Leaving iOS: Simulated 🪂

There's something wrong with my phone. It's incredibly old (iPhone 12, released in 2020, got it in 2022), but that isn't even the worst of it. What's worse is its battery life—you can imagine after so many years of use. But worst of all is its limited storage capacity. I wonder who at Apple thought 64GB was good enough for a smartphone in the 2020s. While this did force me to become an app minimalist (usually I have between 30 and 35 apps installed), other than that, this little memory makes for an awful user experience.

It's not even that I download anything to my phone (except for a few podcasts in my queue). I need 60GB alone to have a working phone. In the end it's iOS itself (12GB), system data (12GB), Signal (13GB—I keep my notes here), photos (8GB—but this is only cached data that is impossible to clear) and voice memos (3GB), the rest of my apps take below 1GB of space. Using my phone these days means getting low disk space warnings several times a week, which has me deleting finished podcasts every other day, clearing app caches, staying vigilant and just on the edge of the 64GB storage limit. Also Signal keeps complaining whenever I hit the limit, stopping me from even opening the app!

The fact that something's wrong with my phone has triggered a train of thought to abandon (the iOS) ship altogether. At first, I didn't ever consider the option to leave iOS. After a decade (to the most part) happily spent in the Apple ecosystem, I believed that I'd just stay put indefinitely. I did notice that Apple's software and products have gotten worse over the last couple of years (most prominent example is Liquid Glass of course, which I keep avoiding to this day), but I was always willing to accept that, especially given that the only other alternative would be to live in Google's ecosystem. I have ungoogled my life in 2019, and I haven't looked back since (YouTube doesn't count).

So for quite a while now, I have lived in the quiet belief that I'd stick to my old-school phone as long as I needed to. Now, that my low data storage is driving me insane, I start to realise that the day to finally move to a new phone is approaching. I had this idea to get the last generation of the iPhone SE (2022)—I know, it's pretty old too, but I think I'd appreciate owning the last iPhone that has a Home Button, and if I'd buy it new, I'm sure it'll be fine for the next 3-4 years.

But then, I remembered Nothing, this English company making these handsome electronic products with a focus on minimalistic design. Among their product lineup is of course the Nothing Phone, the 4a Pro being a mid-range phone that I considered getting. The Nothing Phone runs Nothing OS, which sounds cool, and I appreciate the thought of a dedicated operating system that celebrates the company's design philosophy. But obviously it's just a fork of Android. And Android equals Google. And Google and me—well—we've broken ties, and for the past seven years, I was convinced that this was for the better.

Anyway, I wanted to kick off a blog post series, where I break down what leaving iOS would mean for me. For two upcoming posts, I'll be looking at the consequences both from hardware and from software perspective what leaving iOS would entail.