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It's no secret that I have a deep interest in mobile phones. Over the years I've had Windows CE phones, Blackberry's, an iPhone and various Android phones.
I have been using Android phones for about 3 years starting with the Galaxy S3, then the S4 moving to the Note3 and finally the HTC One M8. I was fully invested in the Android eco system.
In September I decided to move away from Android and back to the iPhone getting the 6+ (I like a big phone)
For a long time I've argued that Android is a superior OS to iOS but Apple has improved iOS a lot and finally produced a decent size phone. I'm not sorry I made the move and there isn't anything I could do on Android that I can't do on the iPhone. The apps are pretty much the same and the battery life on the phone is really excellent.
The one thing you can't do on iOS is customise the home screens in the way you can with Android with different launchers and I do miss that but it's a small thing to give up.
I'd be interested in knowing what experiences other users have in swapping OSs and what advantages or disadvantages have been encountered.
Personally when I travel I never bother with foreign sims. I am able to use either Euro Traveller or World Traveller. In other areas, such as when I was in the Far East, I hop between Wi Fi hot spots.
The other thing I wanted to mention was that battery life in the 6+ is much much much better than any other smartphone I've ever had and several orders of magnitude better than the Note 3.
I can honestly say @Nabs that there is nothing from Android that I miss on iOS.
The main difference is the absence of widgets and the lack of alternative launchers for iOS unless you want to jail break, which I don't.
Other than that, there is very little difference in functionality - there is nothing I can't do on the iPhone that I couldn't do on Android and vice versa (except some specialist S Pen stuff on the Note range).
Excellent question @thesoupdragon
I think integration comes in several parts:
1. Email - as I use a Hosted Exchange Account any mobile device I use is able to access my emails, contacts and calendar and keep them synced in both directions. The iOS email client is excellent, as are the most of the Android clients - but not all. For instance, I have server side rules that push certain emails into folders other than inbox. I like to get notifications of the arrival of those emails as well as those into the main inbox. Not all Android email clients support that functionality - Sony being one example.
2. Music - I had an iPod long before I had a smartphone, so I was already using iTunes to manage my music. When I had an iPhone 4 that worked perfectly of course and when I moved to Android, all I had to do was copy the music files to the Android phone manually and everything worked fine. Now I’m back on iOS of course iTunes is still doing its stuff.
3. Photos - Like all of us, I have thousand of photos on my computer. I also like to have them on my phone. iTunes is very good at managing the uploading of photos and automatically compressing them so they don’t take up too much space. It took me a while to find a utility that would do the same for me on Android phones and it was no where near as easy and user friendly
4. Taking photos - all the smartphones do this well. With Android (and remember i still have the Samsung Galaxy Camera that is fully Android based) upload photos automatically to both Google + and OneDrive (belt and braces). The iPhone backs photos up to photo stream that downloads on to the Mac, but I also still back up to Google + and One Drive on the iPhone
5. Google Apps - all the main Google apps work just as well on iOS as they do on Android. So I still use Google + and Google Maps on the iPhone just as I did on Android devices. I don’t use gmail so that doesn’t matter to me. The only one that doesn’t appear to have made the transition is Google Keep but as the iOS Notes app integrates perfectly with my Exchange account it isn’t an issue for me.
So for me transition is almost seamless and instant.
