-consumer, anti-developer, and pretty much anti-everyone-but-apple.

It just doesn’t make sense to me to use or develop for Apple under those conditions.

The phones being worse than the ones I prefer to use.

Like, they’re objectively less functional devices. I can’t pretend the features drops for every new model/OS aren’t just things android has has for years.

I’ve been forced to use iOS for my work phone and it is absolute dog shit… it feels like Android from 10+ years ago. The lack of customization and dumbass work flows drive me crazy every day.

So many screens in different apps. make you reach way to one corner or the other to go back a screen. In Android, back is one motion that can be done anywhere from any edge. And that behaves consistently across every app. In iOS some apps behave differently, even the same app with a different screen will handle the same gesture differently. It’s an absolute shit show.

Want to open my app list, I just swipe up from anywhere on my screen. Want my notifications, swipe down from anywhere on my screen. In iOS I have to perfectly hit the top edge and slowly drag it down.

There are plenty of other reasons.

Access to the filesystem. Wtf! Lmao. I download a PDF and can’t just open it? I have to basically share it with the app, it’s so dumb.

Split screening apps.

Complete lack of customization. The launcher is ass.

Horrible keyboard and the one I like, SwiftKey is completely neutered and lacks the customization of Android. And some apps will use the apple keyboard even though I changed it to use Swiftkey. Again, no consistency.

Messages will pop a notification then when I open the messenger app they are not there. I can read the message in the notification area, but there is a period of time that it doesn’t display in the actual app. Lmao. Dog shit.

Many, many other things.

Apps and services dying to backgrounding like the hotspot for one will just stop working after a certain amount of time.

Want to know how I change my brightness in Android? I just slide across the status bar in any app on any screen.

When I want to turn my flashlight on, all I do is hold my power button down for 3 seconds. Don’t have to turn my screen on and click anything.

So many things. The settings in iOS are also a joke and the way they are organized, I just hate everything about it. It feels like I’m running Android from 2010 with less customization.

Basically iOS is complete ass.

Apple. I want nothing to do with a closed ecosystem and I loathe how central AppleID is to absolutely everything.

I have fdroid and a few custom apks that wouldn’t be available on their store, so those would be hooped as well.

iOS is trash. Simple as that, my parents have iPhones and I’m like ‘oh you can just do X’, then I go to look, get lost in menus, then find out the basic feature doesnt even exist. I can’t sideload apps, I can’t customise my UI, it’s just incredibly limiting. iPhones are for basics, calls, texts, web browsing. If you wanna do anything else you are better off with an Android.

• Actually being the owner of my phone. Apple decides everything for their users and allows them little freedom. I want to be able to put random apps on my phone, including maybe even my own.

• Price. Shit’s expensive. I now got a Pixel 8 for less than 500 euro’s. Before that I had phones around the 300 euro price range.

• Their ecosystem. They try to lure you into an everything Apple ecosystem. Stuff like iMessage is horrible for consumers. With an Android phone I have choice of apps, smart watch, earbuds, etc. Apple will always try to force you into buying their fancy but expensive things.

• No benefit, there’s plenty of cool Android phones.

Etc etc.

Hahaha great question. It’s funny how I thought it was a silly question when asked the other way. In a way, my response is the same for both phones: ‘The main thing stopping me is that I am not considering switching’.

That said, I carried both for years, so I can probably provide some insight. I switched from Windows Mobile to iOS in 2008. I had one phone until 2012. My “main” phone was iOS from 2008-2017. The biggest factor was (and still is somewhat) who had the best camera. Pixel 1 had a better camera, so I switched to Android as my main in 2017. These days, both have great cameras and it wouldn’t be a reason to switch.

My current job doesn’t need me to have two phones, but I still carry an iPad mini, so I remain in both ecosystems.

I prefer Android on my phone for lots of little reasons, but they all basically boil down to the same thing: Android lets me do what I want with my phone.

It’s difficult to explain if you haven’t been an Android user. If you don’t know what a launcher is, it’s the interface between you and your apps. I’ve never much liked Google’s launcher. I don’t like Google’s keyboard, so I use my own. I like to change the default number of rows/columns of my app icons. I like switching between two bottom-row docks. Then there’s stuff like default apps, and way better widgets, of course. Plus I can arrange my apps how I like.

Now - if you are on iOS and have never had this stuff, you won’t miss it. If you want your phone to “just work” and never think about personalizing it, you have no reason to even value the personalisation that Android offers. But, if you’ve gotten used to your personal phone layout, being forced into the Apple way is restrictive.