After a 5 year hiatus from iOS, in April 2019 I bought myself a pre-owned iPhone 6S for just £245 – 128gb, silver back/white front. I wanted Space Grey, but my local store had mistakenly listed a Space Grey iPhone 6 as a 6S, and upon realising the mistake, the only choice I had was a silver 128gb or a space grey 64gb.
As I’d already had an iPod Touch with 64gb and constantly struggled with storage, I wanted to double the storage just to be sure I wouldn’t run out of space – after all, iPhones don’t offer expandable storage via micro SD cards!
The purpose of buying an iPhone 6S wasn’t to replace my daily driver (which is my 1-year-old Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus), but to make use of a few iOS-only apps that I’ve wanted for ages, but couldn’t because I didn’t own an Apple product.
I also wanted to reacquaint myself with iOS, and see what I was missing out on, and how iOS differed – and what, if anything, had changed – since the days of iOS 6 on my 4th-gen iPod Touch.
Heres my observations so far:
My iPhone 6S: Battery
For a device that is only 3-4 years old, it has only retained 84% of its original battery capacity.
Screen-on times have not been what I expected, and even after a full charge, I’ve had to toggle Low Power Mode and keep it permanently turned on. To maximise battery life between charges, I’ve also turned off as many app background tasks as possible, as well as nearly all app notifications.
Screen-on time has varied, although it’s nowhere near as good as my Galaxy S9 Plus. It has about the same power retention as my Galaxy S7 which, despite being the same age and having a bigger battery, has I think lost more of its original capacity than the iPhone 6S.
Whether the iPhone’s poor performance is due to total battery capacity, battery health or OS-specific battery usage remains unclear, but I have a feeling that it’s possibly a combination of all three.
App Store & app limits
Journalists generally prefer iOS, quoting its security and App Store as major advantages over Android, whereas daily users quote iMessage and the Apple Ecosystem as reasons why they can’t leave iOS.
However, limited to apps only from the App Store is one major disadvantage I’ve always disliked about iOS. I get why an ecosystem is brilliant – especially as I’ve had multiple problems trying to associate Bluetooth devices over the years, and it would be fantastic if things would just work.
But, Android allows me to sideload apps onto my device that aren’t available through the Play Store. This includes apps that I use regularly that, for one reason or another, are taken down from the Play Store, but are still downloadable from other similarly reliable sources.
Yes, there can be a security risk here, but if you trust the app and the source you’re downloading it from – which I do – then why shouldn’t I be able to download and install that app onto my device? After all, it is my choice what I have on my phone.
That is the freedom of Android. If the app I want to use is no longer available on the Play Store, there’s a chance I can still download it from sites like apkMirror or Aptoide.
CarThrottle, for instance, is a social network dedicated to cars and motorsport: their app used to be available for iOS & Android, but for 2 years has not been on the Google Play Store at all. Having bought a new Android phone, I was unable to re-download the app for my new device. Fortunately, after a quick Google search, I found the most recent app version available for download as an APK – I sideloaded it onto my phone, and voila! I can now login and continue using the app, just like before.
With iOS, this isn’t possible, but on the other hand, I have found some apps – no longer available on the Play Store – are in fact still downloadable from the Apple App Store, so now I’m covering all bases with both of my phones.
Customisation
Customisation takes the freedom of Android one step further: if I don’t want the stock look and feel, I can change it. On iOS, I can rearrange the apps, but I’m stuck with the basic layout of app icons scattered on the home screen. I admit it’s a tried-n-tested method, and most people just accept it… but I can’t.
There are work-around methods available, but they’re too much hassle and often involve uploading your wallpaper into an app that litters the home screen with invisible ’tiles’ that match the background – which you rearrange so that your apps are where you want them to be.
Also, the purpose of widgets is to show app-specific info without having to open the app: on Android, the BBC News widget gives me a scrollable list of Top News stories, the calendar widget shows my upcoming events, and the weather widget shows current weather conditions and forecast for my town.
Ill admit they do this on iOS too, but the freedom of Android allows me to display these widgets alongside app icons on my home screen, with the rest of my apps hidden away in the App Drawer – like the Start Menu on a Windows PC, which is separate from a beautifully self-curated desktop.
On iOS, however, apps and widgets can’t coincide or co-inhabit my home screen; instead, widgets live in their own page off to the left of the home screen. It’s a minor annoyance, but because they’re off on a separate screen, the only widget I’ve used thus far is Tap to Shazam: because I forget the widgets are even there, hiding off to the left.
Customisation is why I’ve stuck with Android for so long. If I don’t like the stock UI, I can download something like Nova Launcher to change it, and change the icons with downloadable icon packs.
To even achieve any of this on my 4th-gen iPod Touch – which was stuck on iOS 6 and didn’t receive the update to iOS 7 – I had to jailbreak it. Jailbreaking was a risky procedure given that I could’ve bricked my ‘iTouch’ and rendered it unusable; thankfully, that never happened, although the battery performance took a hit (not sure if the two were related) and I soon got rid of the device altogether.
I haven’t even thought about Jailbreaking the 6S, and to be honest I’m not sure I’d be so comfortable doing it anyway – even if one was available.
Photo and Video Editing
This task is much easier in Android because if I’m in the Gallery or Files apps, I can ‘share‘ the photo or video file into the app I want to edit it in – such as VSCO, Snapseed, Pixlr, Skrwt, Photoshop or Lightroom.
On iOS, I can’t do this. This function isn’t available. Why not?!
Sure, I can share to a social network or cloud storage, but not to another app for editing. (Edit: Darkroom offers an option to share a file to ‘Edit in Darkroom‘ so it would appear this functionality is at app level, not OS level. The only other apps that offer share-to-edit are Lightroom CC, Photoshop Express, and VSCO via the ‘Import to VSCO’ activity.)
To accomplish what is a two second task in Android, I have to open the my downloaded photo editor app of choice, and manually search for the file through that app’s own file searcher.
A number of apps aren’t intuitive at all in this area as file order is often random – for some reason, based on the ‘Camera Roll’ which does its own thing – not organised alphabetically or by date, so searching for a photo inside an app is a chore.
What makes photo and video editing on iOS even more of a chore, is the inability to share files via Bluetooth to my Android phone. As far as I can work out, Bluetooth is only available via AirPlay, which, of course, only works between Apple idevices: iPad, iPhone, iMac, etc.
I either have to upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive, then download it to my phone, or hook up my iPhone to my PC, transfer the file onto my PC then transfer that file to my Android phone.
Bluetooth is supposed to make headaches like these a thing of the past. Not so on iOS!
Therefore, because of all the headaches and hassle, I’ve so far resorted to using Android for most editing tasks, making my iPhone almost null and void.
I’ll upload another post soon on this topic, but for now, thanks for reading!
– Chris JK
KPH tech blog 
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