Android phones can't use iMessage because Apple never opened it up, contrary to what Steve Jobs was hinting at back when it was released.

Nowadays I believe you can get a blue bubble when chatting from an Android with an iPhone user by using RCS / JOYN.

Maybe your "social group". If your friends refuse to talk to you because of the cell phone brand you use, I have bad news for you: They might not really be great friends.

You are missing the /s right?

The hard to tell part is I'm also crossing carriers to message them, so that might have been the issue as well.

I see this in middle and lower-middle class people.

But in the upper-middle class, this is a non issue. We know how Apple manipulates people who struggle to spend $50/mo on a phone.

Source? Would love to read this one lol

This is a bad way to go through life with this reasoning. It is pretty well understood that in normal situations the vast majority of people are not vocal even if they feel the same way about things the vocal people are saying. As an example I use a lot, congress critters use a formula to get the pulse of the constituents. If they receive a hand written letter (yes, I learned about the formula when people did that), they'd multiply that by some factor knowing that if one person felt strongly enough to send in a letter that others also felt that way. Phone calls were the same, but with a smaller multiplier as it was easier to make a call that write a letter followed by emails with yet a smaller mult. This was all well before social media, but I'd imagine searching tweets would give a pretty good indicator as well now. A single tweet would be worth something, but tweets with lots of retweets and heavy comment activity would be something else. Even if a tweet is something done pretty much on a whim with little thought behind it like that letter.

The silent majority is called that for a reason. It doesn't mean they are happy or content. Ignore that reality at your own peril.

    …or with Siri mishearing…

I just want a small set of commands that are easy to differentiate from each other, and a readback before executing the command. This is what phones did back in the days of Symbian, and I could reliably use one from a motorcycle helmet intercom without ever touching my phone. It's what air traffic controllers do, because even people can't reliably understand each other.

We've had decades of Apple and Google pretending that their voice recognition is so flawless it can understand anything and execute it immediately, but for petty much everyone except yourself they can't, so I can no longer use a hands-free phone. I'm glad I'm not blind.

So consider the possibility that many people are affected but haven't reached the threshold of writing something about it.

'therefore, the majority of people probably agree with me'.

Lots of people say they love in India, and that is not true for new. That doesn't make the likeliest fact that a majority of the world lives in the UK and, while India is an oddly vocal 'minority'.

My switching was due to a build up of minor frictions and frustrations with feeling like a second class citizen on iOS because I use largely gsuite apps rather than being bought into the Apple way for everything, with the last straw being the limitations on Pebble functionality.

That being said clipboard history would be a nice addition. However I never want to see how long until my morning alarm, that’s one thing from android I don’t miss, it would give me immediate anxiety.

Regardless when you’re used to something it often doesn’t feel like “putting up with it”, and when you’re not used to something things that are totally fine can feel like you’re putting up with an annoyance. This works both ways.

Take any iphone user and put an android phone in their hands and within the first two months there will be a lot of things they’ll say “how do android users put up with this stuff” about too.

It’s fine. They’re both fine, it’s about what you’re used to more than anything.

Meanwhile the lock button long-press was hijacked for Siri, so now you have to click it five times if you want to turn off the phone.

And don't get me started on the useless back tap, which now displays a popup randomly, trying to seduce you into using it instead of a physical button, but the detection is so flaky I doubt anyone actually uses it.

Please correct me if I'm wrong - it is after all just a feeling.

They should stick to Claude Code, like everyone else.

They have been last to get Widgets. They don't have apps I use (terminals, emulators, pulse wave generators). Not to mention Gemini AI is actually really nice for scanning a screen and doing actions with it.

Apple is always 2nd place or worse. Except marketing, they are #1.

I had to downgrade to Mojave so the wheels likely came off internally around then.

Even siri got worse, when I say call <nickname of my gitfriend> now it does some location based search, and calls sonebody, when near home it is a doctor, when on the other side of the river it is a flower shop, at othe rplaces other random non-contacts, with a contact having the sting it used for search, as her nickname is always part of the called person… It used to work flawlessly as expected…

I would be fine with Siri actually if if could handle simple fixed phrase based task, no AI, as it could a few years ago.

Apple has shifted from working to produce quality to working to maximize profit ... when it comes to software.

The only thing that would change this would be a new CEO or Apple hemorrhaging money with more people buy alternative solutions.

To be fair ... Microsoft is in the same down hill spiral in quality and the IT industry staying with them allows form the to do this.

This is a way that Tim has been failing Apple and its customers. The quality just isn't there any more. "It [doesnt] just work". And the UX is increasingly terrible.

I have also been considering switching to Android. The Apple tax is decreasingly worth it when it don't buy quality.