Despite the widespread belief that the iPhone is a product manager’s marvel, I do see some very infuriating features (rather the lack of them) that when I switched from an Android to iPhone, I was disappointed. Not just disappointed, I felt lost, helpless and angry.

I wouldn’t have bought a new phone had Xiaomi given an Android OS upgrade from Nougat to Oreo, but that was not going to happen. I didn’t mind working on the Nougat OS either but I had just one problem - Slack deprecated its App for the Nougat OS and Slack is our company’s internal communication App! So, in a way, I was forced to buy a new phone. 🤷🏻‍♂️

One major requirement for me was to have a small and sleek phone. I did not want to carry a bulky, huge, not-fitting-in-my pocket kind of a phone. When I searched the market for a suitable option, iPhone was the only option with smaller screen sizes. It was hard for me to consider iPhone (from Android) as the best option, but I did. I bought the iPhone 12 Mini.

It took a while for me to get adjusted to the iOS ecosystem, but I got a hang of it in a few days. I love some of the features and use them daily, but I also miss some beautiful and simple features which I enjoyed on my Android.

I am not going to talk much about the ‘good’ features here, I just want to vent out my frustration of missing some valuable features which I enjoyed on Android.

A few things that made me regret my decision of buying an iPhone:

• The battery life is among the poorest in the market. Even one full charge doesn’t come in handy for a day, with modest phone usage. I generally charge my phone thrice in two days
• One very infuriating thing that made me feel completely helpless was the call recording features. As part of my job, I do customer interviews and record conversations for analysis and insights. I enjoyed the auto call recording feature on my Note 4. Not only does the iPhone not have the call recording option, but there are no good options even in the App Store! I searched for various options: good Apps (without issues) or other workarounds for about 4 hours but to no use
• The call history is another frustrating thing. iPhone doesn’t store the call history dating long back (it doesn’t display at least). I can hardly see the call history dating back to a few days, that’s it! I cannot see if I have called someone a couple of weeks, I just cannot!! On Android, I could find the entire call history of my contacts - going back even 5 years!
• Another issue related to calls, iPhone merges all the calls - from WhatsApp, Skype, Signal, FaceTime, regular calls - and shows them in the call history. Many times, when I want to make a regular call I tap the user in the call history and it triggers a WhatsApp call, which is frustrating
• I have two SIMs on my phone. My outgoing service is active only on one SIM, not on the other and I have set the outgoing SIM as the default SIM for all the outgoing calls. Despite this, if a user calls me on another SIM and I try to call them back, iPhone calls them from this another SIM, not my default SIM. I mean, I made one SIM default so that I do not have to switch SIMs, hello?
• The default calculator is another irritating App. Earlier, in the MI Note, I was able to see what my previous calculations were. If I had done a series of operations, say, 14540 x 24 + 13500 x 12 - 100000, then I was allowed to scroll up and see what my previous punched in numbers were. But the iPhone calculator does not even provide a view of what my previous punched in number is, or in fact, what my previous performed operation is!
• Assume you are watching a video on your phone. In any normal Android phone, when you get a notification you can swipe up on the notifcation to hide it (which you can view later), left or right to remove it - you may want to remove the notifcation from the notifications bar because you know it is irrelevant and you don’t want to look at it later also. You don’t get that ease in an iPhone. You can hide the notification by swiping up. Swiping left or right on the notifcation doesn’t work. If you want to kill the notification, you should swipe down on it to expand the notification content and swipe down again to kill it! I just don’t understand why a left/right swipe is not allowed!
• Another issue related to the notifications is that I am not allowed to kill a notification on the notifications bar by a simple right or left swipe. The right swipe opens the App pertaining to that notification. Left swipe shows three actions that I can perform on the notification: Manage, View or Delete. Additionally, tapping on the notification also opens the respective App. So, if I want to open the notification, there are three different ways to do it! Why such redundancy for opening the notification, while no easy way to kill the notification? For me, killing a notification is as equally important as viewing it. And later I discovered that, I can kill a notification by swiping left on the notification from the right most edge to the left most edge which is even more irritating than simply swiping left and clicking on ‘Delete’. Why can’t the right swipe be used to kill the notification?

Will add more to this list as I find other infuriating issues.

Do you have your frustrations when it comes to the iPhone? Do let me know!

Please note that iPhone is a fantastic phone and there is a reason why it is one of the most widely used products in the world. This post only highlights the aspects which I thought were very basic and should be included; I’ll probably do another post talking of its marvellous features.

That is for some other day!