I was an early iPhone adopter. At the time, I was designing apps for a nascent mobile market, so living in Apple’s world felt essential. I needed to understand its patterns, interactions, and ecosystem firsthand. And those golden years of iOS design were pretty magical. For a while.
As Apple’s design lost some of its luster, I found myself relying more and more on Google for my daily life: gmail, maps, photos, calendar, drive, docs, and so on. So I did what any practical young fella would do: I switched to a Google Pixel.
The Pixel was great. It was full of thoughtful design choices, everything worked naturally across Google’s ecosystem, and the camera was excellent. I was perfectly happy with it.
But now I’m a jaded old fella with two teenage daughters firmly embedded in the Apple ecosystem. I couldn’t track their locations from my Pixel. I couldn’t FaceTime them. I couldn’t send them apple cash on demand. I was ridiculed for having GREEN text bubbles.
So I switched back to an iPhone.
I’m not excited about it. There are already so many bonkers design choices making me wistful for the days when Apple set the standard for this stuff.
A short list of early gripes:
- The keyboard sucks. Still trying to figure out my way around that.
- No universal ‘back’ interaction. On android, you can always swipe to go back. Now sometimes the swipe will take me back. Sometimes I have to swipe down. Sometimes I’m hunting for a little x. Sometimes there’s just nothing?
- The intentional lack of support for non-official Apple apps is frustrating. I CAN use Google calendar as my default, but I CAN’T set up customized notifications for events?
- The inability to disable the little whoosh sound when I send a text? This is the one that might send me over the edge. I want to maintain the new text notification sound but it seems those two sounds are locked in the same setting.
But hey, at least my text conversations are finally blue!