Choosing a new phone

For the last two years I’ve been using an Apple iPhone on loan from Apple. Before then, I used a multiple variety of Android phones, but with a welcome revival in work being done for Apple Podcasts, I was offered an iPhone to use - and then, when the year expired, I was offered another.

The email requiring it to be returned almost came as a bit of a surprise, but forced me to some quick thinking. Now I have to buy a phone, which would I replace it with?

A Fairphone or Jolla device would have been excellent ethically; but not ideal from my point of view - there are a number of apps I need to be able to use as part of my day job, and I also appreciate a decent quality optical zoom, and to be able to pay using a watch/phone.

I have a Pixel watch in a drawer, and currently wear an Apple Watch. I use AirPods, but also in my drawer are enough earbuds which are Android-friendly. All my devices are USB-C (I won’t consider anything without it). My photos are synched between both ecosystems. My passwords are deliberately outside any manufacturer’s ecosystem: I use Bitwarden. So I had a genuine choice - not really tied into any one of the ecosystems.

I checked the apps I use. Flighty, a flight tracker, is the only one that is really iOS-only. And, of course, Apple Podcasts (which has plenty of alternatives, of course).

The hardware I use - from the car to speakers - all work fine on either iOS or Android. I’m pretty confident that either work.

I was beginning to be excited. Perhaps I could switch to an Android device, use my superior (round!) Pixel watch, and go back to an operating system that I used for more than ten years - now that Android phones also have wireless charging and MagSafe-like functionality.

But in my two years on iPhone, I’m aware of one thing - that even though most apps are available on both, the polish is better on iOS. They just tend to work better on Apple devices (in most cases).

My many Apple Tags, which only today alerted me that while I’d made a tight connection in DFW my bags hadn’t, are usable without iPhone; I just have to fish an aging iPad out of my backpack. But that’s a nuisance.

And then Paul, a geeky man at the coffee shop I frequent, said something that stopped me in my tracks a little. “It’s a choice between freedom and privacy. Android gives you freedom. iPhone gives you privacy.”

And I realised that while I was happy to embrace the slight chaos of the Android ecosystem, I’ve also spent much time lessening my reliance on Google. I don’t use its search, nor its maps, or AI, or SSO. Did I really want to volunteer data from all my mobile use back to a company that seems to have lost much of its innovative flair?

So, iPhone it is.

I got the orange one.