I have a spare iPhone 11 that I have been using as a backup phone while my other phone, a Pixel 6, is being troubleshooted. There are a few things about iPhones that I find frustrating, and I’d like to discuss those a bit.

Text Selection

Something that has been frustrating me a great deal about iOS is trying to select text. I have frequently switched operating systems on my mobile devices ever since I have had a mobile phone in the mid-2000s. Text selection is a pretty basic feature that I expect out of most any operating system. my Blackberry was amazing at it, Android does a pretty good job, but something about iOS feels so unpredictable and frustrating. I have difficulty adjusting the cursor left and right to delete text or fix typos. I often accidentally select all text or a word when I’m trying to adjust the exact position of my cursor, and I’ve yet to figure out exactly what I’m doing wrong to cause this.

App Performance

Back a few years ago, it was pretty expected that Android didn’t work as well as iphones, and you would routinely have to reboot your Android phone in order to resolve temporary issues or glitches. I find myself having to frequently reboot my iPhone 11 in order to resolve issues with applications such as Facebook, Mail, and Instagram. Additionally, I cannot find a way to force stop an application in iOS.

Customization

The default iOS keyboard is decent enough, but I prefer using an alternative keyboard such as gboard. I find that gboard is not as good on iOS as it is on Android, and run into issues using voice dictation frequently. I’ll need to continue searching for a keyboard I am comfortable using. I also dislike the home screen customization, though it has improved significantly. Things I would like from the home screen are the ability to place an icon or widget anywhere, and a more organized app library. I would appreciate if the App Library had all of my applications listed A to Z the similar to how it is on Android. The view when searching is quite nice, and frankly should be the default.

Restrictions

I am partial to using Firefox on all of my devices, because I do not believe all web browsers should rely on the Chromium engine. Because of restrictions Apple has imposed upon developers, browsers cannot use anything other than the built-in webkit engine provided by safari. this means that Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox on the iPhone do not use their native rendering engines and instead are a wrapper with their own UI on top of the built-in Safari rendering engine. This is not preferable and restricts freedom of choice. I appreciate the freedom that Mozilla Firefox gives me, but I’m unable to truly use a native version of Firefox due to these restrictions. On Android, I have the ability to disable the built-in Chrome browser and use Firefox as my default, even in applications that rely on an embedded web browser as Firefox has the ability to provide that. no such ability is present on iOS. Lastly, I would appreciate the ability to side load applications directly from the device. On my Android devices, I use a mobile application store called F-Droid for open source applications. No such ability is available on iOS.

My overall review of iOS

IOS is a very performant mobile operating system with a very clear design language and ease of use that is rivaled only by Android. That being said, I wish that iOS had more customization features, more rights, and gave the end user more choice in how they use their phone.