Switching from Android to iPhone 15 for a week: Thoughts on Apple's Areas for Improvement

Jumping from Google’s latest and greatest Pixel 8 Pro to the most modest member of Apple’s best iPhones of 2023 might seem like a step-down. But as first impressions go, the iPhone 15 looks and feels like a seriously premium piece of kit in its own right. Sure, it didn’t get the titanium frame of its Pro-branded siblings but next to the Pixel, its frosted glass back and carefully rounded aluminum bodywork look just as premium, and at some angles better. The biggest roadblock that has stopped me going all-in on iPhone in the past has been WhatsApp, and after much research it looks like my concerns about the transfer process remain very real. Moving WhatsApp from Android to Android (or iPhone to iPhone) can be done at any point, with both phones in any state (so long as there’s enough storage on the receiving device). While I was more than comfortable resetting the iPhone I’d already setup to have a chance at using WhatsApp on iOS, I realized that the move back to Android at the end of the experience would be nigh on impossible, unless I was willing to reset the Pixel I’d been using for months. That’s one of the qualities I always love about iPhones: it doesn’t matter which member of the series you buy each year, performance is always guaranteed to be available in spades, with even the most modest devices outpacing some of the most competitive Android flagships in artificial benchmarks. For all the little eccentricities that iOS throws out, it is an undeniably slick and consistent experience, but with the overt familiarity and seemingly glacial evolution of iOS in comparison to Android, it certainly feels like Apple could be doing more with it. The iPhone 15’s Dynamic Island for instance, is one of the most well executed examples of interplay between hardware and software, and yet Apple chose not to build on its implementation after a whole year, even though the company made it a range-wide addition with the 15 series. The iPhone 15 is an undeniable triumph of in its own right, and while the Pixel 8 Pro delivers one of the most polished Android experiences out there, it still feels rougher around the edges by comparison to Apple’s more affordable alternative.