I’ve been an iPhone user since 2011. Back then, it was never actually a question whether I’d choose iOS or Android as a smartphone platform. My pals had iPhones, my coworkers had iPhonesanyone who was anyone, genuinely, had an iPhone.
But that was more than half ten years ago. Nowadays, Android is actually on equal footing with iOS( and in fact, the two borrow, steal, and share “new” features so often you’d think they were teenage sisters sharing the same wardrobe ). And after so many years on iOS, I felt the time was right to give Android a try full time. As a contraption novelist and reviewer, I’ve sampled dozens of iOS, Android, and Windows Phone machines over the years, but I’d never genuinely given a non-iOS machine a long-term trial. Until now.
Since December, I’ve been using aHuawei Nexus 6Prunning Android 7.1.2( Nougat) as my main device. There’s a lot to love about it, but having been an iPhone devotee for so long, there are a handful of things that drive me crazy.
The 5 worst Android features
1) Mysterious notifications
Perhaps I simply need to clear out age-old notifications in a more timely fashion, but I have one consistent issue with my Android phone: I get mysterious vibration notifications, and I can’t determine what they’re from. My telephone will vibrate, I’ll pick it up, check the notifications onscreen, and … they’re exactly the same notifications I realized the last hour I checked my phone. I’ll check my text, Google Hangouts, and email, andif there’s nothing new there, I simply end up shrugging my shoulders and sitting my phone back up. Whatever notification I get clearly wasn’t important enough to garner further action than that.
I reckon their own problems here is with the phone’s bundled notifications. While organised and convenient as you’re looking through all your notifications, if you haven’t cleared them out, they can disguise recent notifications from other apps further down the listing.( Fortunately, if you do discover an app is sending you unwanted alerts, you are able to press and hold that notification to adjust its puts .)
2) The app drawer
Apparently, the app draweris something most Android phone owneds adoration, but I just can’t seem to get allows one to it. Old habits die hard, I suppose. I’d rather have my most-used apps on my main home screen, and my next favorite apps a swipe away to the right. Tapping the six-dot app drawer icon at the bottom centre of the screen, then scrolling and hunting to find the app I’m looking for simply doesn’t feel efficient.
3) The hardware camera shortcut
For a while, I was perplexed to the reasons why sometimes I’d pull my phone out of my pocket and the camera would be open.( And in fact, said camera had snapped a handful of dark images from inside my pocket .) Turns out, with most recent Android phones, you can quickly access the camera, even if yourphone is locked, by double tapping the power button. It’s a useful shortcut, for sure, unless you have a tendency to accidentally press the power button as you’re drawing your telephone outas I seem to do.
Luckily, by heading into the Settings menu there’sa way to switch this shortcut off. That was definitely the right move for me: Accidentally switching on the camera was definitelythe culpritof some of those phantom tremors I’d been so confused about.
4) Adaptive Brightness
Photo via Andri Koolme/ Flickr ( CC-BY)
To be fair, this feature drove me crazy on iOS too: Auto brightness. On Android, it’s called Adaptive Brightness, butit is seriously out of control. My dad, looking at a photo on my phone, asked,” Why is it doing this ?” as the screen shifted darker, then brighter again. Sitting on a recent airliner flight read a book on my phone, the brightness distractingly and continuously shifted up and down. Perhaps the mild turbulence was changing the slant of my phone and how much daylight its sensor seen? Regardless, it was irritating. Whether in bright sunlight, dim illuminate, or any light situation actually, with adaptive brightness enabled, the screen’s brightness level sporadically transformations for no apparent reason. I headed to Fixes, Display, and I switched Adaptive brightness off. I’ll just manually adjust the phone’s brightness to my personally liking as needed.
5) Incompatibilities with iOS text messaging
I’m mostly OK given the fact that I know that I am a green bubble now.( That is, when I text withiPhone proprietors, my messages show up as green text bubbles, rather than the blue ones of fellow iOS users .) Nonetheless, I wasn’t prepared for a few other inter-operating system incompatibilities.
For example, when iOS-using friends or family members mail me a video, it is compressed beyond acceptance. It doesn’t matter whether I’m connected to a data network or Wi-Fi networkthe video is tiny, fitted with artifacts, and barely watchable. I have to then ask that contact to email me the video so I can get afull resolving, watchable version on my phone.
Group text message weaves are also such issues. I won’t receive messages at all from some iOS usersbut will receive messages from others. This results in a complete-enough message thread to know that I’m missing important parts. Media sent on group threads is also typically missing.
I also miss the most recent special effects that were introduced in iOS 10, like the ability to send virtual confetti along with a congratulatory message( or balloons, or laser beams ). Both iOS and Android let you mail stickers, but those full-screen message impacts were fun.
On the whole , nothing about switching to Android has been a bargain breaker, though. My mainissues have simply been with a few default phone puts that merely didn’t jivewith my own personal preferences. That’s, thankfully, very easy to fixand easy to deal with.
With that out of the behavior, here are the Android features I’ve grown to adoration .
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