last updated: 2025/06/12 My six month review/notes of daily driving an iPhone as someone who spent a decade maintaining their own Android distro: Overall: Mostly OK, some parts are better than I expected, but others are abysmal. Cost: Awful expensive: $600+ phone + monthly iCloud subscription. Important note: If you want to actually use other 3rd party apps, that is when it starts to fall apart as most of them are infested with trackers, require accounts, or even subscriptions too. So for this reason I relegate my iPhone as a basic phone, messenger, lite web browser, navigator, and iPod and then also daily drive a Pixel with GrapheneOS loaded with my favorite FOSS apps for other typical uses of a pocketable computer. System - Tons of accessibility features and choices are extremely nice. - Lack of central back button is an accessibility hazard. - Swipe actions and gestures are frequently misread. - Text selection and cursor movement is completely broken. - No status bar indicator when an alarm clock is active. - No way to display seconds in status bar or lock screen. - Can't start hotspot while connected to Wi-Fi. - Not a hardware limitation: Hotspot + CarPlay works. - Music identification feature pushes Shazam app. - Sticks to a Wi-Fi AP for many seconds longer after it is beyond gone. - For non lockdown users: No way to disable Game Center. - Low battery warning completely interrupts any task. - Automatic updates will delay for days/weeks before installing. - No option for immediate notification of system updates. - Updates leave you with an unusable phone for many minutes. - No Internet permission for apps. - Cellular data statistics has no mechanism to set a bill/cycle date. - No ability to set a hard limit for cellular data. - VPN function has no mechanism to block when disabled/connecting. - Flashlight function is very dim. You can long press to increase it slightly. - Or just go grab a Wurkkos FC11C or my favorite the TS22 :) - No singular toggle for data savings. - No singular toggle for opt-ing out of friend search and sharing features. - No singular toggle for disabling analytics. - No quick way to adjust other volume settings. - Lockdown feels skin deep. - Satellite SOS function is neat. - Time is always very accurate. Android usually drifts +- 2 seconds. - Animations are frustratingly slow. Turning them off just makes it jarring. - bug: Volume will randomly be set to max when using Bluetooth headphones. - bug: When lockdown is enabled, Game Center just loads forever with no message/error. Hardware - They took too long to switch to USB-C. - CPU is FAST, but they then kneecap it by putting not enough RAM. - The speakers are fantastic. Accessibility - Live Speech should have a speak on space option. - Live Speech should immediately open the keyboard. - Live Speech has no import/export option for saved phrases. - bug: Live Speech bugs out and is broken when opened from the lock screen. - bug: Live Speech inconsistently turns into a floating bubble. - bug: During the Personal Voice prompt wizard you can abort the process without confirmation by tapping Done. Notification Tray - Absolutely useless and very confusing. Quick Settings - Tapping the Bluetooth toggle doesn't actually turn it off. - Tapping the hotspot toggle does weird things. Keyboard - Extra symbols are not obviously apparent. - The default single quote key is a `right single quotation mark` instead of a 'straight apostrophe'. - bug: Can be half dark and half light. - bug: Sometimes will be squished into the left 70% of the screen. Home Screen - If a folder has <=4 apps in it, you cannot see their names. USB Transfer - Some photos will not appear if they (silently) fail to be converted from HEIF to JPEG. - Large videos CANNOT be transferred over USB MTP. Instead forcing use of macOS/iTunes. - A workaround is to use an exFAT formatted flash drive via USB OTG. App Store - Why are there ads? Why are they implemented maliciously? - You can search 'Orbot' and the first result is a scam app due to it being an ad. - Apple Arcade is nice as the apps available via it all appear to have much stricter data collection policies. Books - Searching for new books is abysmal and has no real filter support. Calculator - Like most phone calculators, it is awful, just give me a TI please. Calendar - Events get shown directly on the month view, but titles are poorly clipped off. Camera - Volume buttons start/stop video recording instead of zooming and can be easily mispressed, especially without noticing. - An in-app HDR toggle would be nice. - Can't record with both cameras at once. - Can't switch between cameras while recording. - Plays a shutter sound only sometimes? What is the logic? - Video appears super cropped even when disabling "Enhanced Stabilization". - Files are sequentially named... WHY!? PUT A TIMESTAMP IN THEM! Clock - When enabling an alarm clock there is no helpful toast/indication of how many hours until it triggers. - World clock choices has no mechanism to simply pick a time zone. Contacts - VCF imports seem very limited. iCloud on the web seems to handle much better. - Option to export all contacts is hidden behind a long press of the contact list. FaceTime - Entirely useless when lockdown mode is enabled since the callback test mechanism is ephemeral and contacts aren't considered. Files - Feels like a toy. Fitness - Requires 3rd party apps for anything but step tracking. - Step tracking does appear to be fairly accurate. - Step tracking stats are delayed by about ~15 minutes, but this likely is why it is accurate. Freeform - I confused this with the note/sketch app at first, this is instead intended for whiteboard style collaboration. Health - The periodical prompt to take the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 screeners are nice, but should also feature others too. - Has way too many sub menus to dig into attributes. - Medication reminders are hard to access/manage. Maps - Largely fine. - I don't like the overreliance on Yelp, which often has outdated/incorrect information. - I like to see a place before I arrive and you cannot zoom into the pictures without it forcing you to install the Yelp app. - If you keep driving past a turn during navigation it'll keep repeating to turn back instead of recalculating to your different route. - Automatic suggestion/routing to frequent locations can be quite annoying. - Downloaded maps are poorly implemented since you can only solely use them or not use them, no in-between. Maps via CarPlay - Impossible to search for other places when navigating without using Siri. - Traffic information and speed limits are not shown when not actively navigating. - When not navigating it just displays your position randomly on the map instead of focused/directionally. Messages - Links are disabled, even for (verified) contacts, when lockdown is enabled. - When another iMessage contact turns their phone off, it falls back to unencrypted SMS without clear indication. - If someone reacts to your message it plays a distinct, non-customizable, notification sound. - By default notifications repeat after two minutes. - Can be disabled via Settings > Notifications > Messages > Customize Notifications > Repeat Alerts - bug: Sometimes pictures/attachments just fail to send with no error shown. Music - Can be too easy to click onto another song and mess up your current playback. - As with most streaming services some albums or even single songs are missing due to licensing/region restrictions. - Notifications for new songs/albums from favorited artists are nice. - Can't just copy over your own music. - bug: The download button sometimes won't appear at all. News - Why are there ads? Passwords - Can't have a TOTP code without an associated account entry. - If you make a dummy entry then it will complain about weak passwords. Safari - Private Relay as an MPR is awesome and well made. - The button to clear history/data can be hard to see. - Websites cannot use the high quality TTS voices via the WebSpeech API. - What is the difference between bookmarks and favorites? - Impossible to screen record without showing your favorites if you have to type it in. - Many icons on websites are broken when lockdown is enabled due to font restrictions. Supposedly fixed in upcoming iOS 26. Translate - Similar to Maps, offline mode is awful since it cannot fallback to online translation for unavailable languages when in offline mode. Weather - Nowcasting is frequently inaccurate and causes warning fatigue. - It would be nice to have aurora forecasts and alerts for solar/lunar eclipses. - bug: Map loading can be very slow or non-functional sometimes.