This is precisely why I will not buy an iPhone again. Every single time I open my photos to show someone something I have to wait through two popups that are extremely slow to close. Also now I'm getting nagged to upgrade to ios 11 whenever I just want to use the phone. Abysmal.

What's the alternative? Android, especially Samsung infested bloatware, is substantially worse. The touchwiz upgrade prompts are WAY more annoying than ios ones. Plus the constant Samsung login junk. And then there is the heavy google integration that requires a google account for almost everything.

Except it isn't worse. Not anymore anyway. Any and all notifications just go up top and don't prevent you from using the phone -- even if someone calls you. My 3 year old Sony Xperia Z1C that I only use to for testing lets me jump into whatever app I want as soon as it starts immediately even though I can see there's like 50 notifications to go through. But I can do that when it's convenient for me.

My main problem is that if I simply want to do something on any iOS now as soon as I unlock it I'm blocked by pop ups for things like making a back up and buying more iCloud storage and upgrading to iOS 11 -- things I never intend to do. There's no way to switch these off either. And they happen constantly, multiple times a day.

Last time I used my iPad I dismissed a popup, opened up an app and the same pop up came a few minutes later completely interrupting me. I have no tolerance for these annoyances.

Samsung phones were complete trash back in the day with their bloated interface but I've since switched to a Note 8 and the experience has been very good. UI is very clean and the performance/features on the phone are outstanding.

Samsung OS is always slick until a year later when they drop all support for it, and the force installed apps start to install adware. This has happened on every Samsung I’ve owned.

All of those have a free tier and/or no paid levels. I've never not had Apple pay setup, so I don't know what the nags look like though.

The iPhone is a rather one size fits most device. If you don't want to go along with Apple's idea of how to use the device, you will be unhappy with it.

Right now I'm fighting the practically forced upgrading of a particular app for which the update will remove functionality. But in order to not update one app, I'm forced to manually update every other app individually. Which is about 40-50 updates a week that I have to approve.

Using the phone forces me to realize the extent to which I don't really own it. I'm just sort of renting services from it with an all-or-nothing set of features.