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Long time Google fanboy here, and I'm honestly a hair's breadth away from buying an iphone 13. I have had nexus/pixels phones since the gnex. I have evangelize

Long time Google fanboy here, and I'm honestly a hair's breadth away from buying an iphone 13. I have had nexus/pixels phones since the gnex. I have evangelized android to for almost as long. I did ground work for google by pushing people into google's services. I have a day 1 pixel 6 pro. I pay for cloud storage and yt premium. But to me google is just falling apart. I feel like they have lost their technology drive in order to pursue ideological ones. Their tech has become all half-assed with poor/no support. I cannot trust anything they make to be supported in the future anymore. RCS is still a disaster, my one friend on Fi with a pixel 5a still cannot get it working and Google/Fi has pretty said "We don't know". I do not like Apple, but after almost 20 years a Google fanboy, I'm starting to like Google even less. So much so that I'll have to eat lots of shame from the many iphone people who questioned my android love for years. *If anyone can convince me otherwise, please do*. I feel like the best thing that could happen is disposing of Sundar and getting someone who can refocus google on being a tech company devoted to making the best tech products.

overview 5y ago
After reading your comment, my first thought was to tell you to be more open to change. Seriously, it’s just a phone… just try it out :) PS: I was the same as you (used Android, despised Apple) but eventually made the switch and never intend to go back.
adoxyz 5y ago
I switched from Google to Apple after being in the Google ecosystem since the early days of Android. I had pretty much every single Nexus, Pixel, and a variety of Samsung devices. But Google's lack of support, half-assed one-foot in one-foot out, and lack of support made me switch to Apple about 3 years ago and I've never been happier. Apple's ecosystem, while it doesn't offer as much, is a much superior and polished experience. iMessage works great, integration with Apple Watch is top notch, and the whole ecosystem is very fine-tuned. There are still a bunch of things to complain about, for sure, but overall comparing the two is a night and day difference. I've slowly started phasing out all my Google products.. and not by choice either. Had Google Nest and Nest Secure for over 3 years until Google decided to just cancel Nest Secure all-together. Google Home devices are increasingly being less and less effective. Google just can't seem to commit to anything longer than 2-3 years and I'm sick of it. I'd much rather deal with getting features much later but thoroughly thought out, then half-assed and cancelled in 2 years. I will say the one thing I do miss is native Google Assistant, Siri is complete ass in comparison.
alimov 5y ago
Not really here to convince you of one os / ecosystem or the other, but wanted to say that you can get an iPhone, try it for two weeks and return it if you don’t like it.
philliphaydon 5y ago
I went round about a lot. Started with windows phone back when it had the honeycomb ui. Stuck with it until I moved to Singapore where Microsoft announced a new phone and didn’t release it anywhere except a few countries. From there I went to iPhone 4 and had so many issues. So I went to the Note 4 and initially I loved it. But android got slower and slower so after 6 months I reset the phone and didn’t install anything. It got slower and slower and all I used was phone text and browser. But I refused to go back to Apple. I did a few hours of work for a friend fixing something and was complaining about my phone being slow so he bought me an iPhone 6 max as payment. I was annoyed at first but it was so fast… and I’ve stuck with iPhone since and don’t regret it. Best thing ever moving over to iPhone.
lostgame 5y ago
>> I cannot trust anything they make to be supported in the future anymore. That's actually the largest reason I can't invest in Google's ecosystem, but that's mostly from a tech stack end.
scruple 5y ago
I've had an Android device since the G1, then the G2... I'm currently on Project Fi with a Pixel 4a. When this phone no longer suits me, I'll also be moving to Apple hardware. At some point, and it's subjective / an individual choice but, enough is enough.
tomtheelder 5y ago
I switched recently, and honestly have found the experience on iPhone to broadly be worse. There are a few things that are a bit nicer, but the downgrade in the notifications system alone just tanks the experience. That said I switched for mostly privacy reasons, so won't be going back.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  I switched recently from years of Android usage simply because the car I wanted to buy only supported CarPlay. I could either give up Android or give up the car. I chose to keep the car. Now that I’ve had the iPhone a while, there seem to be about the same number of annoyances in iOS as there were with Android, they’re just different. I think I’d give the edge to Android, iOS is slightly more annoying, but not enough to worry about switching back.
  - SapporoChris 5y ago
    Do I understand correctly that your car determined your smartphone choice? Furthermore you considered changing your vehicle selection based on your current smartphone? I find the concept of a smartphone affecting a transportation decision or the reverse to be highly unusual. Can you please explain your rational? For example, do you spend excessive amount of time in your car? Do you do specific tasks from your car that require a specific connection between car and smartphone?
    - dboreham 5y ago
      Not parent, but nowadays the smartphone is the way to get decent information on the screen of your car. The built-in car infotainment/nav systems are all horrible. Voice recognition is terrible. Plug the phone in, and to a first approximation everything works. With wireless Car Play, you don't even need to plug in.
    - nneonneo 5y ago
      A car is both longer-lived and more expensive than a phone. It’s definitely not unthinkable to have that influence your choice of smartphone, especially since there might be many other more important factors that affect your choice of car.
x0x0 5y ago
The security upgrades situation on Google is intolerable. I finally have a phone (3axl) that didn't die in a couple years from accidents / abuse / going to the gym in my pocket, and Google is eol-ing it because they've cut off security upgrades. My next phone will be an iphone.
- kyrra 5y ago
  Googler opinions are my own. At least they fixed this with the pixel 6 with a 5 year upgrade plan.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    I gave my 6-year old iPhone to elderly relatives and it still gets security upgrades. Google “upgraded” to less than any other mainstream computing platform. Windows gets about 10 years of security updates for each major version, up to 15 if you pay extra.
    - cogman10 5y ago
      And that is just for the OS itself. Hardware wise, you can easily pull out 20 years or longer simply by constantly bumping up the OS version.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    No. Google is the operating system vendor. They either fix this with all Android phones or they haven't fixed anything at all.
    - Andrex 5y ago
      They've been at it for years, but it's been a difficult problem to solve. Tangible progress has been made in the last 2 or so OS updates, however. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/talkin-treble-how-android-engineers-are-winning-the-war-on-fragmentation/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/talkin-treble-how-an... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/qualcomm-promises-three-years-of-android-updates-for-its-entire-soc-lineup/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/qualcomm-promises-th... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/07/android-10-has-the-fastest-update-rate-ever-hits-16-of-users-in-10-months/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/07/android-10-has-the-f...
kyrra 5y ago
Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work anywhere near phone stuff. I assume your friend has tried all the debugging on this page? https://support.google.com/messages/answer/9363493?hl=en https://support.google.com/messages/answer/9363493?hl=en My wife's phone keeps failing to connect and we have to do the carrier services reset to make it work. A terrible solution to me requiring factory resetting your phone. But even then, I have a friend that was never able to get RCS to work on his phone, and he spent multiple hours with Google support trying to figure it out. There is something wrong with his account on Google and the carriers side (he tried multiple phones, and it never worked). The RCS team definitely has some corner cases to work out getting everyone activated, because it leads to really bad stories like this.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  Thanks, but I feel I am reaching a point where I need my friend to be able to go to a physical location where they either fix it or clone his phone onto a new one that does work. I can't be google's advocate twisting my friend's arm to troubleshoot their phone anymore. This is just a tiny sliver of my dissatisfaction too. I feel like the long time lover that sits down one night and after a lot of thinking gives pause with "Wait, why am I still in this relationship?"
  - mrehler 5y ago
    Because those wonderful jingles made it so appealing! And keep you coming back for the "phone plan that can!"
  - kyrra 5y ago
    I think Google was in a different position than Apple in the case of messaging client. Apple has total control of the text message app on the iPhone, or Google does not. Google had to appease Samsung and likely some other cell phone makers to allow them to make their own RCS compatible app. Google took RCS and created universal profiles, and I think wants to get Apple on board with it so that there is a shared protocol between vendors. Apple went to full proprietary stack that no one else can use, while Google went the more open protocol. Open protocols like this always tend to have a bit more headache, and we're seeing that with RCS. Especially when some of the players are cell service providers. If the EU open protocol legislation ever pans out, I wonder how that would impact iMessage and RCS.

overview 5y ago

After reading your comment, my first thought was to tell you to be more open to change. Seriously, it’s just a phone… just try it out :) PS: I was the same as you (used Android, despised Apple) but eventually made the switch and never intend to go back.

adoxyz 5y ago

I switched from Google to Apple after being in the Google ecosystem since the early days of Android. I had pretty much every single Nexus, Pixel, and a variety of Samsung devices. But Google's lack of support, half-assed one-foot in one-foot out, and lack of support made me switch to Apple about 3 years ago and I've never been happier. Apple's ecosystem, while it doesn't offer as much, is a much superior and polished experience. iMessage works great, integration with Apple Watch is top notch, and the whole ecosystem is very fine-tuned. There are still a bunch of things to complain about, for sure, but overall comparing the two is a night and day difference. I've slowly started phasing out all my Google products.. and not by choice either. Had Google Nest and Nest Secure for over 3 years until Google decided to just cancel Nest Secure all-together. Google Home devices are increasingly being less and less effective. Google just can't seem to commit to anything longer than 2-3 years and I'm sick of it. I'd much rather deal with getting features much later but thoroughly thought out, then half-assed and cancelled in 2 years. I will say the one thing I do miss is native Google Assistant, Siri is complete ass in comparison.

alimov 5y ago

Not really here to convince you of one os / ecosystem or the other, but wanted to say that you can get an iPhone, try it for two weeks and return it if you don’t like it.

philliphaydon 5y ago

I went round about a lot. Started with windows phone back when it had the honeycomb ui. Stuck with it until I moved to Singapore where Microsoft announced a new phone and didn’t release it anywhere except a few countries. From there I went to iPhone 4 and had so many issues. So I went to the Note 4 and initially I loved it. But android got slower and slower so after 6 months I reset the phone and didn’t install anything. It got slower and slower and all I used was phone text and browser. But I refused to go back to Apple. I did a few hours of work for a friend fixing something and was complaining about my phone being slow so he bought me an iPhone 6 max as payment. I was annoyed at first but it was so fast… and I’ve stuck with iPhone since and don’t regret it. Best thing ever moving over to iPhone.

lostgame 5y ago

>> I cannot trust anything they make to be supported in the future anymore. That's actually the largest reason I can't invest in Google's ecosystem, but that's mostly from a tech stack end.

scruple 5y ago

I've had an Android device since the G1, then the G2... I'm currently on Project Fi with a Pixel 4a. When this phone no longer suits me, I'll also be moving to Apple hardware. At some point, and it's subjective / an individual choice but, enough is enough.

tomtheelder 5y ago

I switched recently, and honestly have found the experience on iPhone to broadly be worse. There are a few things that are a bit nicer, but the downgrade in the notifications system alone just tanks the experience. That said I switched for mostly privacy reasons, so won't be going back.

technothrasher 5y ago
I switched recently from years of Android usage simply because the car I wanted to buy only supported CarPlay. I could either give up Android or give up the car. I chose to keep the car. Now that I’ve had the iPhone a while, there seem to be about the same number of annoyances in iOS as there were with Android, they’re just different. I think I’d give the edge to Android, iOS is slightly more annoying, but not enough to worry about switching back.
- SapporoChris 5y ago
  Do I understand correctly that your car determined your smartphone choice? Furthermore you considered changing your vehicle selection based on your current smartphone? I find the concept of a smartphone affecting a transportation decision or the reverse to be highly unusual. Can you please explain your rational? For example, do you spend excessive amount of time in your car? Do you do specific tasks from your car that require a specific connection between car and smartphone?
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Not parent, but nowadays the smartphone is the way to get decent information on the screen of your car. The built-in car infotainment/nav systems are all horrible. Voice recognition is terrible. Plug the phone in, and to a first approximation everything works. With wireless Car Play, you don't even need to plug in.
  - nneonneo 5y ago
    A car is both longer-lived and more expensive than a phone. It’s definitely not unthinkable to have that influence your choice of smartphone, especially since there might be many other more important factors that affect your choice of car.

x0x0 5y ago

The security upgrades situation on Google is intolerable. I finally have a phone (3axl) that didn't die in a couple years from accidents / abuse / going to the gym in my pocket, and Google is eol-ing it because they've cut off security upgrades. My next phone will be an iphone.

kyrra 5y ago
Googler opinions are my own. At least they fixed this with the pixel 6 with a 5 year upgrade plan.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I gave my 6-year old iPhone to elderly relatives and it still gets security upgrades. Google “upgraded” to less than any other mainstream computing platform. Windows gets about 10 years of security updates for each major version, up to 15 if you pay extra.
  - cogman10 5y ago
    And that is just for the OS itself. Hardware wise, you can easily pull out 20 years or longer simply by constantly bumping up the OS version.
- mdoms 5y ago
  No. Google is the operating system vendor. They either fix this with all Android phones or they haven't fixed anything at all.
  - Andrex 5y ago
    They've been at it for years, but it's been a difficult problem to solve. Tangible progress has been made in the last 2 or so OS updates, however. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/talkin-treble-how-android-engineers-are-winning-the-war-on-fragmentation/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/talkin-treble-how-an... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/qualcomm-promises-three-years-of-android-updates-for-its-entire-soc-lineup/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/qualcomm-promises-th... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/07/android-10-has-the-fastest-update-rate-ever-hits-16-of-users-in-10-months/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/07/android-10-has-the-f...

kyrra 5y ago

Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work anywhere near phone stuff. I assume your friend has tried all the debugging on this page? https://support.google.com/messages/answer/9363493?hl=en https://support.google.com/messages/answer/9363493?hl=en My wife's phone keeps failing to connect and we have to do the carrier services reset to make it work. A terrible solution to me requiring factory resetting your phone. But even then, I have a friend that was never able to get RCS to work on his phone, and he spent multiple hours with Google support trying to figure it out. There is something wrong with his account on Google and the carriers side (he tried multiple phones, and it never worked). The RCS team definitely has some corner cases to work out getting everyone activated, because it leads to really bad stories like this.

Workaccount2 5y ago
Thanks, but I feel I am reaching a point where I need my friend to be able to go to a physical location where they either fix it or clone his phone onto a new one that does work. I can't be google's advocate twisting my friend's arm to troubleshoot their phone anymore. This is just a tiny sliver of my dissatisfaction too. I feel like the long time lover that sits down one night and after a lot of thinking gives pause with "Wait, why am I still in this relationship?"
- mrehler 5y ago
  Because those wonderful jingles made it so appealing! And keep you coming back for the "phone plan that can!"
- kyrra 5y ago
  I think Google was in a different position than Apple in the case of messaging client. Apple has total control of the text message app on the iPhone, or Google does not. Google had to appease Samsung and likely some other cell phone makers to allow them to make their own RCS compatible app. Google took RCS and created universal profiles, and I think wants to get Apple on board with it so that there is a shared protocol between vendors. Apple went to full proprietary stack that no one else can use, while Google went the more open protocol. Open protocols like this always tend to have a bit more headache, and we're seeing that with RCS. Especially when some of the players are cell service providers. If the EU open protocol legislation ever pans out, I wonder how that would impact iMessage and RCS.