I am currently an IOS user, however, as the title suggests, I wish to switch to android. This is because I would prefer to use free software and not be locked into the apple ecosystem. That being said I am already locked into apple and would like to know how anyone else here has managed the switch.
I for one know I will face problems regarding group chats with friends and family on IOS, I will lose out on iCloud+ features, I will have to buy a replacement for my HomePod, I will need to replace apple home, etc.
How did anyone else here who has made such a switch replace or solve these issues?
Apple’s Messages app is a total dumpster fire. Literally every other chat platform out there has figured it out. Snapchat, Telegram, FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Line, etc., all work just fine across platforms. Only Apple wants it to suck for their users whenever a non-Apple device enters the conversation. I can’t understand why people willingly subject themselves to that misery and still somehow feel smug about their iOS echo chamber. Pathetic.
Probably because most people have iOS devices, atleast in the US. In my group of friends and acquaintances of say 30-40 people I am the only one with an Android phone.
I also work in IT services for small businesses (setting up email, etc.) and rarely come across Android phones. iPhones are everywhere.
So if everyone has iOS in the group chat it’s not really an issue.
Android market share in North America is around ~45%. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/north-america
Globally, Android is ~70%. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
There are regional bubbles for each of course.
What are the chances that the decision to make it suck was deliberate? This is apple we’re talking about here, after all.
it’s deliberate. Tim Cook and team have essentially said “yeah we know it sucks but we’re keeping it this way for business reasons”. Can’t find a quote but just look at how they treat literally anything non-Apple.
I believe his exact words were “you don’t like it? Buy your grandma an iPhone.”
pretty sure Snapchat is still not very cross platform, can’t use it on pc
Who is bringing a PC into a discussion about mobile cross platform apps? Many apps have the option, but I don’t think anyone primarily thinks of anything but being able to work across iOS and Android.
Plus it seems once it works outside of Apple’s fortress, it can find a way to work on a non mobile device. It’s kind of in the DNA.
apps like discord and telegram would desktop clients, making them more cross platform if that makes sense
You can use it on pc though.
I didn’t know, since when?
You kinda of can use it on PC though?
how
They’ve been pushing using a browser to access your conversations for quite a while now. Are you just not looking at the screen when you open it, or what?
didn’t know that actually
iMessage is the biggest hurdle. I recommend that you ask your friends and family to switch to another messaging app to talk to you to avoid the green bubble frustration. (begrudgingly recommend Signal, though Sup. by the guy who made PixelFed looks interesting and can help grow the Fediverse)
It’s not going to be easy though.
What’s wrong with a green bubble? Just curious.
IPhone users have a good reason to not like green bubbles in their group chats, because then their group chat loses functionalities like emojis and the ability to send large images. Or so I’ve heard.
Apple is obviously unwilling to solve that because the lock-in benefits them.
That’s not all, as I currently use an iPhone I can tell you firsthand those are the least of your issues. When in a group chat with android users IOS users can’t add or remove people to or from the chat, iOS users don’t get any of the apple specific features like unsending, thread reply’s, reactions, even embedding things like links doesn’t work. The adding/removing people is the biggest issue however.
I have never understood what this green bubble is. I thought it was plainly aesthetic. Now you both tell me Apple deliberately breaks stuff in an infectious way just because an Android user is around. Apple is evil. I will never buy any stuff from them.
That’s because of a difference on protocol (iMessage vs SMS). This wouldn’t matter if they chose to support RCS which is effectively the Android iMessage equivalent and is an open standard (on paper, not necessarily in practice) but that will never happen.
It’s sad that I will never really know about it. Because for some reason they never made Voice compatible with it. I only have 2 people I really text at all, and I use my voice number for everything, not my carrier number. I use the carrier number only for things that won’t accept what they say it’s a voip number. Even though that shouldn’t have anything at all to do with their end of sending a message. I don’t understand why they even check for that. It’s not much of a problem, almost everything uses an app of some kind, I basically only get to see the actual texting app when the pharmacy says my medicine is ready to pick up. Voice number seems to work for pretty much everything else. (and by Voice number, I’m referring to Google Voice if you’re unfamiliar)
I know, and it drives me nuts when iPhone users complain that it’s my fault for owning an android phone. Like um no it’s quite literally your fault if you stick with Apple and defend their decision to make your life worse. Apple’s business model is basically Stockholm syndrome.
The crazy thing is that RCS is entirely compatible with Apple. If they would refuse to develop for it and lock down their App store to keep 3rd party developers from making apps for it themselves
RCS is not completely compatible. For one thing, it requires a carrier and a phone number. You can go out today, buy a Mac or an iPad with no cell modem, and start using iMessage purely as an IP messaging app. So they can’t just replace the existing protocol with RCS, because RCS is a bag of flaming shit. They could spend the money to develop RCS fallback in addition to their protocol, and that would be awesome, but it costs them money, and I get why they don’t want to do it.
The reality is that this is Google’s fault more than anything. They spent half of my adult life repeatedly inventing and then fucking up the act of sending 200 bytes of text to one person at a time.
I’d love for the modern world to have a great way of messaging people that just worked – used IP connections with SMS fallback, a login you could manage from anywhere, full support for all the real-time typing stuff, the rich media support, the whole thing. That would be great. Someone get on that. But if I have to listen to fucking Google whine about it one more time, I’m out. They’re like a guy with one finger left. If you didn’t know any better, you’d feel pretty sympathetic for him. But if you’ve spent the past two watching him slowly chop the other nine off one at a time with a hatchet and then whine about his bad luck for 12 hours after each chop, the sympathy starts to ebb a bit.
They’re not deliberately breaking it – they just don’t support it. “Deliberately breaking” has the connotation that it would have worked just fine, except they took some extra action to stop it. That’s not true here. It would only work the way people want it to work if Apple spent a lot of money paying developers to make it work.
I’ve wrote some lines of code and I know when it’s “just being lazy” or doing stuff “the evil way”. Imagine when Apple accidentally restricted join/leave actions in their native chat client. That would be minutes until they fix it. We are talking about years here…
Sure, but one of those things is fixing a bug in the protocol they already use for core functionality, and the other is an entirely new software development project. Adding RCS support to iMessage is adding support for an entirely new protocol. That’s what I’m getting at here. It’s not “broken”. Apple doesn’t have to “fix” RCS support. They have to build RCS support, from scratch.
This is like saying that Microsoft Windows should be able to run programs compiled for Apple Silicon on Mac OS. That might be a cool feature, and I have no problem with someone saying they think it should happen, but it’s not Microsoft being “evil” or refusing to “fix it”.
They’re one of the most profitable companies around, I think they can hire a couple devs to fix those major issues, it just doesn’t help them (it helps their customers) so they dont.
If they chose to support it there wouldn’t be any need to buy an iPhone to stop the issue, they want a monopoly and this is a perfect example of the anti-consumer practices they’re willing to sink to in order to facilitate that.
I have no experience with this myself, but I heard somewhere that apples protocol for handling messages do not conform to standards and deliberately mishandles media in messages, making images etc lower resolution. I might be wrong though.
Sorta. It’s not that they don’t conform to standards.
It’s that they don’t adopt new standards.
The newest iPhone still handles SMS and MMS the same way the iPhone 3G did back in 2008.
It’s like if Ford refused to add CD players to their cars and insisted you use their proprietary “Ford Media Disk”
And if you don’t like that, fine! It still has a tape player!
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Most of my friends & family use telegram. I’ve always liked it.
Telegram is entirely unencrypted by default, so you shouldn’t use it for anything you wouldn’t say out in public.
iMessage is absolutely an issue, and I don’t think I will overcome it if I make the switch because of how integral it is to my family. I’ve heard of software I can run on a Mac that forwards to my phone. I have an old Mac so does such software still exist and work?
Sounds like their tricks work.
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Check out AirMessage, you can set it up on your Mac and as long as it’s connected to the internet, you can use the AirMessage app to get iMessage on an android.
Alternatively there’s Bubble but that requires you to Apple sign in to their system and didn’t seem very safe but it doesn’t require a mac
Airmessage seems intriguing, I think it may just work!
If you want to switch specifically for free software, make sure that the phone you’re buying is bootloader-unlockable. The Pixel phones (not from a carrier, but unlocked) are good options.
If not, you will simply be locked into Google’s ecosystem (along with whatever OEM, such as Samsung’s), which isn’t much better than Apple’s.
As for ROMs, I’d recommend either GrapheneOS or DivestOS. Both are free of all Google services by default, and are as FOSS as Android allows for in the modern age.
To deregister iMessage, visit this site: https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
In the future, I’d look into Linux phones, but as of right now, they are not usable for daily driving IMO. You can also test Linux mobile on most modern Android phones using Halium with a distro like Droidian.
Also check out privacyguides.org for alternatives to proprietary apps/services.
This is indeed my main reason for a switch, so thanks for the recommendations! I really want to try a Linux phone when it’s ready with either phosh or gnome shell mobile (I love libadwaita), but it’s just not there yet for me.
I would definitely recommend trying Droidian (Mobian for Halium) and UBPorts (although UBPorts is less traditional Linux, as it uses Snaps and has an immutable filesystem by default).
Manjaro is also available, but I don’t recommend Manjaro in general due to untimely security updates.
You can use Waydroid as an Android compatibility layer.
Loooking at the wiki for those doesn’t list modern devices, or even older ones like the pixel 4 through 7. The phone I was looking at buying was a pixel 7 pro as people here seemed to recommend the pixels. Will droidian or others run on this?
As for operating system, manjaro is obv a no go. I also will avoid UBports as I don’t really like snaps or Ubuntu. This leaves droidian and I was looking at postmarketOS, but that doesn’t seem ready. Ideally as I’ve said phosh or gnome shell mobile distros would be best but I can’t find any that support modern devices that run these and I don’t really want to spin my own. Are there any you can think of or perhaps some privacy respecting androids that still let me use google apps I may need or stuff of the like?
Droidian would be more to try out and less to use as a daily driver. It runs atop Halium, so it should work on most modern Android devices that support Treble. Hardware support is a bit hit or miss.
I’d stick to Graphene OS for now.
EDIT: Halium only supports up to Android 11 for now. You will have to wait for support for Android 13 for the Pixel 7 Pro.
If you want to try Linux sooner, the OnePlus 6 can be gotten for relatively cheap nowadays.
I think grapheneOS will probably be fine. There are however a few google apps I absolutely need for work, namely google docs and sheets. From what I could read on their website the google services aren’t included at all, even microg and require extra setup. Can this be made to let me run all my apps that need them?
I’m using grapheneos and docs works just fine
sheets should also work, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t
and you probably haven’t read the website in a long while, grapheneos doesn’t support/recommend microg as it is an insecure/partial implementation of google services
grapheneos has developed their own sandboxed play services, which act as a regular android app, it doesn’t get any special privileged access to imei or whatever stock oem android gives
after installing this through the “apps” app, you can use grapheneos like regular oem android, but with better privacy and security features
You can still install Google services on GrapheneOS. It is sandboxed as user apps, so you can deny it permissions.
https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
DivestOS can use MicroG, which is a FOSS replacenent for Google services.
Neither ROM includes it by default.
Although if you can use the apps inside of a web browser, that would be better for privacy/avoiding Google.
Also not sure if you use it, but Android Auto is proprietary as well and requires Google Apps. Not compatible in Graphene due to it requiring very invasive permissions.
Divest seems interesting, if I can get around the iMessage hurdle that may very well be what I land on!
I did this years ago and getting sms disentangled from imessage was a fucking nightmare. I don’t even remember how I finally managed it. Idk if it’s gotten any better, but don’t be surprised if there’s a headache. Good luck!
I’ve had this issue in the past. I had to spend hours on the phone with apple support to get them to manually remove my number from the iMessage database of known numbers. Then you also have to wait for that to sync back to everyone’s devices who has you as a contact. It was awful and still didn’t fix it 100%
Well, first I would like to adress the elephant in the room. Samsung/Google Pixel is not in it’s entirety Android. There are lots of other brands out there, each and every one of them offers different things to different people who ask for different features.
About what you’re asking for, can’t actually help with group chats (the US has a culturally attachment to iMessage, which is locked down to iOS), but for iCloud well, you can have your stuff in google drive, or on a offline drive (most of modern android have otg capabilities), or even selfhosted if that’s your kind of thing.
Seriously, give it a try and see for yourself how mature now is the OS and ofc see if you’re staying ;)
The cultural attachment you speak of is what concerns me the most. I as a person am lucky enough to have a strong enough presence that I could get away with going against the flow, but it would significantly hurt my ability to socially network.
On the note of iCloud, I’m considering buying a Mac mini and putting asahi on it (not because apple because it’s got that sweet M2) and running a nextcloud server.
I’m quite excited to give it a go, might even try some things like lineageOS or /e/os out!
if you’re going for the privacy flash a custom rom onto a pixel (or fairphone 4 and later if you decided on calyx) there’s copperhead os too if you want to piss of daniel micay I don’t recommend liniage on a pixel or the fairphone 4 liniage also needs some degoogleing+ aosp keyboard is garbage from what I’ve heard
Out of curiousity what is it about the pixel (hardware?) That made you suggest it specifically if you’re going to flash the OS anyway
Graphene OS only supports Pixels, and Pixels have good custom ROM support (make sure not to buy from a carrier, or you probably can’t flash them)
because pixel was a developer focused device
it allows unlocking and re-locking bootloader with your own custom keys and still retains warranty
most android OEM like Samsung, oneplus provided support in the past, but are now locked down for some reason
Huh, after reading your post and some comments I am just glad iMessage never picked up in my country lol.
I moved from my iPhone to an Android phone without a hassle because most of my third party apps were multiplatform and here nobody uses SMS (it is even weird to mention it in 2023 lol) sadly the alternative ain’t better, here everybody uses WhatsApp, at least I talk with my closest friends with Telegram.
Don’t use telegram for personal stuff, it’s not encrypted and therefore less private than whatsapp.
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I haven’t made the switch because I’ve never used iOS but if you have a Mac I remember there used to be a way to get iMessage working, maybe look into that.
Yes, iMessage works seamlessly on Mac, even with me never having had an iPhone.
If you’ve purchased any videos via iTunes, be sure to link it to Movies Anywhere so you can watch them on your Android. Most movies are supported except those from Paramount, last I checked.
I switched a month ago from iPhoneX to Galaxy A34. I used the bare minimum features on iOS so it wasn’t hard for me. Data transfer from iOS to Android was easy; during setup, I was offered to transfer data from iPhone. I connected my iPhone to Android with cable, in less than half an hour my contacts, photos, videos and some settings including wallpaper was transferred. Keep in mind that data transfer may not work if you buy a brand other than Samsung or Google or a phone with Android 11 or lower. Also you cannot transfer data from any app excluding Whatsapp. Android will attempt to find and install your apps to your new device but you will have to relogin etc.
If you use iMessage for group chats, (I sincerely hope you don’t) you will get pointed at by others, try to switch others to a messaging app like Telegram if you can. Even better if you do this before jumping ship. Also deactivate iMessage or you may not receive messages at all on Android, this is a technical issue. guide link
I personally hate iCloud so I disable it even if I am signed in to App Store. The reason is that it syncs my photos and other stuff, suddenly runs out of space and nags me for upgrade. To pull out my photos from iCloud, go to icloud.com on a PC, download everything (photos, documents, whatever) and switch iCloud off. Smart home stuff, no idea.
That’s very encouraging to hear, however unlike you I don’t use the bare minimum features. I use a lot of cloud features, and use iMessage group chats frequently. I have been able to find replacements for the vast majority of those thanks to the great people here, however as you said since I use iMessage group chats frequently, I will get pointed at. I have already tried to switch friends to telegram and they have declined, so that may be a blocker.
Do your friends use Discord?
No, they use iMessage which is a large issue. I effectively need to keep iMessage working.
There are self-hosted apps like AirMessage which can relay iMessage to your Android from a Mac. (or macOS running in a virtual machine if you have the time for that) There is also Beeper which doesn’t require a Mac but it will put you in a waiting list if you sign up now.
Not really helpful here, but I have only ever used Mac’s and have never used an iPhone and I have 0 problems. If you have a Mac or an iPad, you should be able to access everything that’s Apple that use you use on your phone. I can easily put items in my Google calendar from my Mac or my Pixel. I can access files on my Google drive on all devices just the same. The Apple weather widget is less accurate than the Google One which is less accurate than just about every 3rd party app. I use Firefox which syncs between all devices. Pretty much everyone I know has an iPhone and not a single person complains about my green texts. I read the other comments about group chats, and I’m in those too and no one complains. Either my friends don’t use any of these features, or it’s gotten better. I felt that Android phones just work more easily than iOS (which is weird because I feel that Mac’s work more easily than Windows, and this is kind of the same argument). You are going to run into a lot of issues, but maybe they really won’t be all that bad in the long run. You probably won’t get your texts to port over, but you can start new threads and in a couple of months you might not notice. Hopefully it goes well!
The thing about the android side is that you’re pretty much locked into the Pixel and Google Fi if you want to avoid manufacturer bloatware or cell carrier bloatware. I did Metro PCS for a solid decade to provide service, but at the end, I was paying for unlimited and if I wasn’t on WiFi, the service over cellular was complete fucking garbage.
Google at least provides decent rates and their service is good when I need it Yes, all of the eggs are in the same basket, but at the same time, maybe it’s not a bad thing with the frequency of beaches these days. The Pixel? Best phone I’ve ever had (I only buy the “a” versions because I’m a cheap ass). It’s fast and has great battery life.
Good luck!
Welcome to the world of Sd cards and downloading what ya want. There’s google drive. Idk what apple home is cause i despise Macintosh, but there’s Chromecast and that stupid Alexa thing.
