Taking a bite out of the Apple

Author's note: this piece isn't going to be a tech review. I'll be just talking about my experience.

For those who know me, I have been an advocate of Android since I started using smartphones, and very naturally so, considering that the system provides multiple features including but not limited to extreme customization, an App Store with more than a million apps, a variety of flavors, and the amazing ecosystem of Google products integrated with a single Google account.

However, at the onset of my fifth semester, I started looking for better practices for my life in general, and I stumbled upon the concept of de-Googlization and tried it out. De-Googlization essentially means that you try and separate Google from all factions of your life as much as possible. For instance:

• I switched to Firefox from Chrome
• started using DuckDuckGo for most searches
• disabled Google and Google Chrome apps on my phone to reduce the possibility that I look up something using Google, etc. I am not going to put the full list here, but the point is that I did my best here.

 (Ironically, this post is on a platform hosted by Google, but not for long, buddy. Not for long.)

Since I was still not satisfied, I started considering the idea of switching to an iPhone. The thing is that sometimes I am a bit conservative about making purchases for myself, and this was one such time because all my life, I've made myself believe that this is an unnecessary purchase (and it still might be, bear with me) and all such purchases are avoidable (unless you like the product, in which case if it makes you happy, and you can afford it, then go for it by all means). I had heard of all kinds of restrictions about the iPhone, and therefore, thought it was unusable.

During the lockdown, I had the opportunity to use an iPhone 6s as a secondary phone (My primary one was the OnePlus 5T, purchased in February 2018). During this little experiment, I had issues with the battery life and storage (the phone had 16 GB storage, I think). Besides that, I had a good time using the iPhone. Long story short, I got the iPhone 12 in November, one week before Diwali.

So how's it faring? I'm having a good time. There are a few things that I miss, but overall, it feels great. I'm outlining the differences below: 

Battery - I'm sort of comfortable with the time my phone lasts. It lasts for about 1.5 days on average and charges fairly quickly - I think it is comparable to OnePlus 5T's Dash Charging. Moreover, the low power mode is also effective, even more so than I had expected. Screen & Speakers - The screen is amazing! I am not sure why but even 720 P looks as clear as 1080 P or better, sometimes. I've played Asphalt 9 on my phone, and it is a wonderful experience. Now, this may be biased since I've been using an older phone, and benchmarking it against the latest devices isn't justified. 

Speakers - As far as the speakers go, I was skeptical about the sound experience, but I'm enjoying this thing in which they utilize the speaker in the notch and the bottom speaker as a pair of speakers. This particularly makes a lot of difference while watching movies and playing games.

Camera - Ah, the one thing that I was going to be very sure I was going to love. As mentioned before, I got the opportunity to test out the iPhone experience during the countrywide lockdown. Around the same time, I was writing the farewell article for my college magazine and decided to take a picture of my desk with the lights off since it looked nice. This is when I compared the picture quality of the iPhone 6s and the OnePlus 5T, and I was shocked at the difference in quality! In the end, I ended up posting the picture that I took from the iPhone. Now, there is one thing I noticed: although the picture quality is brilliant, when zooming in, I found that the image isn't as sharp as I expected it to be when zoomed out. So maybe part of the reason the photos turn out to be nice is post-processing done by Apple. I'll have to read up more on this; it should be an interesting read. But yeah, overall, I love the camera.

App Store and App Ecosystem - I'm sort of on the fence about the App Store. However weird it may sound, I often browsed the app store to discover new apps, and I did come across some very interesting apps. I was very excited to do the same in the Apple App Store. First things first, yes, the number of apps and, more importantly, the number of free apps is a lot less than those in the Google Play Store. That is probably due to the high price that developers have to pay - both literally and in dev hours (yes, dev hours are important!). With that said, I love the experience that almost all the apps offer. Something that I appreciate even more is the App Store experience: Apple curates apps in categories, and this curation changes daily, but what's more important is that they also have nice write-ups and graphics along with them. Something that I've admired about Apple, even when I used Android, is that they genuinely put effort into their design.

As far as the general apps go, the default mail app and calendar apps aren't up to the mark when compared to the standard Gmail and Google Calendar apps. However, other apps such as Notes, Reminders, Photos, Messages, etc. stock up very well to the competition for me, at least. "Notes" is a no-bullshit note-taking app with a checklist feature and basic word-processing capabilities. iCloud integration is also nice as I no longer have to worry about taking backups (just mentioning this, I know Google also has such apps don't @ me). 

Daily Usage - Now, I don't know why, but it is easier to establish tech boundaries with the iPhone than it was with my Android. However, there are certain things that I wish were different: Google has this product called Digital Well-being integrated within the Android OS that blocks the access and notifications of the apps for pre-defined periods (they call this feature Focus-mode). Moreover, you can also switch it on will. The closest thing I found in iOS is downtime, and it only gives you the ability to set a fixed from and to time. Besides, (this is something I read in a blog, can't find it right now though) you have the option to disable the Focus mode for a few minutes, and they call it "Take a break". As expected, we don't have such kind words. But that's okay - Apple takes its time coming up with stuff in their way ** cough ** widgets ** cough **

One other thing that deserves a callout is the Spotlight search. I use it on my Mac, and I was delighted to have it on my iPhone. I think I use it a lot more than my friends do.

Customization - Yeah... so about this. I know it is a very highly contested topic and in its own right, considering there is a customization of no bound in Android whereas Apple is virtually a sandboxed environment. But, having said that, I do feel that Apple does offer some amount of customization in its settings app: they have a different way of doing things. For Android, you have the app level settings within the app - so your Gmail app, for example, is a singular product. However, you have settings for the default apps within the Settings app itself. Now that I think about it, this sort of sends a statement about how tight the integration of the Apple Ecosystem is - from multiple devices to multiple Apps, I think Apple has nailed this game.

I think I'm done with this. I'll keep posting stuff in the comments when I think about it. Furthermore, I also encourage you to do the same - tell me about your experience or any great apps that you use daily. Or even better, tell me about certain superuser level features that exist currently but not many people know about.