I’ve been using an iPhone 11 for 4 years now and it has been serving me well. Through hardships and hard falls, broken hearts and broken screens, it has surprisingly survived, in a great condition no less. This is great, but throughout those experiences I have also felt the rough edges and ugly parts of being an iPhone user, and iPhones may not be for me.
Stuck in the Apple Ecosystem
When you use a device from apple, you’re expected to use all of them. If you have an iPhone, it starts bluetooth every time you turn it on, because it expects you to use AirPods. When you use Photos, it expects you to connect with iCloud. If you send Live Photos, you either see a static photo or a video. This is a great thing if your life revolves around apple devices, but not so great if you use a mix of devices like me. Syncing my phone data with my Linux computer is always a pain.
On the software side, there’s no alternatives at all. For your apps, there’s no alternative app stores like Fossdroid. So you can only use apps in app stores, which I heard has a brutal app verification and fee system. So for an app you like, if it’s not on the app store, it simply does not exist.
Customization
An avid customizer like me hates that iPhones have little room for customization. You can change wallpapers of your home screen and lock screen, and there’s some widgets, but that’s it. I want a fully custom home screen like on my Linux machine. Is it too much to ask?
Another custom “thing” I want would be my own apps on my phone. I want to write programs that connect to my server at home and run commands like I do with my computer. If you want to do that with your iPhone, you have to become a developer on the app store and pay monthly fees. You also need to have an Apple computer to write apps. That’s what makes customizing for apple so difficult.
Ethical Reasons
Apple is not a great company, and so are many large tech companies. There’s a lot of good that’s happening in the tech space that’s been hindered by these giants, so I don’t think I should give any more to those who don’t have my best interests in mind.
Alternatives
I realize that for the same price, quality, and features Apple offers, there’s no real alternatives, but I still want to believe. Here are some I think deserve looking at.
Fairphone
They sell phones and brand themselves as ethically good for the people and the planet. They make their phones easy to repair too. But their phones are quite pricey and difficult to get if you’re in a third-world country.
Linux Phones
This is more of a broad category, since there are so many “Linux phones.” They are based on linux and have a growing community of developers. But they are enthusiast phones and with the so few features and not so great software, it’s frankyly not worth the price
Pixel Phones
Out of all of these it’s the most realistic one to use. It has widespread use, it’s sold in more places than those I mentioned above, and it’s backed by a huge company. But, the company is Google and they have a not so great track record of ethics and deprecating entire projects.
These are just my opinions, and until my iPhone breaks though, I would like to keep using it.