I’ve recently come to a crossroad with Apple and it’s ecosystem. I’ve had an
iPhone 4S for the last 2 years and I was itching for a new device. Giving the
current iPhone lifecycle, it makes more sense to hold out for the next iteration
of the iPhone than jump into the current generation which is nearly at end of
life. “But I want a new phone NOW”, I have been thinking to myself for the last
few weeks and decided to take the plunge back into the Android world by
purchasing a Nexus 5. Part of the draw was the vanilla version of Android that
shipped with the phone, but also the amazingly affordable (and non-contractual)
price of 399$ for the 32GB model.
Smart phones have become commodity items and I want the freedom to be able to
upgrade when I want (without extending the contract with my carrier) while not
breaking the bank. It’s a hot topic as to which devices are superior
(specifically iPhone versus the plethora of Android devices out there), but at
the end of the day, if I want to upgrade my phone yearly, it would cost me
nearly twice as much to stay with Apple’s Ecosystem than it would be to pick up
this year’s latest Nexus. Regardless of which camp you are in, there’s no
denying that both camps are putting out better and better devices with each
passing iteration.
Keep in mind that this post isn’t about Android versus iPhone / iOS (I’ll save
that topic for next week) but the steps that I took to be able to break away
from the Apple / AppStore Ecosystem. When I switched from Android and Linux to
iOS and OS X, I was quick to adopt the Apple-built software (for the most part)
because of the tight coupling between apps and devices. Getting away from that
turned into a personal quest to find new apps that would not only work on iOS
and Android, but also try to find things that would work between OS X and Linux
as I’ve had the itch to start running Linux again (on sexy Apple hardware, of
course 😉 Here’s what I’ve come up with:
iOS Mail to Mailbox
I’ve been using Mailbox for a while now on iOS because I absolutely love the
app. Fortunately, just before I made the switch back to Android, Mailbox was
released on Android and made my decision easier. If Mailbox was not a viable
option, I most likely would have used the stock Gmail app until it did become
available.
In regard to OS X and Linux, I still favor Gmail in the browser over the app
offerings out there. I’ve always found Mail.app to be a steaming pile with
managing my 10 year old Gmail account. Mailbox is supposed to be coming to OS X
soon and hopefully a Linux version will be not too far behind.
Messages.app & Hangouts App to libpurple (Adium & Pidgin)
I really liked Messages.app on OS X because of the iCloud / SMS messaging you
can do from it. Given enough time, dropped connections and the fact that I was
missing messages (that would wind up in the Gmail site and would be lost until I
logged in) pushed me back to Adium for my instant messaging needs. Adium is
built on the same library (libpurple) as Pidgin making the two of them fairly
interchangable across OS X and Linux.
Messaging on iOS was a separate beast all together. Messages on iOS only handles
SMS messages and chatting on Gtalk required a separate app all together. Not a
huge deal, but a recent update to Android which consolidated SMS and Gtalk into
a single Hangouts app. One less thing for me to have to worry about. There’s
also speculation that the Google Voice app will be consolidated into Hangouts as
well, which would be another win.
Notes & Reminders to Evernote
Evernote has clients on all the major platforms, desktop and mobile. I found out
that they have also updated it to handle more than just text notes. Most notable
is the ability to set up notes to be reminders so I was able to break away from
both Notes and Reminders on OS X and iOS in favor of just using Evernote. You
can also create lists inside of notes which wasn’t an option with the Notes app
but I have already utilized for grocery lists.
Safari to Chrome [Canary]
I had migrated from Chrome to Safari quite a while ago for a few reasons. First,
I liked that you can sync tabs between devices. I also liked the addition of the
“Reading List” and synchronized bookmarks between devices. I absolutely hate
that Apple won’t let you set a browser as the default on iOS. It was a pain to
have links opening in iOS Safari while trying to use Chrome as my primary
browser.
I now use Chrome Canary on OS X because I wanted the bleeding edge experience. I
would have preferred to run Chromium to get away from being so ingrained in the
Google Ecosystem (arguably the lesser or greater of the two evils) but it lacked
automatic updates whereas Canary updates nearly every day. I attempted to run
Chrome Beta on Android but ran into some glaring issues immediately, like the
inability to scroll on a page, that’s a deal breaker, ladies!
Why are automatic updates so important to me? Mainly because of Apple’s recent
track record with leaving Safari unpatched to known security problems for
upwards of a year! The release cycle for Safari is way too waterfall considering
how agile the Chrome and Firefox release cycles are.
Even though I am running Chrome on Android and OS X I would still favor Safari
on iOS only because of the inability to set Chrome as the default (outside of a
Jailbreak). I’m not all that big on jailbreaking or rooting because I would must
rather stick with the latest and greatest versions instead of constantly waiting
for new hacks before I can upgrade.
Calendar to… ummm… Calendar!
Calendar is an app that I use, but it’s basically just a shell for my Google
Calendars. I don’t ever put anything on my iCloud calendar so I don’t really
feel like I’m tied to the app itself. The calendar app on Android works fine as
well, so I didn’t think there was any need to find a cross platform calendar
app.
The one big question that I don’t have an answer for yet is what I should end up
using for a stand-alone calendar app in Linux? I had never used a stand-alone
calendar app before migrating to OS X so I suspect I would just go back to
relying on the Calendar tab built into the Gmail website. That is unless there’s
some default calendar app built into GNOME that would act as a wrapper for my
existing Google Calendars.
Contacts to People
Like the Calendar app, the contacts app is really just a wrapper for my Google
Contacts. I guess they call that “People” now on Android. It’s a bit of a wash
because of that.
iCloud Keychain to… meh, who cares
I’m the type of person that doesn’t see the need in cross platform and cross
device password management. I feel like I am still capable of remembering
passwords and since all browsers and platforms have their own version of
password management baked in, I just let them do their thing. I toyed around
with LastPass and it felt more like an afterthought than it did a seamlessly
integrated solution. Pass for now.
Siri to Google Now
Siri’s always known how to listen, but I have never really felt like she was
great at executing. Too often would she ask if I wanted for her to search the
web for me. Just a glorified voice-powered LMGTFY app. I started to use Google
Now and feel it’s not only superior to Siri for voice commands, but is also one
hell of a mind reader (well, email reader / privacy invader ;).
My favorite Siri feature is the ability to be able to tell her to remind me of
something at a fuzzy time (in 90 days, for example). It seems like Google Now
has the same capability but I’m unsure where the reminders go. Are they in my
Gmail account somewhere? There’s a good chance I’ll drop Evernote for my
reminders for Google Now as soon as I figure out how to access them from my
Desktop.
I have not used it, but it appears that there is a Google Now app for iOS. I
doubt it is as tightly coupled as Siri is, but probably worth taking a look into
it.
Conclusion
I’ve been fairly happy with my software migration choices. It’s going to take
some getting used to only because I’ve been living happily in the Apple
Ecosystem for the last 2 years. Finding platform agnostic solutions is the first
step in my goal of being able to switch between devices and platforms as I
please. Who knows, maybe I’ll try to work some Micro$oft technology into the mix
down the road 😉
