I’ve been using Google Pixels since they were Nexus phones and just activated my new 14 yesterday. It’s a little weird but I like it so far. I do miss twire instead of twitch, YouTube re-Vance’d, and Firefox with Adblock. What does a long term android user like me need to know/install/settings tweak/etc?
One piece of advise I can give; do not try to replicate your android experience on iOS. More than likely it will leave you frustrated. Make the switch with an open mind to a new way of doing things and you will have a much better time.
The best advice I can give is: don’t immediately abandon the stock apps. I see tons of people who get an iPhone, immediately install Chrome and Gmail and all I can think is, what’s the point?
AdGuard or a similar adblocker for Safari will give you the results you got from Firefox. Safari on iOS also supports full desktop extensions if the developer chooses to make them available. So things like 1Password work great on it.
Same with the Mail app, Calendars, etc. Try setting up your accounts and services in the stock apps and see if you like them. Besides that, there isn’t much to tweak, that’s kind of the point.
If you want app recommendations, it depends on what services you use. Some of my favourite apps are:
Weather - CARROT Mastodon - Ivory Lemmy - Bean or Voyager Package Tracking - Parcel RSS - Reeder Password Manager - 1Password Remote Management - Remotix Home Server Management (Sonarr/Radarr/SabNZBd) - LunaSea
To get that ad-free YouTube experience, I use Vinegar safari extension and have pinned the YouTube site to my home screen rather than using any apps.
I also use Banish to remove all those annoying “Open in our app” pop-ups in Safari.
Lastly, I use AdGuard to block ads on the phone locally and have also set up my own Wireguard VPN server at home with PiHole so that I’m always protected ad-wise when I’m out and about over 5G and on any public Wifi (I used to use my own Wireguard VPN with my old Pixels too).
Absolute bliss.
Thank you for sharing this! I am a happy camper now.
No problems! 😀
When I was on Android I used to love the F-Droid open source repository. Both Newpipe (3rd party YouTube app) and DNS66 (local VPN on device that blocked ads throughout the phone).
I switched to iOS and really missed those applications and needed a solution for my new phone. Those 5 things above (Vinegar, Banish, AdGuard, WireGuard and PiHole) have worked wonders helping me when I switched.
Wouldn’t be without them now.
Edit:
If anyone happens be be on android or still uses Android devices with their Apple things, here are the apps I used to use:https://f-droid.org/en/
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/Both platforms with compelling solutions to block ads and nagging popups.🤝
One more tip: this probably applies to Android as well, I’m not sure as I haven’t used it extensively. But iOS has very good, deep, system-wide autofill.
Make sure you have a contact card in your contacts marked as you (“My Card” at the top of your contacts list) and populate it with all the phone numbers, emails, and addresses you can think of. Tag them all properly (work, home, secondary, etc) and even add usernames and whatnot, go all out.
iOS will use those details to autofill signup flows in many apps and services, as well as autocompleting stuff like “my address is” and “my phone number is”. Saves a lot of time.
It also has deep password manager autofill integration. So you can enable your favourite 3rd party password manager as the system autofill and you can call it up even in apps to create new logins or retrieve saved ones.
