Switching to a Pixel

A couple of weeks ago, I was quite certain that my next phone would be the iPhone 18. Lucky me I didn’t wait for that: Apple didn’t announce a baseline iPhone at all this September and the iPhone 17 even got more expensive.

Instead, I decided it was time to jump ship again and, after 6 years with an iPhone, move back to Android.

Why the switch

My current iPhone became quite a pain to use because of its battery and a damaged charging port, which made charging it a coin toss: Would it charge or would it not? I had quite a couple of instances where I would plug it in, it would start charging but then randomly stop after a few %, and I’d leave the house with a half-empty battery on a phone with not a good battery in the first place. But otherwise, the phone would have still worked fine and been usable for some more years, I think.

Which is a shame and the reason I initially looked into getting a Fairphone. Almost anything that can break there hardware-wise, you can just replace in under 5 minutes with replacement parts that don’t cost a fortune. And they also provide software updates until 2033 on their newest gen, which is great.

The reason why I ultimately got a Google Pixel 9a was honestly the price. I got a really good deal for it, 299 Swiss Francs ¹, which made it almost half the price of a Fairphone. And, even though it’s the predecessor to the current Pixel 10a, it still gets software support until 2032, which felt reasonable enough.

After years of being in the iPhone world, I’ve ultimately come to the conclusion that I just don’t care that much anymore about what phone I use. I feel we’ve reached a plateau; the only thing that changes year to year are the processors and the cameras ². But I don’t use my phone for high-end gaming, and if I want to intentionally photograph, I still have my Ricoh camera that is perfect for my needs.

In my everyday life, the only piece of tech where I really need good specs and won’t make any compromises is my laptop. It’s the device I do almost everything on, from work to uni to side projects. And even though the latest macOS updates weren’t the best, I still feel like nobody makes better laptops than Apple. I’m still a huge fanboy there.

On the smartphone side, that’s not really the case. I thought I was really dependent on having an iPhone. Turns out, I’m not.

I mostly use my phone for these things (roughly in order):

1. Listening to music/podcasts
2. Admin-type tasks (e.g. looking something up in my calendar or checking my todo list)
3. Looking something up on the web (although this mostly happens on my MacBook too)
4. Taking a picture
5. Buying something in a store
6. Miscellaneous stuff (navigating, transit tickets, …)

Nothing on this list requires me to a) have a specific phone brand and b) pay more than 500 Francs for that device. And I think it’s the same for 99% of the people out there as well. We’re just too easily convinced that we need the high-end flagship phone from brand x because of a marginally better camera or processor or whatever. That was maybe true a couple of years back, but my 300.– Pixel 9a has a perfectly fine camera and performance, and I don’t know what I would need more?

The migration

The whole switching and set-up process was surprisingly straightforward. Despite me going the “harder” route and setting everything up from scratch. I wanted to use the opportunity to be intentional about what data and apps should be on my new phone to begin with.

The biggest step in the whole migration was my photos library. Previously, I just used Apple Photos as my canonical archive. Sure, I could’ve just moved everything over to Google Photos and called it a day, but that would only lock me into another ecosystem. My goal was to create a setup where, in the future, I would be as vendor-independent as possible.

That’s why I chose to move all my photos into Ente⁠. It took almost a day until everything was uploaded, but so far, I really love this app. Very thoughtfully designed and it just works. I can see myself using this app for however long it stays around (it’s open source so I’m very positive this will be a long timespan).

Apart from the photos, most of my other data (e.g. passwords, music, podcasts, notes, files,…) was not locked into the Apple ecosystem, so all in all, the switch went pretty well. Lesson learned: choosing cross-platform apps for critical data is worth it.

The only two things I’m really missing are two particular apps: Things 3⁠ for my todos and Dime⁠ for my expense tracking. I’ve replaced the former with Todoist⁠ which is… okay I guess. Dime on the other hand was such a wonderfully simple but still beautiful app that there is just no equivalent on the Android side. I’m so used to this app that I’m actually in the process of building my own adapted version of Dime for Android right now. We’ll see how that goes.

What really stings though is that my collection of AirTags are now pretty much just expensive keychain rings without much utility. It’s a shame that they don’t work outside the Apple ecosystem³ (please EU, do something about that too).

The first few days

It’s currently a bit more than a week after the migration and the Pixel is now my daily driver. And what can I say? I’m really happy with my choice so far.

Android has come a long way since I last used it and I continue to discover tiny little features that are thoughtfully designed. One example being the notification history, where you can still look up notifications you might have accidentally deleted. I always wished iOS would have that too.

But honestly, either OS is fine, and they don’t differ that much in the grand scheme of things. The only thing that is truly better on Android is the AI integration. Having an assistant that is actually smart and can do little things for you instead of just saying “I can’t understand you, want me to look it up on the web?” is such a blessing.

I’m sure I’ll find my gripes with Android too, but right now I’m happy with my decision to give a non-iPhone another shot.

And knowing I haven’t paid a fortune for a new phone is certainly a good feeling as well.