From Android to iOS: Thoughts and Observations

Posted by Victim on February 3, 2012 08:46 pm 12

I decided to write this post to share my thoughts on iOS coming from purely an Android background. I've seen many posts on the interwebs about users switching from iOS to Android and their experience, so I thought I would share this same experience, only reversed.

I've been a long time user of Android devices ever since the G1 debuted on T-Mobile. Since the G1, I've owned 5 other Android devices and have used many custom skins (SenseUI, TouchWiz, MotoBLUR, etc.) as well as the stock experience. The latest Android device I had was the Galaxy Nexus for Verizon.

After having the Galaxy Nexus for a couple of weeks, I decided to try out something new, something fresh (at least to me). I decided on the iPhone 4S (Black 32 GB) for Verizon which was the same price point as the Galaxy Nexus - $299 on contract. I've never used an iOS device extensively before my purchase (the longest was probably 5 minutes at one time).

Here are some of my thoughts and impressions of the software and hardware. Bear in mind, some things might be nitpicking, but they are things with which I took notice or had issues.

Hardware

The iPhone 4S hardware is very nice. It feels much better in my hand than any Android phone I've either owned or played with. When you pick up the iPhone, it feels like a beastly machine. The only Android manufacturer I've seen first-hand who can come close to build quality is HTC (bear in mind, I haven't tried out every phone in the Android ecosystem, but I've tinkered with a lot).

There are absolutely no "creaking" or loose parts of the build quality unlike many other devices I've owned which were made of plastic. For some people, this might not be a big deal, but for me it has started to become a deal breaker. I got tired of the subpar quality from Motorola and Samsung in particular. It was hard for me to grasp how much lower the build quality was until I actually held and owned the 4S. I'm not at all saying these other phones were crap; they just didn't feel as high quality.

The retina display (I don't care for the name) is extremely nice. I had seen the display prior to owning the device, and having such a high pixel density on an LCD is gorgeous. It definitely looked better to me than the Galaxy Nexus' 720p display; however, the Nexus is PenTile, so I know the sub-pixeling is a little different. But just from my experience using the device and watching video playback on Netflix put me in love with the screen. My only gripe about it would be the small 3.5" size compared to the over 4"+ devices I'm used to using.

As for the speaker quality, it was a very clear and loud speaker, which I can't say the same for my Android counterparts. For the most part, whenever I felt the need for a louder speaker on Android I would need to root the device to increase the volume past its "regulatory" limits.

One hardware element I miss from Android devices is the notification LED. It was nice to look at my phone from a glance to see if I had any new notifications rather than having to turn it back on to find out. It was convenient and useful, particularly when you could customize it to have different colors for different notifications.

Accessories

Although this isn't a big deal, I was a little disappointed that Apple uses a non-industry standard plug with their 30-pin connector. However, there are hundreds of millions of people who are plugged into the iOS ecosystem, so is that technically a standard in itself? Anyway...it just stinks having to buy a bunch of Apple 30-pin cables when I already have a bunch of micro-USB cables.

As for the accessories (notably cases and the like) there are literally thousands and thousands of different options for cases and different accessories for the iPhone. I was overwhelmed by the number of choices, and I never felt like I had to settle for a less than optimal case for my needs. I can't say the same for my Android counterparts.

Software

The biggest change between Android and iOS is obviously the software, so this was a big change for me. I would consider myself a pretty tech-savvy person so the learning curve on iOS was a piece of cake. I could see how anyone could pick up the device and learn the system fairly easily.

Touch Interaction

The touch screen technology on the 4S was very good. Apple did a great job with their touch screens and multi-touch throughout the device. One of the most exciting things for me was the responsiveness and speed of the UI interactions. I have so long awaited GPU acceleration on Android and I did get to experience it on the Galaxy Nexus, but I still encountered stutters or skipped frames on ICS. Not so with iOS. There has only been one place in iOS where it happened, and that's when you swipe to Spotlight (and it is rare when it happens). I love the fluidity of iOS, and I don't feel the need to root to make my phone faster like I did with many of my Android devices. That had always been the reason I rooted on Android: to run a custom rom like CyanogenMod to increase the speed and responsiveness of my device.

The Keyboard

The most important aspect on a smartphone to me was the virtual keyboard. I have long been plagued by the bad keyboards on Android. I would often find myself typing too quick for the keyboard which honestly wasn't very quick. If I went too fast, I found that certain devices couldn't keep up on the haptic feedback, or characters were sluggish at showing up on the screen. This absolutely drove me crazy, particularly because this is the most used function of the phone.

ICS did manage to help with many of these problems on the stock keyboard (although I suspect a lot of it also had to do with the monstrous 4.65" screen). On older Android platforms I always used the Smart Keyboard Pro app as my main keyboard since it could always keep up with my speed. Prior to owning the 4S, I used the hell out of the keyboard on display models and friends devices (which were the 3GS and 4, not 4S) because I knew this was a make or break. I'm a pretty big guy (6' 4") so my hands are pretty large and I wasn't too sure about a 3.5" touchscreen...I mean...my thumbnail itself covers about 6 keys on the iPhone keyboard...Suffice it to say, the keyboard has worked extremely well on the phone even at its small size. I was very impressed with the performance of this keyboard. It wasn't prone to avoiding mistakes, but I made less mistakes and it felt more responsive than the Android variety.

The Home Screen

This was an adjustment coming from Android. The iOS spring board (which I will refer to as home screen) is missing widgets, something I used every day on Android. Admittedly, on Android my 3 most frequently used widgets were Beautiful Widgets (for my time and weather), FeedR (although dated, displayed RSS feeds on a widget), and Facebook. These widgets weren't too difficult to let go of; instead, I just open up an app now for Facebook and my RSS feeds (I use the Pulse app which is excellent - also available on Android), and the weather is now always in my notification bar when I pull it down.

The grid of icons on iOS is pretty dull to most people, but I think for my purposes it's fine. Perhaps I won't have the same sentiment after a few months, but for now it's fine. I love the fact that a lot of my apps will display little number indicators on the app's icon letting me know my unread email/text message/IM counts. I know this was possible via third party apps in Android, but I never went through the hassle and I never thought it would be more helpful than it is.

The folders on iOS are great and function the same as on ICS (I'm sure Google took the concept of dragging one icon onto another like iOS). One minor issue I found was that the Newsstand app can't be put into a folder...really... I know there is a hack-around solution but the functionality to do it outright should still be there.

App Store

After coming from the semi-new Android Market, I felt that the Apple App Store looked dated. Some things confused me inside the store. For instance, if you went into a category of apps, and tap on the "Top Paid" or "Top Free," many of the choices presented near the top looked to have very few ratings or even very poor ratings...it seemed odd how these were placed.

And what happened to the 500,000 apps they advertise? Whenever I try to go through categories I'm either maxxed out at scrolling at 100 or 300 apps in the list...am I missing something here?

Also, whenever you tap on the Install option for an app you wanted, it takes you back to the home screen which I found jarring...I really wish it would download in the background and perhaps display a download progress in the notification center like Android. My main gripe with this is when it throws me back to the home screen, I find that if I go back into the App Store, it remembers my category correctly but it doesn't remember my scroll position so I have to go through a huge list of apps to get back to where I was looking...it's incredibly frustrating. I've noticed this behavior happens in other apps too which is disappointing for an end user.

Multi-tasking

On Android, I knew multi-tasking very well from developing apps, so I knew how the system would background and foreground apps. On iOS, I have no clue how it works because I haven't researched it (haven't started developing yet!), and I have yet to see any issue with it from an end user perspective.

A knock against iOS though is the way the end user can interact with the running or backgrounded apps via the "task manager" or whatever the term is used on iOS. In ICS on the Galaxy Nexus you just tap the recent or running applications button at the bottom of the screen and it always takes you to the list of running apps. On iOS you double click the home button. To get rid of apps on ICS you just swipe them away in a WebOS card fashion (just horizontally instead of vertically). In iOS, this task is a little annoying as you have to long press on an app in the tray, and then tap the little negative sign to kill it...I think this should be easier to accomplish. I'm hoping that Apple will steal the cards from WebOS as well, although I'm not sure how Matias Duarte would feel about it...but hey, WebOS is open source, right Enyo?

Battery Life

The battery life on the device was very important to me. I was leery about buying the 4S at first because of all of the negative reviews it has received on the battery life. As for my experience, the battery has been great, particularly in standby. I was blown away by the amount of time it can last in standby. On Android, at most with very minimal use, I could squeeze a day and a half depending on the device and signal conditions. With iOS I would leave my phone untouched (with Wifi/3G/GPS enabled) and off the charger overnight to find it only 2-5% lower 8 hours later. That's something I would never find on my Android device unless I was in Airplane Mode.

Settings

The settings for individual apps in iOS sucks. I really wish this were more like its Android competitor. In iOS I find that if I want to change a setting inside an app it is a royal pain to have to go back to the home screen, open up the Settings app, scroll down to the app I want to change, then change it...and then go back to the app. Way too many steps. I hope this will be changed in the future to behave like Android, where each app is responsible for displaying its own settings within the app itself. I would even be satisfied with something like a "settings" button within the app which took the user into that app's options inside the Settings app.

Apps

I haven't had that much time to really appreciate the apps available on iOS although I'm getting more and more all the time to try out.

One particular app I thought would be worth mentioning is the Google Maps app. One of the main things I miss from the app on iOS is the navigation capabilities. I realize Google is more than likely purposely withholding this function from its competing platforms, but I surely miss that in iOS. I've found that there are free alternatives in the App Store, but I can't say one way or the other (yet) if they are equally as efficient.

Safari in iOS works surprisingly well. I honestly wasn't expecting it to be as quick as it was (I'm not sure why...maybe it's my Google bias coming out), but it handled things very well. As for the lack of Adobe Flash, it didn't bother me any because even on Android I almost never used it. One thing I did notice on iOS which I like was the fact that the double tap to zoom gesture seemed to work a bit better than on Android. On iOS it zoomed right to where I wanted. On Android sometimes it misses and I have to scroll a little bit left or right once it zoomed in. As for speed differences between the two, I can't notice it nor could I really test it without having a competing device side-by-side.

The mail client in iOS I found to work pretty well. I knew that moving to iOS the Google integration would not be as good as on Android. So far, it seems to be working fine for my purposes (I use 3 different Gmail accounts which are all set to push). Sometimes it can take a while for a message to arrive, and sometimes it's instantly (bear in mind the device is in the same spot when I tested this). If it really becomes a problem, I can always set my email to pull every 15 or so minutes...but we'll see.

The camera app in iOS reminded me a little of Android (at least ICS). It's very simple to use and it just works. I'm by no means a camera expert or even a camera enthusiast. The pictures came out well for me in Android, and the same can be said for iOS. I know some people say one camera is better than the other, but this really wasn't a selling point for me. That sort of thing just isn't my cup of tea. I will say though that it was much quicker launching the camera app from the lock screen on iOS than it is on ICS in Android. When I had my Galaxy Nexus, for whatever reason it would always load the home screen first and then launch the camera app...very strange.

Notifications

If iOS did not change the way they handled notifications, I never would have bought the phone. One thing that always kept me away from the iPhone was the way it had obtrusive notifications which interrupted the device until you acknowledged them. I think owning an Android device first really made Apple's methodology look bad when they did this. Thankfully, you now have the option to display Banner style notifications at the top of the screen which disappear after a few seconds.

The notification center itself is an obvious steal from Android, but how else would one accomplish this? I appreciate the fact that in iOS you can always pull down the notification center, even inside full screen apps (something I couldn't do in Android). I found that the lack of a "clear all" button was annoying. Also, I wish that if you cleared a specific notification, it would update that apps particular icon indicator count (i.e. if you received an email, but you dismiss it in the notification center, change the number of the "unread" count which is overlaid on that app's icon on the home screen). Additionally, I love the fact that you can put widgets in the notification center, that's very cool and something I hope more apps take advantage of.

Siri

The Siri functionality in the 4S was honestly not something that sold me on the idea of buying the device, although many people buy the phone specifically to use this which is fine. I found that Siri was actually more intelligent that I expected and seemed to recognize what I was talking about if I asked questions in indirect ways, or even casually asked things like I would in normal conversation. There were times though where Siri wouldn't quite understand what I was asking and she would try her best at figuring it out to no avail. Still though, I think that the more people use the service, the better it will get. I find myself using it quite a bit now that I have the phone since it is incredibly easy to use. I guess we'll see if that novelty wears off over time.

As for my Android counterpart, I almost never used the speech functionality in Android. Perhaps the only time I used speech was through speech-to-text when I couldn't type or was too lazy to type.

Final Thoughts

For the immediate future, I will be sticking to iOS (I'm locked into a contract now anyway). If things really start bugging me I always have my old Android phone to go back to but I doubt it comes to that. I honestly couldn't say which platform (Android or iOS) is better than the other. I think they both have their own selling points, and they both are successful at what they do.

For me the switch was pretty seamless, but I do find myself missing the Android UI and system interactions. If anything, I'm glad to have a phone I don't feel I need to root to make the user experience better (although I will probably jailbreak at some point just to try it out). The iPhone could use improvements to the App Store and the way they handle app settings, but this isn't something that would prevent me from using the platform.

The keyboard interactions are a step up from Android in my experience, even at the staggeringly small 3.5" screen. The display is great and I will learn more software quirks and things about the OS over time. This most definitely is not the end of the road as far as my Android device owning days are concerned. I love both platforms for their innovations and uniqueness, and I will re-evaluate my choice of device when the time comes...and it might not be either I choose (I'm looking at you WP7).

Anyways...thanks for reading my ramblings. If you have any questions just let me know...there is so much I didn't talk about, but I hit most of my main points.