This is the same bullshit Apple has been doing with Mac OS X. I'm typing away in the terminal, doing something extremely productive, and suddenly my UI locks up for a second and I realize "shit, I must have accidentally timed a modifier key wrong and now I'm entering some crazy Mac mode" and then all of my windows fly around and I have to figure out how to get back to my terminal. I honestly don't understand why anyone wants any of these features, and if I did want them I'd want them to be super fast without the crazy slow animations, as every second I'm staring at them is a second I'm not working :/.

The one thing I can say is: just like on the Mac, you can turn most of this shit off on iOS. Essentially, they pretend that the only reason people would ever want to have an advanced option on iOS is because they are disabled, and so they hide everything under "Accessibility". You can turn off "3D Touch" and "Reachability" there. I'm not sure which edge swipes you hate, but if it is the one from the bottom, "Control Center" can be turned off (it is a top-level settings panel, turn off both "Access on Lock Screen" and "Access Within Apps"). You can also configure a lot about auto-correction under General/Keyboard.

And it's absolutely true that when Apple adds a new feature, it must have an accompanying slow animation tween to sell it. Frustrating.

Wifi status in menu bar: left and right click on the icon do the same thing. To get the advanced menu you need to option click the icon.

Audio status in menu bar: left and right click do the same thing. To get the advanced menu you need to option click the icon. Additionally, 'scrolling' on the audio icon does not change the volume.

By comparison, Microsoft achieved near-perfection in mouse design with the venerable Wheel Mouse Optical 1.1a. After more than a decade, that mouse is still perfectly usable for competitive gaming. Contemporary high-end mice from companies like Steelseries and Zowie imitate the shape of the WMO very closely, because it's exceedingly comfortable for a wide range of grip styles and hand sizes.

Apple has always produced mice that have at most one physical button, while providing in the OS to support third-party mice that have more. This isn't something that started with Ive. There are plenty of people who think Apple should produce mice that have more than one button throughout its history.

Having used all of these mice extensively, primarily in desktop publishing and programming environments, I haven't found any of the issues you mention a problem. That's not to say others haven't. I enjoyed using the Magic Mouse in particular. I never had any ergonomic issues with any of them, other than the Apple USB mouse.

You mention gaming, and I can see how none of Apple's mice would be good for this. And it's great that there are third-party companies producing great mice, and have been for a long time. (Speaking of Microsoft, I've heard great things about their keyboards as well.) Given my (admittedly personal) experience with Apple's mice, I find the phrasing "consistently awful" to be hyperbole and unwarranted. That's not to say they're the best. There's a wide range between "near-perfection" and "consistently awful".

Gaming is the extreme case for mouse use, but it's not an edge case. A good gaming mouse is simply a good mouse - not a puck that you push around the desk, but an extension of your hand with a sensor underneath. eSports gamers simply demand an excellent sensor and high-quality switches in an ergonomic package.

https://mionix.net/mice http://zowie.benq.com/en/product/mouse.html

They really started screwing up the core UI with just adding things for the sake of adding things.

I wonder if you mean standard-duration animations or their really-slow variations. Adding Shift to any OSX hotkey that involves animation will slow it down 20x or so (e.g. Cmd+Shift+F3). I guess it was originally introduced for show-off purposes, but it's weird how that still exists.

If you do the wrong thing on any computer system and I'm sure something unexpected would happen.

I'm not saying that "you're holding it wrong", nor do I know 100% what you're talking about, but I don't think its entirely fair to complain like that about a computer system that you're not using 'correctly'.

The bigger problem is the lack of alternatives. Android is such a mess of inconsistencies and bad UX, added to that are the problems with system updates, lack of a proper flagship device (the Pixel is a joke compared to the iPhone 6s in my opinion), and the fact that I don't like the Google ecosystem very much because of the way Google handles my data.

I really hope Apple gets back on track with iOS or Google finally nails it with Android so there would at least be competition. But at the moment, using 'mobile', for me, is more frustrating than it was in 2012.

I share your sentiment about Google. They look like they only do the minimal effort possible for Android not to die -- and since they get a lot of user data and ad revenue, they're not trying very hard since they're not taking hits in the wallet. That's not good enough for me, and IMO many other people. I personally have been witness to 3 tech-savvy businessmen who were excited to support Android finally give up and go full Apple. It was a pretty sad story listening to their motivation but I can't blame them because I found myself in 99% agreement with them.

I have the Exynos S7 Edge which for me is pretty much the one and only Android device which is close to perfect. I plan holding on to it until I see something that really excites me, until the release of iPhone 7s / 8 that is. If I like the 7s / 8 I'll just buy that and honestly call it quits with smartphones for at least 2 years.

Had enough of being milked for money for practically no upgrades at all for quite a while. Only Samsung and Apple are really trying -- mostly in the internal storage space.

I can understand some Android users have frustration over carrier issues. But every version I have used has been a significant improvement over the prior, especially under the hood. I suppose one can argue that Android allows for too much end user customization (directly or by third party) but I would rather suffer that than the alternative.

Android also runs on old harware. My LG G2, ancient by many measures, runs Android 7.1.1 via AICP and is more responsive in every way than the original stock 4.3. Unless I shatter the screen, there is no reason to replace this phone. Granted, custom ROMs are beyond grandma but for anybody with marginal tech know-how there are step-by-step guides to upgrade. Yet, iPhone owning friends with older models first complain about iOS updates being 'slow' and then eventually run to the store to "upgrade" their phone to the latest iVersion.

IMHO to say Google does just the minimum, especially compared to iOS, is not really the case.

Samsung's SmartManager allows you to do so and it improved my battery life. Not by 100% but having in mind how notoriously bad Android's standby battery life is, even 2 more hours of SOT is a huge win.

What I am trying to say -- and I don't disagree with all your arguments, please have that in mind -- is that Google can step it up a lot more on the front of the housekeeping, yet they don't.

How long is gonna take for all us techies to realize that the non-tech people hate maintaining tech? Why doesn't Android (and iOS) have mechanisms for never allowing the device's cache to exceed a certain amount, for example?

Again, I don't disagree with you: your arguments are fair, but I believe mine are too.

EDIT: One of the things that seriously alienated me from Google's "vanilla" take on Android is them never allowing mobile Chrome to have content blockers. The amount of trash scripts and popups/popdowns out there on the web is astounding. Actions speak louder than words. I guess they don't want their scripts being blocked as well. That, or they are incompetent.

I am very curious to find alternatives to Samsung's SmartManager.

BTW I am not talking about the "Data Saver" feature. I am talking about iOS-level of disallowing apps in the background -- they are killed and not allowed to run a single millisecond on the CPU, no questions asked. The "Data Saver" is a very minor and niche improvement.

I'm not sure what about it he considers a "joke", but it's one of the best phones I've ever owned. It's what Android was always meant to be.

Does iOS still spam you multiple times per day to "upgrade" to the latest version of iOS? That sort of constant nagging has me seriously thinking of ditching Apple products entirely.

Worked for me on iOS 9.3.5 after another HN user recommended it, anyway. Older versions I'm not sure about, but it can't hurt to try.

I've never owned an iPhone (or any i* devices), so I have no experience here, but aren't the folks at Apple likely to do stuff for a reason? Or are things really that bad?

They probably do have reasons, but as to what they are, no idea. And as to whether their reasons are beneficial to the user, in many cases I can say no, absolutely not.

I actually wish I could go back to iOS 6, but I've never been a fan of the flat UI style.

I feel that all of them, apple, google, facebook, amazon, they all disregard our privacy.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...

Not the same as Google/FB of course but the fact that they can target an ad based on some profile means they have the data.

http://searchads.apple.com

https://www.apple.com/privacy/

  Finally, I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.

All empty words if you ask me.

You feel that?

I won't argue about Apple, they are not perfect, they are after all human, but for the love of $DEITY they seem to be the only ones capable of decent UI. It always needs polish, OS X, iOS etc, but its much better than the tire fire alternatives out there.

And people complaining about the lack of headphone jack, Samsung, as usual, copied apple right after and removed it too. So, whatever.

My favorite Google UXs (by FAR) are Chromecast and Google Home. Especially together, they're magical. Is it a coincidence that there's no GUI there (OK, there kind of is for Chromecast, but only just)?

Google Home can pause/resume anything playing on any Chromecast or group of Chromecasts, even if Home didn't start the playback. It (play/pause) even works with apps like Plex which Google Home knows nothing about. It's gotten to the point where I'll find myself getting up to go to the bathroom at the movies and almost saying "OK Google, pause theater" (I'm not being hyperbolic, the thing which stopped me was not knowing what word went at the end of the command). Great UX, but no GUI.

Update: I use and love Android, but I wouldn't call it magical. It fits my usage patterns, but it definitely has some rough edges.

1. iTunes is slowly degrading into a usability nightmare - recommendations are often albums I own and bought from Apple!

2. the OS itself seemingly picks apps at random for the "play" button on the "swipe-up" menu. Like I might play a podcast on, say, Monday morning and then switch to music - but for the remainder of the monday and some of tuesday when I pause, lock and then later use the "swipe-up" menu it tries to resume playing the podcast not the music. not to mention this menu has two tabs, and switching between them involves a swipe - which usually triggers some of the sliders (Brightness, volume, position) on the screen. This clearly didn't go through any UX testing.

3. no way to disable "voice control" home key shortcut - my iPhone 6S has an AWFUL habit of interpreting background noise as "Dial my ex girlfriend". I somehow can't kill the call before it starts ringing, but usually I don't see it because something has pressed the home button in my pocket. It's truly embarrassing.

4. "Do you trust this computer?" for the millionth time, yes!

This is my last iPhone, I think.

That is incredibly generous considering the past decade of itunes, especially for Windows users. So much bad code, legacy cruft, and inconsistent UI decisions

Too bad there's no other contenders on Linux as well, there's a million players, but no syncing because apparently it makes more sense in 2016 to sync a song with uploading it to an other computer (teh cloud™) then download it back instead of copying it locally within 1m of proximity.

Surely it has grown into a behemoth with managing iPhones, online Music etc., but one can simply not use that.

Phone OSes aren't rocket science, at this point I just want a phone that has buildroot support, even if that means it lacks a GUI.

1) deletions don't sync

2) colisons are resolved by overwriting the side that is synced last

    --delete

Paying for being able to transfer files within 1m ? Yeah no. Thanks for the tip though.

Google Play Music (or any other music app) will then pick up the synced playlists

From the original post.

Been there done that, waiting in a full sport gear in the room for a playlist to sync going around the fucking planet while being 1m apart.

The desktop iTunes is a horror show in and of itself :D

Also weird: My opposite experience is just as maddening :)

The phone comes with a 3.5mm to Lightning adapter, so you can continue to use your existing headphones.

Also, you can disable 3D touch and reachability (the double-tap home button thing) in the accessibility settings, if those are causing your issues.

>offer a system that just underlines words-thought-to-be-wrong without changing them, and let me tap on them to change them

If you disable auto-correction in the keyboard settings, it acts just like that.

Yeah, no. When will I need this dongle? Exactly when I left it somewhere else. Then Apple will need a "Find my Dongle" application next to all the other "Find my*" applications.

I am not going to buy expensive spare dongles just so I don't rage when I realize I left the dongle at work so now I can't listen to music in the garage while I work on my projects. I am not going to carry it around all the time with my phone just in case I need it. The removal of the 3.5mm jack is a failure by Apple.

> expensive spare dongles

They're only $10 USD.

[1] https://uncourage.com/

In the case of the iPhone 7 the laptop bag is my pocket which has much more limited space and a hard connector getting situated in the wrong spot could end up being uncomfortable until readjusted. Additionally it is not just a wiring adapter. The Lighting to 3.5mm adapter actually contains a DAC and ADC inside of it which unfortunately causes the audio quality to suffer slightly compared to a higher quality dedicated DAC/ADC solution inside the phone.

http://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/

"when playing an uncompressed 16-bit audio file on the iPhone 6s, the dynamic range dropped from 99.1 dB at the headphone jack to 97.3 dB at the adapter. Though keep in mind, this slightly lower measurement is still higher than the theoretical maximum you get from a compact disc (which is 96 dB). So, is it a difference you are likely to notice? If you sit in a quiet room with a really, really good pair of headphones … and you’re a canine, the answer is: maybe."

But arguing this is a poor user experience is probably wrong for most people. Apple is correct in that this is the way things are going. I bet all the Flagship Android phones will be jackless too soon.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/06/samsung-galaxy-s8-ru...

I'm pretty sure that this market segment, while surely it exists, will never overlap with those who care about good sound quality and a good music listening experience.

In other words: they're leaving significant market segments behind.

Partly because even months before the iPhone 7 came out, sales of wireless headphones overtook those of wired.

http://qz.com/745108/wireless-headphone-sales-just-hit-a-tip...

People are already using it without unnecessary accessories.

I, for one, agree with the decision to let go of the audio jack.

Getting rid of the headphone jack is by far the dumbest move I have seen on the iPhone in a long time.

Then why did you get the iPhone 7? Should have voted with your wallet

When I get unexplained low blood sugars in my sleep, which is believed to be the cause of Dead in Bed Syndrome, it sounds an alarm on the iPhone to wake me up before it's too late.

As for going with the iPhone 6

1) my money would still have gone to Apple

2) I didn't think about what a pain it was until after I bought them

Side notes

1) I have contacted Dexcom regarding an app for Android, but it doesn't seem like it will happen anytime soon.

2) I also tried an open source version for Android, but after purchasing 4 phones in a row that it had varying problems with I decided my life was worth more than being able to stay on Android.

[EDIT]

Diabetes is the number 7 leading cause of death in the United States and low blood sugar is the number one reason for ER visits by Type 1 diabetics.

I know there have been some changes on the G5 so I'm not clear how that works.

With the G4 the Dexcom CGM acts as a proxy to the phone. So when everything is working correctly I get two alarms. So this gives me a certain level of redundancy. Anyway it works for me well enough that I can get a full night's sleep. For years I had alarms set to wake me up several times during the night.

[EDIT]

Also, responding to your question about the phone being louder than the Dexcom. The phone is an order of magnitude louder than the G4.

Also though, which model do you have?

I have the G4 Platinum w/Share. The sensors for it now ship with a warning sheet stating that you may not receive audible alarms due to issues with the speakers.

I have G5 with Share (I think; I have a drawer full of old Dexcom stuff) and have gotten the same letter, but haven't had that issue. I definitely trust it more than Dexcom pairing with the phone. I'm glad your setup is working for you, though.

I'm not saying removing the headphone jack to make the phone a mm thinner wasn't a retarded move, but... Really? $10?

What if I buy a router today and there is a company that sells routers with a nice gui, but all the rj45 jacks are removed and it requires a dongle on the power jack to be able to connect a rj45. (For some reason it comes with a dongle but that requires the router to run on batteries)

Anywho, I am not the guy that is going to buy apple hardware anyway. So I don't really have any impact on apple if I don't buy anything.

It's just that I see so many comments arguing that dongles are expensive... The problem is not that they're expensive. I agree that they suck, but I can't possibly believe that people that can afford to spend $1000 on an iPhone Plus all of a sudden can't afford a $10 or $29 dongle.

Then again, some people buy expensive cars and are surprised about the high price of spare parts. I guess many consumers like to pay a big amount of money for a single product, and not a big amount + 10 small amounts for a product that needs multiple other products during its life.

Its like a phone case, we all wish it wasn't necessary to have one, but many people buy cases because the phone needs it to stay nice/safe. And I don't think there is a solution readily available that makes phone cases abundant for those people.

It's amazing that people would pick an extra millimeter trimmed off or waterproofing over a headphone jack (I assume they did surveys..?).

Don't get me wrong, I'm no Apple fanboy. But the real injustice here is that they're clinging to their proprietary Lightning port instead of going with the standard USB-C. That is complete bullshit.

This goes both ways.

It's been a total non-issue for me. Since the iPhone 7 comes with both the adapter and Lighting headphones work/home usage isn't a problem. I just use the adapter + existing headphones at home and the Lighting headphones at work.

It turns out that what I really don't like is having a conversation on a Samsung phone with the consistently awful earpieces Samsung puts in them (Note 4, S4, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S...). I've been pretty happy with the iPhone 7 earpiece.

My plea to Samsung: you guys make killer displays; couldn't you figure out how to make an earpiece that isn't awful?

https://www.amazon.com/Cozy-Industries-MC-RD-1-2-MagCozy-2-P...

Asking him about it, he pulled out a new Pixel and said it was for op's very reason. In particular he noted that the pixel had a much better DAC than any one iPhone he'd ever had - and in particular that it could drive all of his higher end headphones. He also mentioned that the new iThing adapter has it own DAC inside the adapter... it's apparently powered by the lightning port with its own drivers - and that he had tried it out anyway but found it incapable of properly driving any of his nicer headphones.

Same with Precision Touchpad laptops (Dell XPS 15 for instance), changing all the swipe gestures to work exactly how I want. I always joke with my colleagues that if they can use my laptop efficiently, then I'm not done setting it up yet.

I totally get that it's a difference of expectations, it's just interesting to me.

The decision not to include a phone jack in the iPhone 7 was a crappy decision insteaead.

Given that USB-C requires roughly the same vertical space as the headphone jack, the one thing lightning has going for it from my perspective is that it works in a phone too thin for a headphone jack.

Well, besides being able to charge your phone from your laptop charger, use the same USB flash drive in your phone and laptop without an adapter, use the same powered noise-cancelling headphones in your laptop and phone, connect your phone to your projector/monitor/TV using the same adapter as the laptop, and so many more.

What if I want to use my headphones while charging my phone?

And how is the quality of the DAC in that adapter?

Sure sounds great!

Also, I need to buy a 3rd party dongle since power is also important in my car and I'm not buying a new car because of a phone.

I couldn't agree more with this. Just as bad (if not worse) on Android. I can't seem to use any modern phone without a huge number of unintended inputs. The reliance on gestures in apps is especially annoying because I don't use some of them often enough to memorize the different gestures. I very often just get stuck in various apps tapping and swiping randomly trying to make something happen. Just the other day I finally figured out when I get stuck in Instagram I can tap the Instagram logo to go back. Up till now I've been force quitting it instead.

I probably have a hagiographic image of who Steve Jobs was, but I have to imagine that the current state of iOS wouldn't have slipped past him.

Hear, hear. It's like my last days of using Windows. Every app window had so many "hot spots" crammed in that triggered something, so that whenever i had multiple overlapping windows and wanted to click on a background window to bring it to the foreground, I would inadvertently trigger an action or change program modes because there wasn't a single pixel of the underlying window that wasnt an active zone.

That behaviour totally broke the "multiple pieces of paper on a desk" behavior and instead turned your desktop into a myriad of booby traps ready to kill your productivity.

I am starting to feel the same way about iOS.

Bring back "dead space" on application windows that don't HAVE to do anything when you tap/click/swipe/pinch on them.

If one is using several applications on Windows and being productive about it - You don't switch applications in Windows by clicking then with mouse. You order them on the task bar and then switch between them using windows button - number (where number is the order on the task bar.).

One of the biggest culprits is MS Office (especially Excel, where I routinely keep data i need to refer to every now and then). Unless the title bar of the window is visible, clicking on any other edge will change the current active tab, pull down a menu, open a dialog, disable recalculate mode or some other weird behavior that is sometimes not readily apparent.

I actually researched this back many years ago, and at the time, clicking on windows Exposé style won out reasonably convincingly over keyboard techniques, including winkey+#.

Compared to expose which is first a hotkey to initiate(note that already here you lost the race in number of keys to press), wait 300ms for the animation to complete, find the window you want which is more like O(n), move hand to mouse, move mouse around to find the cursor, move cursor to desired window, click, wait another 300ms for animation.

Even if I happen to already have my hand on the mouse and know where the cursor is the best case will take you at least one second, this is much inferior to just pressing 2 keyboard buttons which is essentially instantaneous, even with faster animations you will not save much time as you need that time to find the window. With more than 5 windows open finding the right one can be a true challenge as they get very small and there will be a lot of them to scan.

For grandma who don't care about speed maybe expose is easier to understand and remember but for intense task switching by experienced users it is just in the way.

From memory, Expose was around ~1.0s, taskbar click around ~1.2s, winkey around 1.5s, with other methods slower.

The physical action of flicking your wrist and clicking is actually surprisingly fast, possibly even faster mechanically than a two-key keyboard shortcut - think how fast twitch gamers are.

Decision time was the main component. Expose's decision time was the lowest mean, and the most stable. Alt-tab had the lowest decision time, but far greater stdev. Yeah this is a controlled test that may not represent a real user's workflow, hence my 'depends'. "Find the window" is actually an interesting one - as long as the interface is reasonably spatially stable, you actually don't need to find it because your spatial memory takes care of that for you.

In my experience, while I might have a few 'primary' windows that suit the ordered taskbar well, I've often got a number of other things that come and go. I'm never going to remember what place they are. So, while winkey+# is fast for a select few windows, it's really slow for others. I don't find it appreciably faster than an Expose interface, and it's easier and faster for me in my workflow to use one main task switching interface.

Now I'll have to figure out if it can compete with a mastery of ctrl+tab and alt+tab (and windows+tab and their cousins ctrl+shift+tab).

They could have switched to USB-C, became standard, and then switched to one port. Then at least the head phones you but would also work on your shiny new MacBook.

Consider what would happen in that case: right now there are hundreds of millions of iPhone accessories out there that rely on the Lightning port - everything from headphones to cars to health devices and more. If Apple removed the Lightning port all of those accessories would become obsolete overnight and people would be up in arms about it (just look at the removal of the headphone jack and the storm in a teacup that became.) Manufacturers would bring out USB-C accessories for the iPhone, people would buy them to replace their Lightning accessories, the furore would die down and things would go back to normal, and then boom - Apple removes the USB-C port too.

In the space of a few years they'd have fucked over hundreds of millions of people who wasted money on replacing their accessories and the outrage would be overwhelming. People would be accusing Apple of doing it on purpose just to sell more accessories (which is what they're accusing Apple of right now because of the aforementioned removal of the headphone jack) when in reality Apple has been telegraphing the transition to wireless for a while now.

Going completely wireless would also destroy the current accessories market. No dongle or converter to fix it either.

Also apple already did change the connector for the iPhone once.

The iPhone will go USB-C because the rest of their products have. They can stay dumb and alienate their consumers, or finally start integrating with the world.

What's wrong with admitting that you took a bet and it didn't work out?

People do that all the time. Reasonable people, at least.

Removing the headphone jack had absolutely nothing to do with selling dongles and everything to do with Apple doing what it always does: seeing which way the wind is blowing and dragging everyone kicking and screaming into their vision of the future.

They did the exact same thing with the floppy drive and optical drive, they're now doing the same thing with USB and the headphone jack, and within five years you can be sure that every single one of their competitors will have made the same decision.

I had been really optimistic about the adoption of USB-C, since it is as an open standard, but the discovery of such enormous licensing revenues that are essentially without expense to Apple, makes it almost inevitable that they will begin insisting peripherals get permission from Apple, too.

Maybe I'm just forgetting things today, but i'm not thinking of any.

ADB? FireWire? Which ones?

It's an absolutely wonderful UX for me.

What about manageability, i.e. can a user fit a mental model of the system in their head, or is it too complex to do that? What about the related concepts of consistency and predictability? What about comprehensibility of the metaphors used? The clarity of language? What about ergonomics? Directness of manipulation? What about delight (think pull to refresh)?

Elevating discoverability above all other concerns means that there can be no hierarchy of information. Every feature becomes primary. Everything is on page one, everything is above the fold.

I've had an iPhone for a few months now and I still have no idea what this is about.

As for auto-correct, I forget that even exists as it is the first thing I disable on a new phone (I type in 3 different languages on a daily basis).

As for the iPhone 7 (which I will soon upgrade to), I've tested the phone and it feels fabulous. Lack of an ancient 3.5mm jack does not bother me. The DAC should be as close to your ear as possible, so it makes sense to most audiophiles. There is a dongle for that and I do not see an issue bringing that along if I need it.

If I don't like those design choices then I'd choose a different browser rather than spend time configuring one.

(And obviously people make browsers for people who love custom configuration. Safari is not one of those.)

I'm an iPhone user since the 1st gen iPhone with 8GB.

the horrible inconsistencies in the way autocorrect works

The worst part of autocorrect is how it sometimes autocorrects at just the last moment when you hit send. It's like my iPhone wants to break me up from my girlfriend! (I was dating an aspergirl recently, so literal meanings had a bit more meaning. Now I'm dating a foreign born ex-college professor, and she's more insistent on correct grammar than anyone I've known.)

all you said applies to me as well plus the new generic form factor which is uninspirning bust most importantly too large for comfortably pocketing

the real thing that keeps me locked to apple for now is the app commitment, but if a se2 fails to materialize I'll definitely jump to android at the end of life of my 5s

I've been curious about the Sony Xperia Z5 compact.

I would really like a Kickstarter for replacement form-factor main boards for classic iPhones (4S,5S) to run modern android or something.

I have so many "obsolete" phones with working hardware and barely usable software.

I think the 20% is actually pretty damn close to what my real error rate is, which astounded me. Even just stuff like initiating a scroll, I'm finding that I've started subconsciously ignoring the accidental 3D touch activations. I thought it would have been maybe 5%.

Android has this same problem and I wish they'd fix it using your suggestion. It would make typing so much better.

Ios have had that for at least a year. Two years?

That being said, it's not longer a deal breaker, I think, for most of the people that used to complain about it and if you have a pixel or a high end Galaxy its very rare to find instances of slugginess or dropped frames when scrolling.

I still face more sudden app crashes on Android than on iOS, weird error messages that are definitely not user-friendly and for some specific categories of apps, like games or sound/music, I still think iOS offers better selection and reliability.

Samsung abandons phones so fast, android updates are rare. (I know in my case the carrier is also between it)

Here are my conclusions after using iPhone for a couple of months as a daily driver:

1. The switch itself was, unexpectedly, a lot less painful that I anticipated. All my apps and mobile workflows were up and running in half a day. So I guess I'm platform-agnostic.

2. iOS feels very smooth. No stuttering at all. Sometimes I get lagging, but it's a minor annoyance, not a showstopper - except for cases when I can't pick up a phone call because the round draggy thingy just won't drag.

3. App switching via double-tapping the home button is easy and pleasant. I like it more than the Android way of switching apps.

4. Text editing on iOS is absolutely atrocious. This is a major downside, and a deal breaker for me. That's why I'm switching to Pixel as soon as I can get my hands on it. iOS's magnifying glass cursor is much less convenient than Android's "handle cursors", especially when the text I'm editing is near the top of the screen. Going into the editing mode requires a long tap, as opposed to Android's regular tap, which is annyoing as well. The stock keyboard is slick but useless because I'm a gesture typer. I tried Swype, but it's no match for Google keyboard. GBoard might be a good replacement, but it doesn't support Russian yet, so no opinion here.

4a. The only thing in iPhone that somehow mitigates the awfulness of text editing on iOS is 3D-touch cursor movement. You strong-press in the keyboard area and drag, and the cursor moves. This feature is very well done. I'll probably get me iPhone 6s just to have it (not iPhone 7 because I don't like their new home button). Also, this 3D-touch cursor movement may not work with non-stock keyboard like GBoard or Swype - I have no information about that.

FWIW, voice typing generally works well for me. Not sure why you're having so much trouble.