How did you manage to stick with iOS? I am serious! I come from many years of experience on Windows Phone. If you ask me, if the third-party app issue wasn’t there, is by far the best OS for 95% of consumers. That’s a whole different discussion though and irrelevant for now.

So I decided to leave WP and join Android. I temporarily got a used Moto G a month ago, and was waiting for new device releases. My requirements? Great camera, reasonable size, timely updates. The topic of Android hardware has been discussed many times. Basically out of frustration with existing Android devices, I got the iPhone 6. The decision was based solely on the hardware. I never worried about the software since a significant chunk of people seems to consider iOS as the best mobile OS, so I thought that was a given (haven’t really used it myself since 2008).

My experience has been… frustrating to say the least! I’ve had it for 4 days, and every single day I’ve thought about returning it, only to convince myself "it’s fine, you can work around this", until the next day comes that find something more annoying. Here’s my compilation:

• No trial updates for already expensive apps. I don’t mind paying for apps. I’m not going to pay though for something I can’t use first and see if it works for me!
• Terrible notifications. Just noting that there is no indicator anywhere in the status bar, that there is stuff in the notification drawer, is enough to show how bad it is.
• Apps like Skype just spam you with notifications, whereas on Android you get only a notification for the most recent text of a conversation. I’m guessing revoking notifications is something iOS doesn’t do.
• Notifications support actions, but not enough apps seem to enable them (which was surprising to me; I thought developers were quick to support all new features in OS). Same for Touch ID which although cool, very few apps use it. So I have to rely on copy/pasting passwords from my LastPass app which is annoying.
• And then the minor things:
  • No way to see battery percentage.
  • You have to pull the notification drawer all the way down to see if there is something in it. Same if you are in an app, and you just want to view the time.
  • Start screen forces you to arrange stuff from top-left to bottom-right. Also you need to have an app on your start screen, period.
  • Why doesn’t anyone other than Microsoft put the address bar in the browser, at the bottom of the page? Seems such an obvious thing to do on at least phones!

So what am I missing? Where is the greatness in iOS? I don’t even think I’m asking for anything fancy, but maybe I am? And if returning the iPhone is the solution, then what do I get? Maybe I should just get a Moto X 2013 and stop caring about the camera! Not even the Z3/Z3C seem to manage that, so there is basically no hope in Android-land (unless I guess you go Samsung/TouchWiz).