Comment on Strategies and advice for transitioning out of Apple's ecosystem of devices?
djdarren@piefed.social 5 hours ago apple makes you feel so cozy and content in their UI design that anything even slightly different is really disruptive
I switched from iPhone to Graphene a couple of years back after almost 15 years of iOS, and yeah, the transition from one to the other was the very steepest learning curve. It’s almost like jumping from Mint to Arch. My partner wants my Pixel when I next upgrade so they can play with it and get used to it before having to make the jump from iOS, but I know it’s going to be a painful transition for them.
I recently put Graphene on my no-longer work phone. I think what makes it extra tough is that it feels familiar and simultaneously alien.
There’s an action centre, and you can edit toggles, but there are no editable sliders for audio and brightness. A lot of the icons feel like buttons but aren’t.
Then there’s the gestures. They feel a little off. The back motion can be done forward too, and there’s no preview of what “back” is. And I loathe the settings pane.
Graphene is nice, but I still dislike Android.
For me the biggest hurdle was finding apps that felt the same as the ones I was used to.
Take Mastodon: I’ve gotten used to Moshidon now, but previously I used Ivory, which is ridiculously polished by comparison. The natures of iOS and Android mean that there are very few Android apps that are as …pretty… as most iOS counterparts.
Also; functionality. I guess because iOS users are more likely to pay for apps, developers are more likely to cram in as many features and polish as they can. If you try to replace an app with 1:1 feature parity, you’re mostly going to be disappointed. Photos on iOS is an incredibly useful, user friendly app which has almost all of the library and editing features most people need. Immich comes close, but not quite close enough for me to be able to confidently say that you could switch from one to the other without really noticing.