Eh - it's not really the same. Android certainly still mostly pushes you at cloud based services (ex: Youtube Music/Amazon Music/Spotify/ETC)

But there's not really a "Standard" music player for the ecosystem, so the expectation is that you pick a 3rd party app you like and use that. And for the vast majority of those - the simple "you have a filesystem - play files from it" approach works just fine (ex: I use VLC for local content, and JellyFin for self-hosted music).

Personally - having my library hosted on my own JellyFin server is basically miles better than anything else I've found (And using either the native app or a specific music client for jellyfin).

The downside is the cost of entry is much higher, and it takes more time and effort to get setup the first time.

Also - your results will vary a lot more depending on which app you pick, and what features that company supports.

So... the experience defaults to something that's more complicated and less featurefull but can be significantly better than that available via iMusic/iCloud at the end of the day.

Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then.

iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.

This is one of those things that will hopefully be opened up with more standardization. There's nobody to blame but ourselves for not enforcing this earlier, and hopefully in the future opening an MP3 file won't be harder than it was in 2005.

I have also had it do that thing, where my (non-DRMed) song, recorded from a CD, is replaced by the DRMed “radio edit” version of the song, from Apple Music.

That’s fun.

Whether or not the sync actually happens, or if the song stays on the original device, seems to be a crapshoot.

Safari bookmark syncing is … not good. It rearranges bookmarks, refuses to delete some, refuses to sync certain ones, according to some internal algorithm. Etc.

Android was always focused on cloud stuff, which makes sense given that their biggest markets are places where most people don't have PCs, plus Google wants that halo effect from Android. I appreciated that iPhones were designed for my PC too. But iPhones were generally bad at copying any other data ad-hoc. They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.

Oh god! This bugs me so much. I don't understand why it's so hard to get this right. I'm sure it is, but why?

I know that if one of my devices switches from our 5GHz to our 2.4GHz network this can happen, but even when they're on the same network, it happens sometimes. (And why do my devices keep trying to force themselves off of the 5GHz network? WTF?)

And I get that it's called "Airdrop", but I'd really like it to work over ethernet, too, since that's a lot faster!

Check if BT is enabled on both your phones.