iQuit: My Hellish Attempt to Leave Apple’s Walled Garden
This is a very poorly written article<p>&gt; Only a little frustrated that iMessage didn’t allow for modern chatting on non-Apple PCs and phones.<p>RCS is trash and stupid idea on the face of it. It&#x27;s all essentially wholly Google-controlled which means they will give up on in 1-2 years when some exec comes up with a way to climb the corporate ladder. They will implement a new app&#x2F;protocol&#x2F;platform with 70% or less of the features of RCS and be billed as the &quot;new hotness&quot; before it also gets thrown into the graveyard.<p>&gt; Only a little miffed that I couldn’t choose Google Maps as my default navigator or set up an Amazon Echo as easily as Apple’s own HomePod speaker.<p>I&#x27;ve setup many Echo speakers from my iPhone, it&#x27;s always a simple process, I have not clue what they are talking about here.<p>&gt; But these things began to add up, as did the $120 I was spending every year to store my photos on iCloud.<p>Apple&#x27;s 2TB plan = $9.99&#x2F;mo, Google 2TB play = $9.99&#x2F;mo, neither are required.<p>&gt; When I emailed Google to request interviews with executives about the switching process, a spokesperson accidentally copied me on a note to his team in which he mocked the very idea that an Android-and-friends model could work as well as iOS. “It’s like doing a car comparison but trying to compare a Honda to a car you build from parts you got at Pep Boys,” he wrote.<p>So clearly the Google execs don&#x27;t care about making this easy (as also seen later in the article when the transfer tools have issues) but the writer lays all the blame at Apple&#x27;s feet repeatedly through this.<p>Then the author goes into a completely non-sequitur about the market value, Vision Pro, and Epic (which Google also battled with over the same thing). Literally adds nothing to the article at all.<p>&gt; moving files from iOS to Android turned out to be shockingly complicated and expensive<p>From what I can tell the &quot;expensive&quot; part is never explained in this article, it&#x27;s just throw in... because?<p>&gt; jumping from a Dell or Compaq to a Macintosh, and vice versa, was relatively easy<p>Rose colored glasses much? Windows &lt;-&gt; Windows was easy enough (though many normal people failed at that) but Windows &lt;-&gt; Mac (both directions) has never been particularly simple&#x2F;easy. In a lot of ways it&#x27;s easier now with everything being web-based.<p>&gt; A Google sales adviser promised that migrating from my iPhone would be as “easy as you copy paste from your computer.” This, surprise, turned out not to be true.<p>Wait, a sales person lied to you? Stop the presses, we must tell the masses about this new development immediately. Spare me.<p>&gt; When it finally completed, only a smattering of photos appeared along with random texts from 2011 to 2013, which soon abruptly disappeared.<p>I honestly wouldn&#x27;t have expected there to be any way to transfer old messages at all. The fact that the ones that came over disappeared later is very clearly an Android problem. It&#x27;s not like Apple reached out to your Android phone and deleted them later. A common theme in this badly written article is to blame Apple for everything and refuse to take any person responsibility or lay any at Android&#x2F;Google&#x27;s feet. Cool.<p>&gt; My 171 iCloud contacts auto-merged in a mess with every Gmail address archived in my account going back to 2005, including nine ancient versions of myself.<p>Again, what did you expect. You already had contacts in Google&#x27;s ecosystem, is it on Apple to find a way to merge those all intelligently? That process is actually a lot more difficult that people might think and the consequences of screwing up can be bad, better to have dupes than overwrite&#x2F;lose data.<p>&gt; A Google support agent couldn’t figure out the problem and referred me to Apple customer service through a 1-800 number.<p>Google&#x27;s transfer app didn&#x27;t work so it&#x27;s up to Apple to figure out? Ok....<p>&gt; The next day, an AppleCare technician called and, to the company’s credit, spent 52 minutes suggesting more detailed fixes. But he also said he couldn’t evaluate Google’s recommended transfer steps for possible issues, because Apple blocked Android’s website internally.<p>I have a very hard time believing this. It literally makes no sense. Is Steve Ballmer moonlighting as a manager at the call center?<p>&gt; I also realized I would have to manually transfer my saved passwords, two-factor authentication codes and Signal and WhatsApp messages.<p>I fail to see how 3rd party apps are Apple&#x27;s fault?<p>&gt; I was excited to try Xbox cloud gaming (which isn’t available in Apple’s App Store) on my phone<p>I do this at least once a month on my Mac and&#x2F;or my iPhone, it works perfectly fine in the webapp even with a controller. The issue is latency to their servers, something I don&#x27;t think a native app would actually fix. I actually do think Apple should relent on this front some but also the experience is just not great. You aren&#x27;t going to be playing FPS or any fast paced game here, the lag is just too bad.<p>&gt; The XPS touchpad didn’t feel as smooth as Apple’s.<p>Those pesky Apple execs! Sneaking into the XPS factory and screwing with their trackpads. Seriously? Why is this mentioned? If anything it&#x27;s clear that the hardware they switched to is subpar and there was good reason to stay on Apple&#x27;s hardware in the first place but they manage to write it as if it&#x27;s somehow Apple&#x27;s fault (like the whole article).<p>&gt; While my iPhone-using friends joked (I think?) that I was dead to them, my family was annoyed that it was tougher to share videos with my Pixel. For whatever reason, some of my texts failed to send. Much of this poor usability seemed to be more Apple’s fault than Google’s, because Apple has resisted adopting a communication protocol that could improve sharing between iOS and Android<p>Again, let&#x27;s just blame Apple. See above, RCS is shit and no one else in the world cares about RCS or iMessage even. Either use a 3rd party chat app or stop complaining.<p>&gt; The impasse was particularly frustrating because I was still a paying iCloud subscriber whose iMessages were stuck on Apple’s servers.<p>I don&#x27;t see what this has to do with the price of eggs in China. If I leave a subscription active with another platform why would I expect that to affect my experience on a different platform? Hey I&#x27;m still paying for Hulu but Netflix is doing something I don&#x27;t like! Can you believe that? Even while I&#x27;m still paying for Hulu? See how silly that sounds?<p>&gt; I, for one, failed. Neither I nor the experts I consulted could figure out how to get my photos, texts and other data out of iCloud and convert them to files that could live seamlessly on my Pixel or Dell.<p>We are throwing that word, &quot;experts&quot;, around pretty loosely here aren&#x27;t we? I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d classify anyone they talked to through this whole process as an expert.<p>&gt; So I returned the Android and PC and instead bought a new iPhone and MacBook Air. Although these devices are as refined and powerful as they’ve always been, Apple didn’t have to make the best products to regain my business. I just wanted my life back.<p>Bullshit. You tried other products and they weren&#x27;t as good, this is a pretty big retcon in my opinion. We didn&#x27;t hear hardly anything that was better about the XPS or the Pixel other than faster picture taking on the Pixel and how sleek the XPS was with it&#x27;s keyboard (but remember the trackpad was shit, and somehow Apple&#x27;s fault?).