I've always had Androids and heavily invested in the Google ecosystem, e.g., 200GB storage plan, YouTube Premium, have around 6000 songs/180 GB uploaded to YouTube music (fka Google Play Music), lots of personal files uploaded to Google Drive, multiple Google smart speakers around the house, Gmail user since it was first introduced and etc, etc, yada, yada. We are about as Google as could possibly be around our household.
I'm also a person who always used to root all their Androids and run custom roms, until the last maybe 4-5 years, they are so much faster now that it seems unnecessary, plus, it's harder to find a phone with a really long lasting development community. And the vendors are offering londer software support these days. I still run a custom launcher though.
I've also had multiple work iPhones, until very recently I've probably been carrying one along with my personal for at least 10 years. So I know my way around iOS pretty well, as well.
About maybe 7ish years ago, I thought, well I'm going to try to use an iPhone as my personal, because I have an Apple Watch that is hooked to my work phone. And all the Google apps are availalbe on iOS, why not? IT WAS A TOTAL DISASTER. There was a large gulf between the way I used my personal device and my work iPhone device, and when I tried to use Google everything on the iPhone, it made me crazy. It only lasted about two months and I was so fed up that I dumped it for another Android.
I'm thinking about maybe giving it another go, couple of reasons:
One, the place I am now working since August 2022 only issues iOS devices to management and I quit my management job at my prior place so I could come over here and be more technical again, so I have to use my personal phone with their MDM control software. I have tried to tell them to stick it in their ear but the reality is, I need access to work stuff on my phone when I am remote. Unfortunately, the work stuff that is now on my phone works SUPER AWFUL with Android. So clunky. Maybe it is just the phone that I have, a Samsung S21FE, but man, using the work apps works really bad on this phone. The worst part of it is the re-authentications. Literally if I tried to work on my phone for 2 or 3 hours, on Teams and Outlook, it would ask me to re-authenticate 20-30 times. And it seems like the certificate for the MDM is getting broken every few days. And then it complains about cutting off my access, and not pushing email, and so forth. There may be things the MDM monkeys at work are setting to break it this bad. Not sure. But it's a real problem when I am on call, if the MDM stops working and I don't get alerts, I will not wake up in the middle of the night to respond to urgent alerts.
Two, it seems that the Google integration is better on iOS than it ws a few years back, I usually kept one or two of my Google apps on my work phone like Google Voice and it seems like you can now use Google Voice as your primary dialer, which was not the case the last time I used an iPhone as my personal.
Three, I've spent a lot more time with iOS in the 7-8 years since I last tried it as my personal. I'm sure it would still drive me nuts to some degree, but if my work stuff was better, that would be a huge, huge win.
Wait we were talking about switching platforms? lol. It is easy if you save all your data in the cloud. It will usually pick up all your apps too. Learning the menus and so forth if you don't already know it, that's on you.
I'm also a person who always used to root all their Androids and run custom roms, until the last maybe 4-5 years, they are so much faster now that it seems unnecessary, plus, it's harder to find a phone with a really long lasting development community. And the vendors are offering londer software support these days. I still run a custom launcher though.
I've also had multiple work iPhones, until very recently I've probably been carrying one along with my personal for at least 10 years. So I know my way around iOS pretty well, as well.
About maybe 7ish years ago, I thought, well I'm going to try to use an iPhone as my personal, because I have an Apple Watch that is hooked to my work phone. And all the Google apps are availalbe on iOS, why not? IT WAS A TOTAL DISASTER. There was a large gulf between the way I used my personal device and my work iPhone device, and when I tried to use Google everything on the iPhone, it made me crazy. It only lasted about two months and I was so fed up that I dumped it for another Android.
I'm thinking about maybe giving it another go, couple of reasons:
One, the place I am now working since August 2022 only issues iOS devices to management and I quit my management job at my prior place so I could come over here and be more technical again, so I have to use my personal phone with their MDM control software. I have tried to tell them to stick it in their ear but the reality is, I need access to work stuff on my phone when I am remote. Unfortunately, the work stuff that is now on my phone works SUPER AWFUL with Android. So clunky. Maybe it is just the phone that I have, a Samsung S21FE, but man, using the work apps works really bad on this phone. The worst part of it is the re-authentications. Literally if I tried to work on my phone for 2 or 3 hours, on Teams and Outlook, it would ask me to re-authenticate 20-30 times. And it seems like the certificate for the MDM is getting broken every few days. And then it complains about cutting off my access, and not pushing email, and so forth. There may be things the MDM monkeys at work are setting to break it this bad. Not sure. But it's a real problem when I am on call, if the MDM stops working and I don't get alerts, I will not wake up in the middle of the night to respond to urgent alerts.
Two, it seems that the Google integration is better on iOS than it ws a few years back, I usually kept one or two of my Google apps on my work phone like Google Voice and it seems like you can now use Google Voice as your primary dialer, which was not the case the last time I used an iPhone as my personal.
Three, I've spent a lot more time with iOS in the 7-8 years since I last tried it as my personal. I'm sure it would still drive me nuts to some degree, but if my work stuff was better, that would be a huge, huge win.
Wait we were talking about switching platforms? lol. It is easy if you save all your data in the cloud. It will usually pick up all your apps too. Learning the menus and so forth if you don't already know it, that's on you.