A few weeks ago, my trusty review unit of the iPhone 16 Plus needed to be sent back, so I made the decision not to seek out another iPhone but to move completely to the Android ecosystem. As you’ve no doubt seen from the headline, things didn’t go quite according to plan.
Before any side of this argument starts to raise its banners, let it be said that although I have primarily been an iPhone user for the last couple of years, since becoming a freelance writer at the start of this year, there hasn’t been a week gone by that I haven’t also had an Android phone in my pocket.
I’ve been lucky enough to review some of the best Android phones of 2025, and I love the amount of choice that you can find when venturing outside of Apple’s walls.
For next-level DSLR-style cameras, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra can’t be beaten, whilst the CMF Phone 2 Pro is a marvel of engineering at the budget end of the market. Personally, I decided to make a move to the Honor Magic V5 as its larger display is very helpful for writing articles on the go.
Thomas Deehan / Foundry
With the Magic V5 in tow, I made sure to move over logins to key apps, arrange the homescreen to my liking and set up Google Pay with all of my main cards – all of the things I thought I needed for a smooth transition.
But as it turns out, there’s a lot more to Apple’s ecosystem than I had initially anticipated, and it’s largely dictated by your spouse’s phone of choice.
The family ecosystem
My wife has been a die-hard iPhone fan ever since making the leap to the iPhone 8 from an old HTC device, and with an Apple Watch and a pair of AirPods Pro 2, she has no inclination to ever retreat across that Apple/Android divide. As someone who also used an iPhone, this never presented any type of issue…until I stepped outside of the ecosystem.
When it comes to arranging our weekly food shop, I’ve always relied on a shared list in the Apple Notes app, and I assumed that it would be an easy enough process to still edit that list on my iPad and then copy it over to Google Keep so that I could access it on my phone. Reader, I was grossly mistaken.
At present, Google Keep doesn’t let you add helpful tick boxes to a list without adding such a box to every single line of text. This meant that my carefully constructed list of required produce, meats and essentials turned into a UI disaster that made it hard to keep track of what I needed to get.
Thomas Deehan / Foundry
I also didn’t anticipate that it would disrupt certain elements of conversation throughout the day.
My wife and I constantly send each other stories from Apple News that have caught our attention, but it’s one of the few Apple apps that doesn’t have a version built for Android, which also means that any stories I was sent couldn’t be read until I got home and booted up my iPad.
Even smaller instances, such as helping one another to track down a device using Apple Find My, aren’t easy to do when Android is in the mix.
The moment I logged back into my iCloud account, it felt like a wave of relief had washed over me
The Apple benefits that can become a trap
On the hardware front, I knew ahead of time that missing out on MagSafe was going to be an issue.
I’ve written before about how helpful Google’s Pixelsnap design on the Pixel 10 series is in helping iPhone users to make the transition, and while there are MagSafe-compatible cases that you can buy for other Android phones, the quality of those cases can be hit-and-miss. One such case that I nabbed saw the metallic ring come away from the adhesive layer after only a day.
What proved to be more time-consuming was trying to detangle the iCloud+ exclusive ‘Hide My Email’ feature, which generates a proxy email that can be used when creating an account to save your real email from ending up in data leaks.
I had been using the feature for quite a while and, without thinking too much about it, had created a long list of proxy emails and passwords, which then needed to be carried over manually in order to keep using said accounts on Android. It’s exactly the type of feature that seems great until you no longer need it.
Thomas Deehan / Foundry
Even with all this in mind, I had planned to stick things out with Android.
However, I got my hands on a refurbished iPhone 16 for a separate article I’m writing about second-hand phones. Let me tell you, the moment I logged back into my iCloud account, it felt like a wave of relief had washed over me, knowing that everything was where it needed to be and no extra hassle was required. Once I realised how much I missed that convenience, I decided there and then that I had to go back to Apple.
I still feel, more than ever, that there are great benefits to be had from both iPhone and Android, but I would implore consumers to be more aware of the digital quicksand that both camps try to put you in, as it’ll only make the process of jumping ship that much harder.
Not tied to a particular ecosystem? Our guide to the best phones you can buy includes the top iPhone and Android options.
