The iPhone 16 series of devices were released yesterday. They are great smartphones for people deep in the Apple ecosystem and, as usual, will sell in tens of millions in months to come. So we thought, what would be a perfect time to release this review for a year-old device? A friend of this publication, Joel Njoroge, shares his deep insights after using the devices for several months. He has since returned to his Android device, and no one blames him. Which platform doesn’t want its lost followers back?
So, I switched to an iPhone. It’s not like the YouTubers who switch by pulling a phone from a drawer and doing a catchy title to please the YouTube algorithm. I did it for the experience. After being on Android since 2011, I decided that maybe it was time to see what this proverbial walled garden was all about. I went ahead, and at the end of February 2024, I got an iPhone 15 in blue (more on that colour later). I’ve always been an Android person, so I was curious to see what iOS has in store and what the use case would be. I decided to approach this by letting iOS be iOS so I can somehow have an easy transition.
The device specs are 6GB RAM, 128GB internal storage, and a blue colour choice. My initial impression after opening the box is that this has got to be the palest blue colour ever. Never has the phone, in any lighting, shown the actual blue color—not summer blue, beach blue, nothing. In most and all situations, the back of the phone appears white. I may as well say that the phone is white but identifies as blue.
The device feels great. You get the sense that Apple really went out of its way to make it feel premium. iPhones have always felt that way, with a premium build that has inspired Android brands. Being a “small” device by today’s standards, the phone feels light. The display is quite crisp and dense.
I won’t rant about the 60Hz refresh rate since I decided to use it with an open mind, accepting the Apple way of doing things. The refresh rate did not bother me because iOS is smooth in terms of the transitions between apps, app pages, menus, etc.
It isn’t as jarring as using a 60Hz Android phone. Everything feels cohesive in the sense that iOS complements the hardware powered by a powerful A16 Bionic chip ticking under the hood. This is a good thing, keeping in mind the famous Steve Jobs quote, “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”
There is USB-C, a new addition to the iPhone thanks to the EU. This makes compatibility with accessories and charging cables easy. Apple makes really good hardware, but the drawbacks arise due to iOS itself. Mostly because of, again, how Apple does things that, at times, don’t follow industry trends.
The software: iOS
iPhone 15 ships with iOS 17 out of the box. The UI is very snappy with eye-candy transitions. It has come a long way, from a barebones interface to a matured one that has gradually been closing the gap in features compared to Android. The overall experience will be good, even great for a non-techy person. But obstacles will come along once you have experienced Android for many years like I have. This will depend on your use case and what you expect a phone to do. Technology should fit your needs, not you adjusting your life and workflow to fit it.
That is why one should buy a device not based on hype but based on what they require it to do. I am a sysadmin, and I deal with Linux servers daily. For the five or so months I have had the iPhone 15, I have realized that iOS treats people as end users, not admins. This means that Apple is the admin and will do things based on what they think the user needs, not allowing users to choose how they want things done. Android gives you everything; you decide what works for you.
There is a lot of cohesiveness and consistency across the UI. For example, app icons and widgets are square-shaped with rounded corners. It is the same as the phone’s rounded corners, even the camera housing at the back. Apps are of great quality compared to Android. But this does not apply to all apps. An app may be well built on iOS but lacks some features that the Android version has. The App Store is well laid out. I noticed that apps update simultaneously when running mass app updates, unlike Android, where apps update one at a time. Some Android apps work better on iOS than Android. When you watch a video on YouTube on an iPhone and turn on dark mode, the video playing does not pause. On Android, the video pauses when dark mode is applied, and you must tap play to resume. When you watch a video in landscape mode and lock the phone, after unlocking, the app remains in landscape mode, unlike on Android, where it switches to portrait mode. Dark mode is not as jarring as on some Android phones. It’s easy on the eyes.
Tap to wake the lock screen works well with the depth effect on lock screen wallpapers.
The temperature value on the weather widget has this cool animation when the temperature changes. The number sort of rolls up. The widget background matches the outside conditions: grey for dark clouds outside, blue for sunny and so on. Unfortunately, the weather app is sometimes not accurate and critical alerts don’t work. So, I have had to use the Today Weather app to have alerts delivered.
Safari browser has a neat tab switcher. Pinch in to reveal all open tabs, swipe across the bottom to switch between tabs.
Media playback is great and rich. The speakers are loud for a phone its size.
Social media apps are well-optimized on iOS. Example: WhatsApp chat background has this cool depth effect. Telegram has great animations, such as the delete chat animation.
Quality of life
Some iOS behaviour brings quality of life. Before going to bed, I always turn off data and home Wi-Fi to avoid notifications buzzing on me at night. So, when you wake up and lift the phone, iOS automatically turns on Wi-Fi and pulls notifications. Sometimes, the notification alerts are in the form of slight knocks. The same happens when I arrive home from work. It automatically connects to Wi-Fi. Neat.
Haptics are great. I rarely miss phone calls. There are knocks and buzzes thanks to the precise Taptic Engine. Calls and alarms have the tones play as the vibration motor buzzes and knocks like a music beat. The alert slider has subtle bumps knocks when you toggle it. It’s very satisfying once you experience it.
The phone automatically turns on battery-saving mode when the charge level goes below 15%.
When you tap the lock screen notification, details are not shown until the phone detects your face and authenticates with Face ID.
Swiping away the call screen allows the app UI to glide to the Dynamic Island. Neat.
Notifications Summary is handy for collecting notifications and displaying them in summary at defined times, such as morning, afternoon and evening. I have done this for apps such as YouTube and Gmail.
Tapping the time on the status bar returns you to the top of any list you are in.
Honeymoon ends…
As much as iOS is fancy, some decisions Apple makes are quite baffling and really go against the notion that the “iPhone just works.” For starters, all app settings are in the settings app and not the individual app.
The back gesture is totally confusing in the way it works. It lacks consistency. In one app the gesture to go back could be a swipe from the left edge, another app like YouTube you have to tap a very small arrow to go to the previous screen. To go back to the video list in the YouTube app while watching a video in portrait mode, you have to swipe down on the video currently playing then swipe left to go back to the list.
When you want to delete a contact, open the contact, tap “edit” on the top right, then scroll down to find the delete button.
Say you want to search something in a group chat on WhatsApp on Telegram. Open the chat, tap the chat header name then tap “search” to find what you are looking for. These are too many steps for something that can be done on Android in two taps.
The Photos app is a mess. All screenshots and photos downloaded or taken are dumped in one continuously chronologically arranged list, the top photo on the list being the earliest. Say you want to share a fire meme you downloaded weeks ago. You have to retrace your steps in your mind when you downloaded it. Android does not do this and has a proper file management system that separates photos from various sources into folders in the gallery. I know this will somewhat be fixed in iOS 18 but again, there will be the Apple way of sorting photos. On the flip side, iOS does not save any photo unless you expressly save it. Unlike Android, apps like WhatsApp save all photos in chats unless you turn that setting off.
The share menu on Safari is sometimes confusing. If you view a PDF document on Safari and need to download it, you tap the share button and scroll down to “Save to Files.” This results in some photos going to the Files app and others to the Photos app.
There are no individual volume controls for alarms, media, phone calls, etc., just one system volume control that applies everywhere. So, when watching YouTube at near max volume and a call comes in, the phone rings loudly like an IP phone in a conference room. When watching a YouTube video and you toggle on silent mode, the audio goes mute until you press the volume button to resume audio.
Notifications need work, a lot of it. Unlike Android, where notifications can be delivered silently by buzzing or tone without turning on the lock screen, on iPhone, I found that by default, every notification turns on the display. You can somehow change this behaviour, but the results are confusing. In the sense that you can change a setting but the notifications don’t behave as you expect them. If you receive a ton of SMSs every day, especially important ones that you cannot miss, then this notification behaviour will surely annoy you.
The keyboard…
To put it in a few words, the keyboard situation is a nightmare.
It’s basic and has low accuracy compared to Android. Here’s the thing. iOS has few third-party keyboards, the major ones being Gboard and SwiftKey. The bizarre thing is that these are just clones of the default iOS keyboard. We can say that the default iOS keyboard has many faces.
The default keyboard is basic. There is no number row for easy input on numbers. Yes, I know or discovered that I can tap and hold the “123” button to reveal the numbers and then release it to return to the main keyboard layout. But this is hardly intuitive and requires remembering every time. The keyboard is responsive but lacks basic features, such as showing suggestions when searching for something online. Say you switch to Gboard. Well, Gboard on iPhone is significantly deprived of features, unlike on Android. The app has not seen an update in two years now. It has latency, which results in typing errors all over. SwiftKey has a number row but has the same latency issues as Gboard. What will anger new entrants to iOS from Android is that sometimes iOS will display a different keyboard when typing. You could be typing on Gboard on Safari, but the switch to Messages, and then the default keyboard slides up. Absolute chaos.
Here’s another one. When typing a text and you make an typing error, you can’t tap directly next to the letter in the word you want to correct. You have to long-press on the spacebar to drag the cursor to where in the word you wish to correct.
Just the other day, I was sending someone some cash. I copied the phone number from Contacts. It had a “+254” prefix. I pasted it into the banking app but realized it would not allow the prefix and had to edit the number to begin with “07xx”. Strangely I could not edit the number since the keyboard had switched to the 123,456,789 layout. I had to copy the number to a note app, edit it, then copy it back to the banking app to proceed. It’s very annoying.
Many exclusive iOS features, such as iMessage, work well when surrounded by other iOS devices among friends and family. Sharing stuff across platforms is difficult if you are the only one with an iPhone.
Camera
iPhones have always had good cameras. iPhone 15 has two lenses: a standard wide and ultrawide lens. But lenses give consistent photos with natural-looking colours. Users coming from, say, Samsung phones will have a different experience in that the photos will be different from the vibrant and colourful ones they are used to. Photos taken on the main 48MP lens are saved in 24MP, unlike other phones, which use pixel binning to combine pixels to a final output of 12MP. This means that iPhone 15 photos have great detail, especially when you zoom in. This is whether during the day or night. However, I noticed lens flares, especially when taking photos in areas with artificial lighting.
I have seen the issue where macro photos usually are out of focus at a distance where other phones would give great output.
Video stabilization is great, and there is a very smooth DSLR-like transition between lenses. But the iPhone does not exist on its own. Android brands have also caught up in this aspect, especially the flagships. Google Pixels also exist. What iPhone 15 lacks is camera versatility, which is available on devices at its price range. But for a simple point-and-shoot camera, it works well.
Battery life
This is what surprised me the most. Initially, I would charge the phone once every 36 hours. This is on light to moderate use. The battery would last until evening at around 30% on heavy usage. Battery life was consistent until iOS 17.5 happened which introduced unusual battery drain. iOS 17.6 (at the time of writing) has somehow fixed this, but the experience is not as when I got the phone. iPhones excel at having barely any standby drain. I could charge up the phone to 100% just before bedtime and wake up to 100%. No drain.
Final thoughts
iPhone 15 is a great product, and using it shows Apple’s effort to create a cohesive experience. It gets better if you have other Apple products. The experience is, however, hampered when using the phone as a standalone device. To get the complete Apple experience, you have to be invested in the ecosystem, which works really well, and that’s why users say they can’t leave. If you use Google and Microsoft apps a lot then Android is the best option since the integrations work better.
The notion of “it just works” depends on how you like Apple’s way of making things work. Some tasks should not take more than three taps to do. This starts from Apple’s iOS apps and goes to third-party apps like WhatsApp and Telegram like for instance, how the search icon is buried in the chat details instead of the main page. And coming from Android, this is among the first hurdles you will encounter.
The disappointing part is how Apple diminishes the experience that Android users have. Sure, customization is coming up in iOS 18, but it will be on the surface level. Plus, there is the wholesome banter about how Android has had theming ever since time began. The keyboard won’t get the fixes needed for a good typing experience. And this is why I can’t be on iOS any longer.
Using an iPhone means accepting what a waiter serves you regardless of how it’s prepared. Using Android means being presented with a buffet where you get to serve and indulge as you please. And if the buffet is not appealing enough, you can prepare your own custom meal as you please.
Personally, I am going back to the buffet experience.
