If All Your Friends Get iPhones, Should You?

I used to be a big fan of Android - here's why I switched.

If you’re reading this, it’s reasonably likely that you are 1) in the US, and 2) reasonably young. And if that’s the case, then probably, most of your friends have iPhones. You might even have one yourself. However, I’m targeting this post at the holdouts - the people who have Android phones, having endured the complaints by friends who just want to be able to properly use group chats. I was one of you once - up until around three years ago, I was a devoted Android user. “The customization ability is so much better,” I would say. “My phone still has a headphone jack,” I proclaimed, before all the Android phones also got rid of their headphone jacks. “I have access to developer tools.”

(Side note: Maybe some of you reading this have very good reasons for needing the customizability of an Android. I think this is a pretty small minority, but if it’s you, I’m not aiming this post at you.)

I also thought that, because I didn’t have an iPhone, that I was really smart for making this decision. All these other people had bought into the idea that Apple was perfect and could do no wrong, even when the company made what seemed like obviously bad choices like removing the headphone jack or SD card slot. I would read posts online about how someone was on a long bus ride, and everyone else’s iPhones died, and their Android lasted so much longer than everyone else’s. Or I would find a cheap game from, like, the Amazon App Store, and download it, reveling in my phone’s ability to access third-party app stores.

When I would ask people why they had an iPhone instead of an Android, usually they would respond with some variant of “It’s just better.” This, I decided, was a clear sign that they had fallen victim to the cult of Apple. They couldn’t even give me one legitimate reason why they preferred their phone? I could give them ten reasons why I preferred mine. Clearly, these people had not done research or made charts of why their phone was better. Speaking of charts, here’s one I made in around 2016, debating which phone to buy after having the (truly terrible, but very cheap) LG Optimus L90.

Looking at these stats, it seems like you’d have to be insane to buy the iPhone over the OnePlus 2. For $500 more, you got…. a somewhat better battery life? And that was about it. Every other stat was pretty comparable. And I did, in fact, eventually end up buying the OnePlus 2. I was pretty confident this was the best way to go.

All this was ignoring what I actually was going to use the phone for. My phone wasn’t a technical tool that needed to satisfy certain specifications, it was a social connection device, a way to stay in contact with people when I wasn’t physically there. And so the most important thing that it could do was to make the friction involved in those connections as low as possible. The OnePlus 2, despite its 4K camera, completely failed in this respect. If I got added to a group chat, no one could ever again add or remove anyone from the chat. I couldn’t play GamePigeon games with anyone. I would mostly text people via Instagram or Snapchat, but Snapchat was always developed iOS-first, so I would get new features after everyone else. All my pictures on Snapchat looked terrible because Snapchat didn’t bother to optimize their app to actually take advantage of the cameras of Android phones in the way they could with iPhones.

None of these are huge issues, of course, just minor annoyances. But those minor annoyances matter a lot when it comes to friends. It’d be crazy to stop being friends with someone because of their choice of phone. But when you’re on your fourth separate iteration of a 10-person group chat, all because one of the people involved has an Android and you can’t add anyone new without creating an entirely new chat, you might start to feel a little bit of frustration towards that person. If you’re making a group chat for math class, and you’re trying to add everyone you know in the class, you might hesitate when you see someone’s name highlighted in green. It’s not personal, of course. But you might want to let other people add their friends in the class to the chat, and most people have iPhones anyway, so maybe just don’t add any Androids. Or if you want to video call someone, and most people have FaceTime, you’re probably gonna call someone who has FaceTime, instead of someone who’s gonna try to get you to download Skype.

From the perspective of someone who has an Android device, many of these things that you’re missing out on are hard to notice. I didn’t know that I hadn’t been added to my math class’s group chat due to my device until six months after the class ended. I wasn’t aware of how often my friends played 8 Ball Pool with each other, because no one could ever attempt to play it with me. When someone was considering FaceTime calling me, there was no notification that I got which represented “they would have called me, but they couldn’t”.

All of these things were a way bigger deal, for me, than whatever technical benefits Android might have. Looking back, it seems ridiculous that I traded “being included in group chats” for the ability to download APK files. But I didn’t actually realize I was making that trade; it wasn’t until now, from the other side of it, that I could understand what I was actually missing out on. So if you’re on the Android side, consider the possibility that you do not have the whole picture - that there are benefits that you don’t currently see that you are not getting, even ones I haven’t mentioned here.

New iPhones are expensive, so another thing you might say is that you can’t afford a new iPhone. That’s pretty reasonable, but in this case I think you should just buy a refurbished old iPhone. As of this writing, you can get a refurbished iPhone 13 from Walmart for around $400, which should stay up to date for a couple of years. I currently have an iPhone 13, which works fine except the battery is a little weak. You can also get a refurbished iPhone 11 for around $240, which will probably get 1 or 2 more years of iOS updates and is comparable to most Android phones at that price point. That said, iPhones hold their value reasonably well, so once you have an iPhone, you can trade it in when you want to upgrade and you won’t have to pay the whole sticker price.

“But wait!” you might exclaim. “This isn’t MY fault. It’s Apple’s fault, for not making their apps available for Android!” And yeah. It is unfair! In an ideal world, all phones would work together with each other perfectly and the only reason to buy a different phone would be the technical details. You should be able to buy a phone because of its two-day battery life or whatever, and it should work the same way as an iPhone. Whether or not locking everyone into the Apple ecosystem is something they can legally do is an important question, and there have been several anti-trust lawsuits over it, including one just this week.

But unless you’re part of the Department of Justice, there’s not really a lot you can do about it. Instead of hoping that Apple will be forced to make the Android experience equivalent to the iPhone (something that they very much do not want to do), or that they’ll finally implement RCS or something, you should probably just buy an iPhone as your next phone and make your life easier. Enjoy not having to defend your choice of phone, not needing to think about what brand of phone you’ll get next, and finally being able to play GamePigeon.

- Sent from my iPhone