I’ve been an Apple user long enough to say my blood runs in six colors. It’s a reference to the days when the iconic Apple logo was a rainbow. My first computer was a Macintosh 512ke. The “e” stood for enhanced, which meant it read double-sided floppy disks. Yup, really dating myself here.
All my smartphones have been iPhones. I had an iPhone 6 that I was quite happy with. It did what I needed it to and I wasn’t looking to replace it until I had battery life issues (before Apple acknowledged the problem). At that time, the only option was to send it off and pay to have the battery replaced. I didn’t see much of a point putting $79 into a 3-year-old phone, but I needed a phone that would stay charged for longer than 7 minutes. So, it was time for a new phone.
I’ve always counseled people to buy as much speed, memory and storage space as they could afford, so I took my own advice and bought an iPhone X. I didn’t have the X home for an hour when there was a hitch in the giddy up. I couldn’t read it.
Long story short, Apple eliminated a feature called Display Zoom that enlarges the entire screen enough for me to read it easily. This isn’t the Zoom feature that magnifies part of the screen (that’s still available), this is a feature that made everything on the screen just a little bigger. I have enough vision that I find the Zoom accessed via the three-finger tap, to be cumbersome. I am fortunate to have a friend with a direct connect to the Apple Accessibility Group. A high-ranking manager confirmed that Display Zoom was no longer available. After a bit of whining and lots of hemming and hawing, I returned the iPhone X with 15 minutes to spare on my 14-day return window at Best Buy.
I was without a phone for about 14 hours while I pondered my next move. My daughter smirked when I asked to take her Samsung Galaxy 7 for a test drive. I spent about an hour playing with the fonts in different apps. I didn’t have to put on my reading glasses and I never even turned on the accessibility features. Universally, I could make fonts on Android larger. Boom! Decision made.
Ultimately after a lot of research and several trips to Best Buy in Concord, I ended up with a Samsung Galaxy S8+. Serious shout out to the Best Buy Concord Mobile team. I was in and out of that store no less than six times while I stressed about this decision and every time they were helpful and didn’t make me feel stupid. They respected that I knew more about accessibility than they did (though they genuinely tried to be helpful and asked all kinds of great questions). They let me futz and change settings even showing me their personal phones at times.
I’ve been an Android user for a little over two and a half months. Do I love it?
No, but, I can see it and that’s what matters.
Android is an open operating system. That means anyone who licenses it can add their own twist to applications. This results in almost too many choices, and at times, a frustrating lack of consistency. On the iPhone, you have fewer choices, and everything is tightly integrated. Wherever possible, I’ve replaced everything on the Samsung with a corresponding Google App (Gmail, Google Messenger, Chrome, Google Assistant, etc.). I’m well integrated with Google on my iMac and my iPad, and I like the consistency. I’ve already read Google’s Terms of Service and I trust Google’s security (as much as you can trust any online security these days).
It’s little things that make me nuts. It’s took me the better part of two weeks to get notifications straightened out so that I wasn’t getting useless weather notifications at 3 a.m. I really miss being able to mute my phone with the flip of a switch. There are four separate volume settings! Recently, I was trying to post a photo in my email to Instagram, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where the damn phone had saved the photo.
One of the big concerns with switching was replacing apps, but for me, 95 percent of the apps I use are free. If you play a lot of games or use specialty apps, your millage may vary. For me, music is the issue. I have more money than I care to think about invested in music purchased via iTunes (and I don’t use Apple Music). It’s possible to access my iTunes music on my Android, but the solution is clunky and doesn’t work well with Android Auto, the app that integrates with my car’s screen so I can see a map and play music at the same time (first world problem for sure, but annoying none-the-less).
More than once, I’ve considered rehoming the Galaxy S8 and going back to iOS. Last weekend I even spent some quality time with a friends iPhone 8 (which still offers Display Zoom). Sadly, it was much harder to read.
Apple was one of the first and, at one time, the best at mobile accessibility. I was very loyal to a company that lead the way in making sure that the blind and visually impaired could compete with their sighted peers. I’m still a dedicated Apple desktop user. To be honest, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this trip with Android OS, is an alternate route, around a momentary obstacle. My hope is that it’s not forever, but it is definitely for now.