An iOS Person Turns to Android - How Did This Go?
Well, it didn't go so well!
A friend challenged me several weeks ago. I was never excessively religious about Apple products but I have been into the Apple ecosystem ever since 2006 when I bought second-hand the magically compact and powerful (for the time) 12 inch Macbook Pro. As a student who, until then, I was lugging around a 15-inch multi-kilo HP laptop, going to Mac was a complete mind-shift: both because of its size and portability and its operating system. A very fast (short) forward to 2007, Apple released the first iPhone — although in Germany it took several more months for it to be available, I was sending my first emails from a mobile device by November (official release in Germany was 9th November). And since then, I've been into the Apple ecosystem through almost every one of the hardware and every one of the software iterations up to today's iPhone 7 Plus.
With this year's iPhone anniversary, I was in a conversation with a friend who asked quite bluntly:
"As a person who advocates understanding and experiencing differences, how come you've never tried Android?"
Cold shower — and a few hours on youtube listening to reviews and on ebay hunting for a second-hand current Android phone, I accepted the challenge! In between the Google Pixel, the Mi Mix, and the Samsugn Galaxy S8, I didn't really have a high preference — all seem to offer tremendous design from the simplicity of the Pixel, through the avant garde Mi Mix, to the incredibly technologically smooth S8. All had great reviews and I braced myself and pulled the trigger on getting a second-hand S8.
As any tech-nerd, I was excited when it arrived (and I even overzealously bought the DeX Station which enables to plug in the phone into any screen, keyboard, and mouse and to convert the phone into a full desktop experience — THAT part, actually worked very well and was unique to this phone). I loaded it quickly with all the apps I use on my iPhone and started exploring.
At first, I thought that there are a few weird things — I needed to rewire my brain about how to launch apps, how the security features worked (finger print on the back), where the camera sits, how different the vibrations are, how the settings are organized, and more. And it was going on ok — not spectacular, but I could see myself working that way quite ok.
The place where things started breaking was when I tried to transfer pictures from the phone to my Mac laptop for editing and archiving. Connecting the phone with a cable to a Mac doesn't give the same type of solution you normally get when you plug in a USB drive or an iPhone — my Mac never 'saw' the Samsung through any of the apps I tried (Photos, Lightroom, Image Capture); googling returned a number of additional apps to install specifically for the purposes of doing this but neither of the two I tried worked (one crashed, the other one was REALLY cumbersom), and bluetooth transfer worked but was too slow to do anything meaningful. How can this be that hard?!
The diversity activist in my head persevered — the lesson was worth it. If the choice of phone can say something about our personalities (a semi-random choice here), then being able to build a bridge between the two is surely an asset. The iOS person in my head though was rebelling. This experiment wasn't meant to be a review or to produce a 'switcher' but it reminded me of the power of habit. Both Apple and the Android headset manufacturers have been good at nudging our brains with each new OS leading to a divergence in the ecosystems: many years ago, a Samsung phone really looked and behaved like a copy of Apple's. Today, they behave very differently from each other. From a business perspective, it is understandable that the two ecosystems should not communicate — it is almost expected that it will be difficult to transfer photos, for example.
Such an argument can rarely be made about the two users, though — and just as the users of those phones can still communicate through bridges such as Whatsapp, facebook messenger, Slack, and many more, we need to build such bridges with the people who are different from us in their experiences, culture, knowledge, personality, and more — finding the common protocoles, tearning the language, and adapting the delivery mode just as the smart software designers and design gurus of the apps do.
Who has tried the reverse experiment and has a story to share?
For the curious, the experiment ended after a week — I came back to my iPhone 7 plus and returned the Samsung phone — great design and hardware, new user experience and more design choices, more advanced sensors and technology. But that phone still did not communicate well with the niche user who has a multi-operating-system environment. And with smartphones (and other things), interoperatibility trumps isolationism.