Thread by @frioux

I recently switched from Android to iOS and some friends have had questions. I'll attempt to answer them here.

First and foremost: why. Fundamentally Google is a company motivated by it's main business: advertisements. This business model motivates all kinds of sub-optimal behavior. You see it in the news, you see it in the canceled-but-beloved apps, you see it in the shoddy ecosystem.

I have been nervous about my use of Google products for a long time. I set up a paid email account 7 or 8 years ago, use duckduckgo, and firefox. It's kindav a hairshirt but I feel good about the decisions.

Anyway, my Android phone (Pixel 3) had 3 strikes: 1. in 2020 it's speaker would just turn off. The only solution was a reboot and of course the main way I'd find out was a missed call or page. 2. the USB-C connecter nearly falls out of the socket. 3. EOL, no security updates

I finally bit the bullet and ordered an iPhone. I paid full price to get it unlocked. When I was younger I wouldn't have been able to afford that, and would have had to migrate to another provider, probably.

For better or worse I am still using Google Fi for my mobile service, so I followed these instructions: fi.google.com/ios/quicksetup. I expect to switch away at some point, but one thing at a time right?

After the above I installed signal and signed into Gmail so I could access email, contacts, and calendars. The only weird issue was that gmail has a weird hidden page where you enable syncing of certain calendars: anyplan-support.blogspot.com/2022/01/sync-a…

I installed a bunch of apps. Here are some replacements I had to make:
* Google Fit and Health are not the same. I replaced some of Fit with Strava.
* I found a random KeePass tool but don't like it as much as what I had on android. I'll keep looking

* Firefox is mostly useless except to use it to send tabs to other devices. Firefox focus is a free private browser *and* content blocker (ads) for Safari.
* The built in Podcasts app is head and shoulders better than Google Podcasts, to the surprise of no one

The next, pretty huge step, was to mostly, finally, stop using Gmail. My main email addresses no longer contain gmail.com, but I was using Gmail for storage. I have a bunch of friends who work at @Fastmail so I was pretty sure that I was just gonna switch to that.

I already had a @pobox account and getting it migrated to Fastmail was pretty painless. I made a support request and it mostly just worked. There were a couple steps I had to take (update MX records, update any email clients, cancel the original pobox account.)

Fastmail has a gmail import and it is impressively fast. I have never considered *why* offlineimap takes days to download my (nearly 17 year old almost quarter million messages) gmail, but Fastmail took just over an hour. Awesome.

I knew I had a few remaining accounts that were going directly to gmail, so I found them by searching on fastmail (lives up to it's name, faster than gmail) with the query `to:[e-mail] after:2021-01-01` and walked through each account, changing passwords and to addresses.

As an aside, the fastmail web ui is really good. I might start using it primarily, after having abandoned the gmail UI as too slow many years ago for mutt. Could be nice not to have all this local email infra (mutt, postfix, offlineimap...)

Once fastmail was set up, I disabled syncing gmail contacts and emails on the iphone, but left calendars. The fastmail calendar still needs some work so I'm straddling both for now, but fully intend to switch eventually.

The one remaining email bit I haven't figured out is @Tailscale. Tailscale is SSO only, so migrating my SSO from gmail to (probably) github is basically going to be me creating a totally new account, as far as I can tell. I can live with that but it'll be annoying.

OK so I got everything migrated, I am using iOS daily, and am almost all the way out of the google ecosystem (still using gcal, Youtube Music, and Fi.) Here are some things I think iOS does better and worse:

The default iOS apps are good. I find the default Google apps are mostly not. The podcast example is top of mind, google podcasts doesn't even have a persistent UI in the status bar like normal media players. How?!

iOS doesn't have the call screening I had with Android on Fi. This is brutal. I loved being able to press a button and see a readout of "who is this" and inevitably "...insurance will expire in 5 days...". Now I just get the opportunity to ignore unknown numbers?

iOS has been better about privacy and app permissions for a long time. On the other hand, on Android you can allow some notifications and not others for a single app. iOS doesn't have this and it's a bummer.

iOS doesn't support a general @lastfm. Not surprising since the way LastFM works is by spying on your notifications, but still a bummer. I am basically not doing LastFM anymore now.

Overall so far I am reasonably pleased with iOS. It's a mostly useful solution out of the box, which I think is less true of Android. A lot of people act like iOS is more of a walled garden than Android, which I think is silly, they are both mostly closed ecosystems.

If I really wanted freedom I'd probably go to a totally different ecosystem, but freedom is not my goal with a phone, I just want a working appliance. I seriously considered a flip phone, a gps, a camera, and a pager. Maybe next time.