I recently switched from a 13 Mini to a Motorola Razr and wow Android is so much nicer than iOS. Notifications don't randomly disappear on Android, I have a Back button, and I can use real Firefox!

As an Android user since the T-Mobile G1, I tried switching to an iPhone 15 Pro as my primary phone from a carrier deal as the hardware looked nice plus Android/iOS has converged so much over the years with all the same apps available on either. I was pretty used to iOS from iPads and as a backup phone so the switching costs were minimal and the better MacOS integration seemed cool.

But man, the notifications are a constant thorn in my side. I have missed so many work notifications due to the lack of persistent notification indicator (other than on the lock screen), and the overall weirdness of iOS lockscreen notification panel (segmentation between "old" notifications that can be mass dismissed and "new" notifications that pile up individually-ish). I use an Apple Watch and somehow still miss Teams notifications as they come in, I'm not even sure how that happens...

I'm so close to abandoning the iPhone as my main phone and going back to my S23 Ultra pretty much entirely because of notifications, it's been a disappointment...

> I can use real Firefox!

This is the only reason I'm using Android when the rest of my family is on iOS. uBlock on Firefox Android is essential.

I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.

Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.

NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.

> NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iPhone though

I have yet to experience that. The biggest reason I have mostly stayed with iPhones over the years was because the tight integration with my MBP was useful, and iMessage is way better than SMS.

RCS helps even out the playing field a bunch, but just about the time that went mainstream I hear that it's a regular source of trouble for everyone (Android an iPhone both) because the carriers suck. And Apple did at least finally add some equivalence for one of the Android features I had wanted (call screening).

Teenagers supposedly care. But I've never seen adults who care in the least what kind of phone someone has.

I've heard that, but anecdotally, neither of my two teenagers care at all. Maybe it used to matter in the past, but these days all the kids seem to be on Discord and any phone will do.

Personally I’ve only experienced the opposite. Lots of people mocking me for having an iphone, never seen any anti android sentiment.

> I think this update is finally ending that for some people.

For some people in the HN social sphere, maybe. My sisters have had iPhones since they were first released in the naughties. They used to make fun of me for using Android and then Windows Phones (I'm on iOS now). The notion that my sisters would ever switch over to Android is risible; they don't care about phones "making advances" or having "security commitments." They care about iMessage, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.

There are no other phones that are not iPhones for them. The blue/green gap is real.

Dunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being.

Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.

If you want to see daily bugs on top of it: disable animations in accessibility. Constant, 10x-daily-or-more issues in system UI (apps are surprisingly much better normally). E.g. it has partly or completely broken the recent app switching for the past 4 major versions so far, especially if you use a non-stock launcher.

I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)

I think that is what you get used to. I've been using Android for over a decade and my wife's iPhone is super confusing to me.

I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).

But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.

But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.

> Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”

Hilariously, those things actually did work back in 2017, and Apple has since broken all of them in various OS updates

Yeah that's the joke. 10 years ago all of this basic stuff was working well. Now, autocorrect and cursor placement regularly make me want to chuck the phone into a chipper shredder.

I've had an iPhone since 2009 and feel they have gotten much more confusing over time.

It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).

> ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.

This is actually hilarious because Android had all-screen phones with only virtual buttons long before iPhones did :)

Sure, but neither my Pixel nor Samsung handset defaults to gesture navigation. I consider myself pretty tech savvy but just never use Apple's multitasking provisions on iOS and iPadOS.

Pixels do now

Followed by “where is the back button.”

Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)

You mean the “roulette-wheel do-something-vaguely-backish” button?

I can't remember the last time I've encountered an app that didn't let you swipe to go back. That's practically built into iOS at this point.

Does apply still sometimes put the back button in the top left?

That used to drive me nuts especially as they grew the phone to size 5+ inches

iOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them

Fair if you haven't looking at it in a while but they have largely been on par for a decade.

The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.

Things like media playback via a web browser (and really browsing in general) are so superior to iOS it's not even a fair comparison.

I'm not the biggest fan of Liquid Glass, but I regularly use Android via single-use tablets and dev test devices and I think I dislike Material 3 Expressive even more. M3E feels weirdly awkward and unrefined and it's a struggle to come up with a color scheme that looks right. It would be a constant irritation if Android were my daily driver.

The latest top of the line Chinese phones (Xiaomi 17, Vivo x300 pro, Oppo X9 Pro) are at least equal if not better than top of the line iPhones or Samsung phones. Better battery life, larger batteries, better screens, faster charging. Much better cameras. They now do collaboration with lens makers like Zeiss and Hasselblad and it really shows in the photo quality, last year was the first time I've felt like a phone could replace an entry level DSLR.

People say that the faster charging will degrade battery life, but my last phone was a Samsung and battery life was massively degraded after two years without any kind of fast charging. The one I had before that was a Redmi, much faster charging and the battery was fine after a couple of years.

I’m actually glad because it seems like we are finally leaving behind the flat design that started in iOS 7, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure it would be good to go full skeuomorphic but at least a button looks more like a button again

Especially with the state of the App Store. We used to have really nice, well designed apps to go along with the amazing hardware, now it’s even worse than Android with an endless list of SEO-optimized, copycat and IAP scam apps.

Yeah I switched to Android in large part because of Liquid Glass. Not the look, pictures of it are quite nice, but because of how it works or rather, doesn't. It's buggy, slow (on a 1 generation old pro phone), and way too UI-forward, prioritising UI over content in the same way that skeuomorphism did. Overall it just felt dated in the same way that skeuomorphism did when it died.