I’m currently using an S7 edge that I’m moderately happy with, sans a cracked screen and the somewhat mediocre performance. I’ll chock up the performance bit to the fact that I’m running it with battery saver set to reduce performance and lock a few other things down for the sake of battery life, but otherwise it’s serving me well, and it gets great cellular performance and reception.

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Ever since the Motorola Droid (yep, the OG slider that was sold on Verizon), I’ve been on Android, and haven’t switched to any other OS, even just for temporary reasons. I used to be the guy who would always root his phones so I could control certain aspects that weren’t factory, like down-clocking the CPU in the name of battery life, or removing unwanted carrier bloat or even running a custom ROM (man, I loved my Galaxy Nexus). The only thing I do now is use a package disabler that allows me to prevent carrier apps from my carrier (AT&T) from running in the background, sucking away at my battery and possibly accessing my data.

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My biggest hold-back is how locked down iOS is. Without going into detail, I support customers on a daily basis that use Apple products, and have seen just about every kind of issue come across my “desk”, and have been a bit leery of some of the funkyness iOS has when issues arise. My S7 edge has never done anything odd where I’ve had to jump in and troubleshoot and perform steps to resolve issues. It’s basically been smooth sailing, other than Samsung’s UI not being my favorite rendition of Android OS, and the issues I’ve mentioned above. But back to the locked down aspect, I’m going to list how I use my phone, with specifics, and I’d like some opinions on whether or not I should even consider iOS, and if so, maybe how to cope with some of my requirements that can’t be met with iOS.

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* I’m an audio engineer, and one of the things I do the most is send mixes out to my clients, usually in mp3 form, for referencing. As such, I like to put the mp3s on my phone, and since I store everything with Google Drive, I simply pull my app up on my phone and not only have the option of listening to said mp3, but I can even download it to the internal storage, and it show up in my Google Play Music app. I do this with not only mixes I’ve uploaded, but sometimes I’ll put an entire body of work on my Drive and then download to my phone’s storage, and because I meticulously tag my audio, the downloaded mp3’s show up with cover art and all in Google Play Music. I’m concerned about iOS not allowing one to essentially pull mp3’s available from the Files app into the Music app and play them there.
* Though battery life could be better on my S7 edge, I’m pretty happy with it considering the capacity the battery has. I mainly use Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Reddit, Discord, Samsung Browser (my browser of choice on my phone), Google Duo, and the phone and messages app native to my phone. I don’t do mobile gaming, and typically keep a small number of apps on my phone to do the job. Considering that I usually pull about 3 1/2 to 4 hours of screen-on time, with FB Messenger, Reddit, messages and phone having the most usage (I’d say all split evenly), how well will iOS cope with that? Specifically, I’ll be rocking a 6S with a replacement battery as my “test” device.
* Though I don’t customize my device much, I do use Nova Launcher with a custom icon pack, and KWGT Pro to display a running list of events for my calendar as well as any upcoming alarms (time and date). I understand iOS has the Today screen, which basically includes widgets that would be useful to me in this regard, but can it really include the information I need? If it can show my upcoming calendar entries, as well as alarms, I think I’ll be good and not missing my icon and home screen customization so much.
* I’m pretty heavily invested in Google’s ecosystem as far as apps and services go. I use Gmail, Duo, Drive, Calendar, Contacts, Keep Notes, Maps, Photos, Home, Assistant, all of the Play services, YouTube, Voice, and maybe a handful of additional offerings. For most of these, I think I’ll be fine, as iOS does a nice job of syncing up with these either natively or via the apps I could download. However, I do use Google search and Assistant quite a bit, and I’m not liking what I see about Siri. How do Google services perform with iOS, and are there any shortcomings on iOS using any of Google’s offerings vs how they work on Android?
* Though I don’t take a lot of pictures/video, I’ve not always been impressed by the S7 edge’s imaging capabilities. I’m pretty sure it’s just the processing that Samsung has implemented into the capture process, as images always look oversharpened and almost unrealistic. I used a modded version of the Google Camera, and while it was glitchy, it got me closer to what I would expect from a flagship. Video capture along with optical image stabilization is typically great, sans low-light capture looking pretty grainy and fuzzy. How does the iPhone 6S stack up against the S7 edge in the camera department? I can look for reviews if that’s something that would suit me better.
* Notifications on Android are fantastic. Over the years of Google and the dev team for Android working to build a better mobile OS, they have me hooked on the quick reply feature, as well as just the ease of accessibility to what I need to see. I don’t have to dig through my apps list to see the notification badge lit up, and the notification shade is useful in regards to having all of my quick toggles for WiFi, Bluetooth, Brightness, etc. and notifications are grouped properly and it just looks nice. Who even uses the notification shade on iOS? I’ve never seen any of my family/friends use it, ever, and they usually only check their notifications from the lock screen. Are notifications just not as important on iOS as Android would have its users believe?
* If there’s anything my S7 edge does well, it’s cellular usability. It supports LTE Advanced, so I typically get completely usable service with my carrier to the point I just never run speed tests. It’s also got some stellar radio quality, as I’m usually the only one that gets signal in areas that other devices that show “No Service”. It’s been the best phone for cellular reception and usability, and I’m concerned how the iPhone 6S stacks up with that. There are plenty of HowardForum posts where users agree with each other that the S7 edge has the best service of any device they’ve ever used, even newer devices like the S8, S9, and Note 8 and 9 from Samsung, and possibly newer iPhones like the 7, 8, X, and beyond. My MIL has the X with the Qualcomm modem in it, and her phone does seem to hang on about as well as my S7 edge does at our house where service isn’t great, but we use WiFi Calling here and I’m not sure how much more often my phone actually latches onto the cell tower than hers, or if it’s the same. Do iPhones typically do pretty well with cellular reception and performance, apples to apples?
* MicroUSB is ubiquitous and I’m really torn between it and Lightning. I’ve been using the same MicroUSB cable for 2 years now, and other than it being dirty, it’s never given me a fit and I’ve never had to replace it. Meanwhile, all of the friends/family I talk to that have iPhones are constantly replacing their Lightning cables, whether they’re Apple or 3rd party. Is the Lightning connector that bad, or should I assume that the users are not taking care of their things?

Okay, I’m sorry I wrote a book. I’m done now LOL.

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Thanks to anyone that reads this and feels they can provide some usable insight into my concerns!

Edit: Thanks to all of the folks who took time to respond, including those who simply noticed the fact that I wrote a bit more than was really needed LOL. General consensus is that most things I should be fine with, as long as I can acclimate myself to iOS. There are benefits to be had by moving to the iPhone, and obviously some drawbacks, but I feel the drawbacks are not as big of a deal since I can either work around them or not try to replicate the missing features or functions.

I will say, one thing I’m not cool about with customers of competing products and companies is how defensive and otherwise cocky some folks are. I see a lot of down votes, and snarky remarks, and honestly it just makes y’all look petty. All I was asking for was opinionated, *constructive* replies based on my specific concerns about moving platforms. Some of y’all are acting like textbook brand ambassadors when Apple isn’t even paying y’all! The least y’all could do is be decent human beings and try to respond with decent character to a fellow human being.

Thanks to those of you who took the time to not only give me responses, but also to simply show humility and kindness with your replies. If you can’t respond with at least some level of generosity, why even act on my post at all?

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