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After over 6 months trying to adopt #Apple phones with an iPhone 17 (and please be aware this is about my experience with Apple phones - I have an Apple iPad & I love it), I've moved back to #Android. P will get it for Father's Day!!! I'll take his old iPhone 12 so I can still have an iPhone for reference and tech help interactions at work though.

Here's the good for me on iPhones:

The iPhone 17 has an incredible automatic camera + filters to make every picture gorgeous. This feature makes such a huge difference in one's experience with their phone.

iPhone widgets are awesome - Pressreader's top stories were great (their widget is there in Android but not working for me). Wikipedia had an iPhone widget of the most popular articles that doesn't exist on Android 😭 And weirdly, the whole Hoopla app isn't working on my Nothing3 Android (login page just doesn't appear).

The iPhone bad: I write creatively on my phone (long story short I quit smoking & the only way to write without triggering cravings was in bed on my phone, and I came to really enjoy the process!), and I basically stopped when I got the iPhone. I thought perhaps I would learn to love the keyboard; through osmosis & constant texting & writing, I would just pick up how it worked. Instead I came to rely on dictation, which sure is great for casual conversation but dictation is too much if you're worldbuilding or getting emotional over your own scenes.

I didn't fiddle with the settings as much as I suppose I could've, and a tech ed colleague of mine indicated her iPhone wasn't as chaotic as my iPhone keyboard was, so perhaps I still just didn't customize it properly. But my experience was that across different apps for writing text in my iPhone, using either the Apple keyboard or the Gkeyboard for Apple, tapping on a word to select all or cut, getting your cursor into a word to fix a typo, selecting a paragraph, autocorrect, and even finding the asterisk (a must, for fixing typos during text conversations - I don't edit the message because that's LYING), were cumbersome processes. Getting the cursor inside a word especially, at work, I've noticed all my patrons with iPhones invariably delete the whole word and rewrite it. Nobody's got time to wait for that magnifying glass to appear. I know about the space bar trick now (long press on space bar and you can move the cursor anywhere) but man, I missed the keyboards on Android.

Recently, E's MacBook died, only a year old with no rough handling & light casual usage, and after the Apple Store techs took a look, they confirmed there was likely a fluke 'logic board' (read: motherboard) failure. "If you don't have Apple Care, give it to us for repair, starting at $600." E was pretty disenfranchised; the shine of Apple has worn off & she's switching back to Android with me. Her's is a Samsung, and I gotta say the Smartview feature for casting to our Rokus is great.

So now my "daily driver" phone is my Nothing 3 Android. Nothing is an independent, London-based phone company with cyberpunk aesthetics from a Swedish/Stockholm design team & a founder from OnePlus, which has a great reputation as well. My only qualm is how the default camera settings take dark photos, a little heavy on the blues and greens. My life is not a Matrix film though, lol, so editing the default to add a more wholesome color grade is what's up. Been working on that today.

​I am also trying to get my parents (and myself) on the same password manager and when I say that, I mean that I am dragging them into it kicking and screaming. Eventually, everything will "just work" but it doesn't at first, and I warn everybody in my password management class that this is the deterrent: it's software you have to actively learn. Workflows and troubleshooting and workarounds and waiting for the cloud to sync all your devices, etc. What to do when autofill doesn't appear when you tap into the username field? Try tapping into the password field. If that doesn't work, pull out of the app (don't quit it) & go into your PW manager app to investigate. Just in general, toggling between open apps to copy and paste authentication content back and forth is a huge barrier. For those who never learned to manipulate different software windows on a computer, it's difficult to explain both conceptually and in practice.

So, the number of furious blowouts (E) and the constant exasperation (P) has been real. I'm not without guilt - I've yelled back at E to calm down so she can actually learn, but yelling that doesn't seem conducive to that messaging, does it? lol At any rate, however we're doing it, we're doing it! And at the end of the day, we'll be more secure & protected, and be able to recover passwords and accounts with each other's credentials. I love them a ton & we support each other through everything so these pains are well worth the benefits. 💕