I switched my iPhone for the Pixel 8 Pro: 5 things I learned

After owning almost every version of the iPhone since 2011, three months ago I ditched my iPhone 14 Pro for a Pixel 8 Pro. As a cross-platform user, I was tired of Apple’s restrictive policies, particularly their stranglehold on text messaging with iMessage.

Happy as I had been with the iOS experience – including the iPhone’s seamless integration with my MacBook, Apple Watch, iPad, and Apple TV – that experience broke down rapidly on my Windows and Linux PCs. What began as a minor annoyance at having to switch to another device every time I wanted to text someone gradually grew into a nagging desire to liberate my mobile messaging life from Apple’s control.

Sure, I could have tried to migrate most of my messaging conversations to WhatsApp or another messaging platform. But as an American user, SMS remains the primary means of messaging throughout my life. To be able to send and receive messages to and from my mobile number with everyone in my circle, I needed to ditch iMessage.

Of course, Apple doesn’t allow any other app to send and receive SMS on its devices, so to dump iMessage in favor of an app that would work across all platforms, I needed to kick the iPhone to the curb.

Here are five things I’ve learned after 90 days with Android on Google’s Pixel 8 Pro.

Tech Advisor / Robert Strohmeyer

Android has come a long since the days of chaos

When I traded in my last Android phone – a Motorola Droid – for an iPhone in 2011, I’d come to view Android as a chaotic mess and saw iOS as the clean, stable alternative. Sure, the Apple phones were absurdly expensive, but they worked more or less flawlessly as long as you didn’t mind living without the ability to customize anything but the wallpaper.

While Apple’s aesthetics and UX polish still stand out as superior, the customizability of Android remains far more extensive than that of iOS.

By leaving Android then, I was giving up the freedom to configure my phone any way I wanted in exchange for more security in the app ecosystem and a more stable mobile OS. Android, in those days, had an app ecosystem fraught with bugs and security problems, and performance issues abounded from device to device.

On top of that, Google didn’t have much of an ecosystem, while Apple was designing its various devices to work seamlessly with one another.

Fast forward to 2024 and Android’s ecosystem has flourished. Google devices including Chromecast, Nest doorbells and cameras, and both Chromebooks and Windows PCs all work nicely with Android phones.

Outside Apple’s walled garden, everyone else has just moved on with their lives and Android phones make it easy to share data, messaging, and app experiences across PCs and other devices, even if they’re not made by Google. I can use Google Messages just as well from the browser on my Ubuntu Linux PC, my Windows 11 PC, my mostly neglected Chromebook, and yes, even my MacBook Pro.

While Apple’s aesthetics and UX polish still stand out as superior, the customizability of Android remains far more extensive than that of iOS. Meanwhile, Google Play has tamed the Android app marketplace significantly over the years, and Android apps are generally no riskier than iOS apps.

iMessage’s green bubbles are meaningless

As an iPhone user, I’ve never understood why non-Apple messages come in as green bubbles rather than Apple’s standard blue bubbles. I couldn’t care less what kind of device the other person is texting from, and seeing half my incoming messages appear in a different color has always seemed like a pointless distraction. But now that I’m on the other side of the mobile platform divide, Apple’s attempt to stratify mobile users into blues and greens seems even more obnoxious.

Apple’s green bubbles have always been just another branding ploy

Android users don’t spend a single second of their day thinking about whether the text bubbles on your screen are blue or green. They’re not missing a thing. In fact, Android phones have been using RCS (rich communication services) since 2008, and it appears Apple is only just now catching on with the expected introduction of RCS on iOS 18 this year.

The clear takeaway is that Apple’s green bubbles have always been just another branding ploy, intended to reinforce their customers’ belief in the inferiority of competing devices, but serving no useful purpose at all.

Device ecosystems still matter

When I switched to Android, my Apple Watch lost most of its utility for me. Apart from telling time and tracking workouts, I mostly depended on the smartwatch to give me glimpses of messages throughout the day, sync to my calendar, and keep up with the weather.

In today’s tech landscape, phones and smartwatches are tightly interconnected, so if you use an Android phone, an Android smartwatch is a must. Naturally, I picked up a Pixel Watch the same day I got the Pixel phone, and the two work as symbiotically as the iPhone and Apple Watch.

Tech Advisor / Robert Strohmeyer

Casting videos from the phone to the TV was another daily habit that suddenly needed attention when I switched phones. You can’t cast from Android to Apple TV devices without janky third-party apps.

Fortunately, Google Chromecasts are dirt-cheap, so I grabbed four of them for less than the price of one Apple TV, and added one to each of the TVs around my house. Now I can cast to any of my TVs, and still watch my Apple-bought movies on the Chromecasts with the Apple TV app. It’s a weirdly circular experience.

In a household, switching platforms can be contentious. While I switched from iOS to Android, the rest of my family did not. So now we have two different digital TV devices hooked up to every screen in the house, and there’s little agreement on what to use by default. My son seems to like the Google UX, but my wife and daughter consistently exit the Chromecast and turn on the Apple TV when they’ve got the remote.

Android Auto is an embarrassment

When I decided to make the switch, it never even occurred to me that I might have issues with Android Auto. In my mind, my car came with support for either platform, and it shouldn’t matter much which one I used.

Oh, how I was mistaken. After four years of hassle-free driving with Apple CarPlay, the bumbling, incoherent experience of Android Auto has been downright infuriating more often than not.

half my apps don’t work correctly with my Audi’s click-wheel control

Tech Advisor / Robert Strohmeyer

With CarPlay, Apple’s tight-fisted governance of app behavior ensures, at a minimum, that apps play nicely with the car’s built-in controls, in stark contrast to Google’s lackluster execution. With Android Auto, half my apps don’t work correctly with my Audi’s click-wheel control. When I switch to an app, I should be able to press the Back button on my car’s center console to get back out of it to the main view.

As often as not, however, this doesn’t work at all, and there’s no way to exit an ill-behaving app without asking Google Assistant to help me out or picking up the phone and manually selecting something else.

At first, I thought this issue was just with third-party apps, but even Google Messages has this problem in my car. Searching Android user forums, I discovered these issues vary slightly from one car manufacturer to another, with the common theme simply being Android Auto is junk.

Google’s AI rocks

I’ve had a mix of Google Home speakers and Apple HomePods around the house for years, so I’ve known first-hand for quite some time that Siri is a fairly dumb assistant. With Google’s recent push in AI tech, however, the gulf between Google and Siri has only widened.

Whether I’m at my desk, standing in the kitchen, or driving, I can usually count on Google Assistant to answer any questions I can pose to it. Siri, however, will often resort to sending links to my iPhone rather than summarize information for me on demand.

With Gemini Nano built into the Pixel 8 Pro, the AI experience on my Android phone is now light years beyond anything I’ve ever experienced with Siri on any iPhone. It’s not yet clear whether Apple has any big tricks up its sleeve to catch up with Google, Microsoft, and Samsung in the AI department.

Will I stick with Android?

When I first decided to switch from iOS to Android a few months ago, I thought of it as an interesting experiment and nothing more.

If I didn’t like Android, I’d gladly switch back, but I was committed to giving the switch a solid run before making up my mind. I still have the iPhone 14 Pro sitting on my desk, and I’ve used it a few times for testing other products that work with iOS. It’s right there and I could go back to it as my daily driver phone today if I wanted to. But as it turns out, I don’t want to.

While my initial motivation for switching devices was a somewhat trivial annoyance with the way iMessage monopolizes my text messaging, I’ve found the overall Android experience liberating. I really do love being able to walk out the door with my Ubuntu laptop and still retain the ability to send texts from my browser whenever I want.

I also love Google’s substantially superior AI and the ability to arrange the icons and widgets on my phone any way I like (a feature I hear is coming to iOS 18, as it happens). And, to be honest, I kind of enjoy the misguidedly askance glances I get from my smug iPhone-toting friends when they see me pull my Pixel out of my coat pocket.

So, all in all, I’m happy with the switch to Android and I don’t plan to switch back anytime soon.

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