After 7 years of android I switched over to iPhone. Largely due to the Google hate I experience here on hn. There is so many small annoyances on iPhone. Some things like hide my email, password management are brilliant, even if I need to use Safari, which I hate because I want to use Firefox for ad blocking. But iOS is objectively terrible. Notifications are so horrible. Support for my Garmin watch is awful. The jarring system sounds and don’t even get me started on the awful alarm sounds. Siri is unusable and the fact that I can’t change to another assistant is terrible. Apple Maps doesn’t even have biking directions in one of the most bike central cities of the world, amsterdam, lol!! Useless. Dutch is not supported in system wide translations feature, again I need to revert to Google translate. Keyboards for multilingual people are really really terrible. I need to switch between 4 languages every day. The fact that I need to switch between keyboards and then still have autocomplete fight me whenever I dare to use a word form a different language ( even simple ones like “yeah” which I want to use in German or Dutch as well ). The keyboard is so terrible as well. And then just things that make no sense at all. Why can I not see a battery percentage on the icon of the battery? I need to swipe control center down to see that. Why can I not see seconds in the time? Why can I not set two timers?????

I really really really hate iOS. It has things that are nice and better than android. But for anybody to think that it is a “complete and integrated” ecosystem makes me … laugh. Like it’s just objectively terrible.

A lot of the annoyances that you cited are valid. I speak three languages (one that the keyboard does not support), and my accent when speaking English trips Siri a lot (But I prefer not to switch to French). But the ecosystem really works together when using Apple products. Anything else and it becomes jarring. And you can appreciate it when you accept THEIR way of things. I used to be a heavy customizer (Arch, Custom roms for Android,...), but this day not so much.

And it does work for people that can accept that. Anyone else? Not really, as you will feel frustrated by the constraints and the tall wall of their garden.

That's just saying it works together so long as you define working as what it does.

> Why can I not see a battery percentage on the icon of the battery?

Settings :: Battery :: Battery Percentage

Siri, Keyboard, and Maps gripes granted, but not really what people mean when they talk about "ecosystem", I'm very happy with how I can copy paste between my phone and laptop, and how my homepods and airpods and appletv all hand-off to each other.

> Settings :: Battery :: Battery Percentage

Yeah, that would make sense, right? But Apple decided not to include that setting on iPhones with a notch (which is basically all of them these days).

> I'm very happy with how I can copy paste between my phone and laptop.

If you use Linux and Android, you can do that with KDE connect. Pretty sure there's some solution for Windows too.

> objectively terrible

I think notifications are far better on iOS, love using Siri for controlling things/the phone (search is mediocre at best), I like the system sounds and alarms, hate when I have to use my Pixel dev phone's keyboard, etc, etc. It's rather subjective.

The two timers thing though, holy crap that annoys me. I swear they said they fixed that...

> I think notifications are far better on iOS

Except you have to swipe-then-tap to dismiss them. It's so fucking annoying. That's the biggest thing I miss about Android, just a simple swipe dismisses them.

Here is some tip if that can help : if you continue to swipe after the button are shown, you'll feel a vibration and releasing your finger will activate the default option (which is "Close"). In fact, you just have to do larger swipes.

But yeah, I also uses iOS because I don't want anything Google. In terms of UX, i don't like iOS but I also loathe Android. I currently lack courage, but I think that in some point in my life, I'll just throw smartphones. I'm sad that Firefox OS became this closed KaiOS thing. A hackable dumbphone is just what I need.

There still is Ubuntu Touch with slowly growing device pool support. Dunno how polished or performant it is right now, though.

And for those of us who don't want to live exclusively in their walled garden, it's an ecosystem rife with friction and sludge.

It's hard to call the iPhone complete when it makes egregious concessions in it's capabilities in the name of "safety" (which turns out to be a moot-point anyways, as sufficently funded state actors have proven to us over the past few months).

Security is not moot just because state actors can break it, that's basically expected. The idea is to give everyone below the level of a state a harder time.

If all that effort didn't come at the expense of user agency, I'd be inclined to agree. Instead, it looks like an increasingly toothless justification to prevent people from undermining the App Store's profitability. The security theater isn't as convincing when their puppets are falling apart in their hands.

But it's not security theater. Sandboxing and strong isolation is one of the oldest techniques around for increasing security. iOS has the least malware of any OS. The security measures it contains would appear to be extremely good at keeping out threats that plague many other platforms.

Sandboxing and strong isolation are not mutually exclusive with allowing third-party sources to install apps. If their sandboxing is as good as you say it is, there should be no security threat imposed by allowing other apps on the device. The two should be distinct, separate threat models, but Apple conflates them.

Allowlisting is also one of the best security practices you can implement, because allowlisting significantly reduces the problem space of executables you have to consider (and dangerous executables, if found, can be removed from the allowlist). There's always a chance that a piece of malware which somehow breaks the sandboxing and isolation can find its way onto someone's device; allowlisting greatly mitigates this possibility.

Endpoint security is everyone's problem now, because everyone has one or more always-connected devices. The future of computing is a signed, remotely attested path from power-on to user application code, all checked against an allowlist of approved binaries. For most, this will be a good thing.

> If their sandboxing is as good as you say it is, there should be no security threat imposed by allowing other apps on the device.

No, because it's part of a defense-in-depth strategy. Sandboxing and isolation is meant to catch what app review misses, without app review people would be attacking those mechanisms directly at a much higher frequency.

What state actors? They are compromised by a small, private company.