I was a loyal Android fanboy since my very first smartphone: the LG Optimus running Android 2.2 Froyo

Before that, I was obsessed with everything Google was doing. I was naive enough to think they actually lived by the “don’t be evil” mantra. Search was still good and Google+ was a cool nerdy alternative to Facebook. They were making Linux mainstream with their highly customizable open source iPhone alternative and I was there for it.

Before that I had a Samsung Gravity with a slide out keyboard and a Sony Ericsson feature phone with a web browser, complete with a little mouse cursor you could control using the keypad. I could switch the big ol' SIM card between the two and it just worked. I switched phones a lot in those days 🥲

I got into rooting and flashing custom ROMs after a while and it was the most fun I’d had voiding a piece of hardware’s warranty since I softmodded an original Xbox using Mech Assault. I remember getting the HTC Sensation and flashing a custom port of the newer version of Sense that shipped with the shiny new aluminum HTC One, courtesy of Team Venom.

What a fucking rad community of open source devs and smartphone hackers doing off the wall custom Linux kernels and ROMs for free, all because of Google supporting Open Source with their powerful new smartphone OS. I overclocked so many old phones half to death. I probably could have fried an egg on some of them.

These days Android itself is still open source, but it requires Google’s proprietary services and app suite to work. Most phones are so locked down you can’t flash custom ROMs unless you’re a literal hacker anyway.

My last Android phone was a low end OnePlus Nord N200. I always wanted a OnePlus phone since they were so big in the modding community – in the beginning, they even had handsets that shipped with Cyanogenmod. How cool is that?

This phone was a far cry from the old days though. The default configuration for the home screen was a knockoff of the old iOS setup where there was no app drawer; every app installed on your phone was spread across a few pages on the launcher. If I swiped to the right, I got a bloated feed of Google ads and clickbait articles tailored to me, based on the trove of personal data Google was continuously harvesting. You can’t disable it unless you uninstall updates and freeze the Google app installed at the system level.

It felt like a cheap Chinese iPhone knockoff, but with a shitty automatic color scheme that pulls the most bland colors from whatever wallpaper you’re using and themes every facet of the OS accordingly. Google search is almost unusable at this point. The icons are inconsistent and look terrible unless you can find an icon pack that covers all of your apps (you can’t).

Back in the day, the only time I deviated from Android was when the iPhone 6 was getting old and Verizon gave me a free upgrade. It was okay. I ended up going back to Android less than a year later and that’s where I stayed until I switched to T-Mobile and got an iPhone 13 a few months ago. Holy shit has iOS changed.

You can add widgets to the homescreen now, iCloud has Private Relay, you can change the lock screen widgets. Everything is so uniform and smooth. My favorite part is the lack of fragmentation. With Android, there’s a million different devices, all with their own slightly different aspect ratios and quirks. Some phones are five or six years behind on OS updates. One might ship with a 2000mAh battery and another has 6000. Some have physical buttons, others have a ripoff of the iPhone gesture navigation. Some have 8GB of RAM and a 16-core processor, others have 2GB and an antique quad core chip. Apps are in no way consistent between different devices.

I know iPhones are proprietary and market trends will tell you they’re obsolete six months after you spend over a thousand bucks on the latest one, but I also know people who happily used an iPhone 6 for the better part of a decade. I bought a 13 after the 15 was a couple months old and it’s still, by far, the best phone I’ve ever had. And as a bonus, there were zero bloatware apps I couldn’t remove. I don’t have to root my phone and run a de-bloater script. I can simply uninstall an app if I don’t want it.

I do miss the days of staying up all night flashing ROMs and reading threads on XDA Developers, but I’m afraid those days are long gone. I’m not a programmer or hardware hacker and the older I get, the less free time I have to mess around with hobbies and fun little projects. I love my outdated iPhone 13.