Listener Question on Using Software

Welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of weird ideas about smartphones. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting here reading this book, Apple, The First Fifty Years by David Pogue. I got an advanced copy of it, not to brag, but it is exactly what you think it is. It is an epic, like 600-page tome all about the first 50 years of Apple. It's fascinating. There's so much in here that I didn't know. Like I have covered Apple so much as a product company, but understanding what was going on inside of the company, and particularly the ways in which Steve Jobs was both unbelievably good at his job and managed to drive absolutely everybody insane all of the time. It's just fascinating. There's so much interesting sort of internal machination drama in this story. It's very good. And even if you are somebody who knows a lot about Apple, uh as, I like to think that I am, this book is worth a read. It's the 50th anniversary of Apple starting next week. We're gonna have a bunch of Apple coverage, lots to do. Very excited about it. I gotta finish this book in part so that I can do all of that coverage. Anyway, today on the broadcast, most of the show is going to be my conversation with Alison Johnson, our senior reviewer, about my phone journey. I've mentioned this a few times, but I've spent the last several months trying like every phone I could get my hands on. I've tried flip phones and foldable phones. I tried a phone with a keyboard. I just tried to go and see if there is something better than the phone everybody just defaults to, right? I've had an iPhone for forever and was like, well, maybe it's time to see if it is worth the work to go get a different phone. Um I've had a lot of thoughts. I have done a lot of testing. I've done a lot of phone switching. And uh I just needed somebody to bounce some ideas off of. So I grabbed Allison and we're gonna talk through where we are in the phone world right now. Also, we have a really fun hotline question about AI and vibe coding and how to think about what these tools can actually do for us. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first I probably Support for the show comes from L'Oreal Group, the global beauty leader, defining the future of beauty through science and technology. L'Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the wor ld. Support for the show comes from Hostinger. Ever had an idea for a business or side hustle, but never actually launched it? With Hostinger, you can turn that idea into something real in minutes instead of weeks. Hostinger is an all-in-one platform that brings everything into one place: your domain, website, email marketing, AI tools, and AI agents. You can create websites, online stores, and custom apps with simple prompts. Then use AI agents to automate tedious tasks and grow your business. Go to hostinger.com slash vergecast to bring your idea online for under $3 a month. Use promo code VIRGCAST for an extra 20% off. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks, instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, unified platform that gets out of your way. It's asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongoDb.com slas h Hi Allison. Hello. So the last few months I've been on this wild phone journey that I just imposed on myself because I was really bored of my iPhone sixteen. And um, unlike you, I'm not a phone reviewer anymore, so I'm not perpetually switching phones. And I think you and I both agree that when you are a phone reviewer, it warpse you slightly. Um and and I I found myself in this place of like, okay, I've actually had an iPhone pretty much as my only phone for like four years now. And that's the longest I have gone without being a phone reviewer in a very long time. And I'm just sort of bored of the iPhone. I was like, okay, I I don't review phones, but also I know a lot of people who will send me phones to test for a couple of weeks. So I just did that, called in a bunch of phones. Uh I've tried a I've tried a whole bunch of them and I've I've come to you with ten observations. I would say I have I have many. Okay. But we this may be a six part podcast we do. But I I think I I'm gonna tell you well, I'll just tell you where I landed and then I wanna get into I have this mix of I would say sort of hot takes about phones that I want to gut check on. Um and then just a bunch of things I encountered that surprised me that I want to talk about. I'm sound okay. Yes. Okay, so my my end point, just to just to say the upsetting part first, I bought an iPhone. Okay, I knew I knew that was coming. This is this is not frankly where I expected to land. And as of not very long ago, it was not where I was going to land. Um but I went out the other day and I bought an iPhone 17. Uh it's Sage. Oh, it looks lovely. Oh great choice. I I love the color. I am I am medium happy with the phone in the same way that I was medium happy with the iPhone sixteen. But you got that high refresh rate screen back. I did. Um you're still wrong about the always on display. Which is bad. I love it. Did you turn that the just the picture off? It's better. It is definitely better. And it will you can do it so it mostly just shows you the time now, which is what I'm looking for and what I appreciate. It's bet ter. It's still better on the pixel. But I think through these 10 things I have for you, I think we can we can I can start to explain to you why I landed on an iPhone. And then I want you to tell me if you think I made the wrong decision at the end of this process or not. Does it sound good? Okay. Yes. Okay. So thing number one. Uh switching phones is awful. Like awful, awful, awful, awful. And it's everyone's fault. Uh, and I don't know what to do about it. So like just the very first thing I had to do, and I know you have to do this all the time. Um, I had to switch my eSIM from an iPhone to an Android phone. Oh God. Nightmare. Nightmare. Project. Did it work? It it worked after I both called a person at Verizon and they were like, do you have another phone I can call you back on? And I was like, who says yes to that? Like, no, I have the one phone. What are you talking about? Like this is this is my phone. I have the phone from you. What do you want from me? And they were like, Oh, I see I had to have them call my mom to authenticate the account. So I literally I had to I had to I message my mom from my computer while my phone was off in order for her to authorize them switch. It was insane. So it's this like thirty six hour process just to change my eSIM. And then I I complained about this on the show and I got messages from people who work at Verizon who were like, yeah, we know it's awful. Yeah, they do. They should feel bad about it. And I suffer through it so much. That's why I just I'm like, I'm on ESIM. I guess I'm gonna have this iPhone for a little bit. Yeah. No, it's it's really true. And I think there is something about the pain of switching phones that is part of the lock-in of it. And even from Android to Android, right? So there's like once you get onto Android, the switching process is much easier. So the first phone I tried was the the Motorolaer Raz Ultra, the flip phone, because I was like, maybe, maybe this is the time when flip phones are for me. Um, they're not, which we're gonna get to. But um that switch was awful. And then I switched from the razor to the pixel and moving the ESIM there was like two taps. Couldn't have been easier, terrific times. Um but the process of moving all of your stuff, even though that's getting easier, still takes a while, whatever. But like you have to go and you're you're logged into some things, but not to others. You have to do this horrible process of trying to transfer like WhatsApp data and signal data and that breaks in a bunch of ways. You have to one for me is like I I have run out of um downloads on some books on Kindle because I have to go in and manually redo this every time. So it's just like there is this unknow able amount of things you have to do every time you set up a new phone that with each of these it took like m most of a week before it felt like I was just seamlessly using my phone. Yeah. How do you do this all the time? You do this all the time. I do. Um, so my secret is uh I I kinda just yellow and I don't worry about the messaging apps. Like I just lose all my messages every time I switch phones and my bad outcome. It's so annoying. My friends are so annoyed because I'll text them and be like, dude, I don't know. Where's this show tonight? Like, who bought the tickets? It's somewhere. It's on this information is on a phone. Like Yeah, they're like, scroll up, Allison, and you're like, I can't. I literally cannot. They're used to it. They understand that this is how I operate. Um yeah, and and my method, I think, is a little different because I want to make sure I'm not like bringing some baggage from the previous phone to the current phone. So I just like clean slate set everything up from scratch, which is worse and like better in some ways. Um have the password manager, my life would be uh over if I didn't have the password manager to just like autofill everything. Yep. Um and yeah, that's just kind of how I live my life. There's like an awful two hours where I'm like logging into stuff and um inevitably it's the parking app. I end up on a s a street in Seattle downloading the parking app and my husband's like, Oh my god, you have to do this again. Yep. And you have to download it and then you have to log in and then you have to check your email for the verification thing. And God only knows what notification settings you have on your phone so you'll know whether the email came in or not. And then you have to go back. And that may or may not have worked because these apps don't talk to each other very like it's it's just yeah the number of times you're in an app and then you go to the email client and then you click on the verify link and it opens the browser instead. Like nightmare. And there's so many things. And part of me is like, okay, I'm not sure I actually think it's a better answer to have all of that stuff so bundled together that I get a new phone and everything is just magically logged in and there. Like there are security issues with that that I think are probably real and valid, but it really like switching phones is awful. Yeah, it's so awful. I've been so desensitized and I I like offer therapy to my friends when they're like, it's time to switch phones. I'm like, you got this. And I had this, I had the fun experience of being at the Apple store uh buying the new one that I bought. And I I wound up basically just deciding to go through the process at the store, right? Normally like I buy the thing, I go home and do it myself and this time I was like, I'm a normal person now. Let's do it with the Apple representative. Uh it took two hours. No, no. It was not a good time. Um but but I got to watch a bunch of people go through this and there were a bunch of people who had come into the Apple store just to update their software. And and they're they're because I think people are like s when I when I make this change something is going to break. Yeah. And I I'm kind of like you're you're probably right about that. They want to be in a safe space when it happens. Totally. And I think the fact that that is the case and that's how people feel about getting new devices and new software is such a damning critique of the state of all of these things. Yeah. It's awful. It sucks. Yeah. Like I I truly I got to the point where I I planned to do this with more phones. I wanted to like really go down the rabbit hole of Android phones. And I got to the point where I was like, if I if I have to do this stupid signal transfer one more time, I'm gonna lose my mind. Um okay, so that's thing number one. Thing number two, uh you and I have talked about flip phones and fold phones a lot. And I think I think I've figured out what's wrong. I think flip phones have a software problem and foldable phones have a hardware problem. Uh I think foldable phones are s they're still too big. They're still too clumsy for a lot of things. I think the the the I've been using a pixel fold and the thing where you can't functionally open it with one hand and still sort of it's just it's just awkward in a way that I don't think is right. And they have durability problems. The camera's not usually as good. Like this thing, if you could just make it a little smoother and a little better, I think the idea of it's more screen would be more compelling to me. Because it is more screen. And I like the more screen. I do. More than I expected, honestly. Yeah. Did you use the Z Fold 7 as my question? I didn't Samsung wouldn't because you have one. Like if I'm just being honest, that is what it is. Oh they were like Alison already has one. All right. I'll bring it I'll bring it to the East Coast next time I'm there. But it's a good one I also ruled out Samsung at the beginning of this because um just to be perfectly blunt, Samsung's take on Android is not for me. Like I get that it's for lots of people and there are lots of good reasons to like Samsung phones, but the the way that one UI works on top of Android just feels like mess to me and I have I have never liked it and I still don't like it now. So I I didn't even go very far down the road with any Samsung device. But I did try to get a Z Fold seven because I know you love it and you wouldn't send me one. I'm glad you tried. So that's on the on the foldable side. I think uh you know, I keep saying there's no killer app for it, and I still kind of believe that, but I can open it up and it is bigger to read on, is cooler than I thought. It just is. Like it it is I I enjoyed having big screen more than I expected. But the trade-off of what it's like to actually use the thing didn't quite feel worth it for me. On the flip side, this is the right phone hardware. This is the the Motorola Razor Pro Ultra . I l love the hardware of this phone. Yeah. And I get absolutely nothing out of using it. Oh no. Well so it's like you open it up and everything is like too tall and the keyboard's kind of wacky and nothing's in the right place because everything is still up at the top of this very tall phone and it just doesn't quite work. And then you close it and it treats it it like's a completely different phone on the outside. So it's constantly asking permission to use an app on the external screen. And like, buddy, it's my phone. What are we doing here? And and then you go to respond to a text message and you you oh it opens up the keyboard and then you can't see the message anymore and like it's it's it's as if no one at Motorola ever closed the phone when they were developing this thing and it drives me absolutely insane. But I look at this and I'm like, there is something about this and the like quick bits of information that it gives you and the stuff you can do with it propped up like this on a table, taking pictures, like there is stuff here that works for me. It's just none of the software makes any sense. There yeah, it's wonky. And if you can believe it, Samsung's is even wonkier. I guess maybe that's not a surprise. Uh motor is at least like you will we'll let you opt into opening an app on the outer screen, you weirdo, it's gonna look all strange. Right. Um Samsung makes you download good luck, which is an adventure. Yeah. I know. I mean I I think I I like the flips and tend to be a person who's like I'm willing to deal with a little wonkiness and it yeah, the the texting experience on the outside screen is not ideal and I don't want to write all of my text that way. But I do do that thing where I'm like, I will actually respond to the text because it's just an option right there and I don't have to like dive into the phone and be come face to face with everything. Um, I'm the worst for like I'll see a text and think of a response and s send it in a week when I get around to it. Or never in my case. Yeah, probably never. A lot of nevers for me. It's great. Yeah. My friends all love that too. Um Yeah, that's I think one of my f the the camera being able to prop up and use the outer camera um and the texting from the outer screen are are kind of my favorite things, but that that was not enough to to move the needle for you, it sounds like again, those are those are good examples. There just need to be fifty more of them for this form factor to really work for me. And it's like there, there's just so many little tweaks to bits of the operating system that don't exist. Um, I also found I I tend to I hold the phone like like this kind of grabbed in my palm when I'm when I'm just using it closed. Um I have brought up Gemini by accident maybe forty five thousand times. Oh no in the process of doing that. Like just constantly. It's it's just right where your finger is and then it's like, oh I j I did Gemini again, over and over and over and over again. Ye ah. Um okay, observation number three. This is just I need a gut check from you on this. Um purely anecdotally, but I get maybe ten times as many spam calls on an iPhone than I do on Android. Uh it was it was shocking to me how many of them went away, particularly when I was using the Pixel. And then I like switch back to the iPhone and boom, there's this one uh it's like a company that calls wanting me to donate blood that calls me like twice a day. Just gone for weeks thanks to the pixel and now suddenly back on the iPhone. Yeah. Totally. Android is just better at this. They are, yeah. In I think in iPhone settings, they've they've provided more things, but you kind of have to I I could be wrong. I don't spend uh tons and tons of time on iOS, but um you can opt to have like all unknown calls just disappear and go away. Um, or like numbers that aren't. Right. Yeah. That always scares me a little bit where I'm like, well, maybe it's someone's gonna call me from daycare from a a weird number and then my kid is bleeding and I need I don't know. Yeah. Um things like that kind of scare me. Yeah, the the Pixel in Android in general just seems to be smarter about like either just straight up labeling it with a big like this is probably spam. Don't worry about it. Yep. Or um just like not bothering you at all. But just go Yeah. Yeah. I I got back to near hundred percent just answering the phone every time it rang on Android, which has not been the case on iPhone for years for me. Uh yeah, this is fascinating. Um, okay, next one. Um Gemini is so much better than Siri, it is astounding. And it kind of changes the way I use my phone. Um like I I I found myself doing things with the voice assistant that I would never even think to do on the iPhone because I would just assume that it's broken. Um like the the joke now is you do things you're you're you're like, you know, hey Siri, what's two plus two? And it's like would you like me to ask chat GPT? And it's like, well, this is what are we even doing here? So I have just sort of switched my brain off on all these things that I might do. Uh you know, instead of like going to Chrome and Googling something to get information, just asking Gemini for that piece of information. Siri is so bad at these basic things that I don't do them anymore, and they slowly started to creep back. Like I use Gemini a lot on Android to to control the phone, to do things, to open apps to find stuff in the place. Like it is it is a good orchestrator of your phone in a way that Siri just never has been. And I think it's like that might be for me the biggest single advantage of Android over iOS at this point. Yeah. And it' its's wild because we've seen it happen in real time. Like Gemini was not great at first, and there was a lot of stuff it could not do. But like in the true Google fashion, they've sort of like fixed things and added things gradually. Um, putting personal intelligence in the mix has like kind of blown my mind where like a year ago, I would argue with Gemini like about where my flight was taking off. And it would be like, no, no, you're you're leaving from San Jose. I'm like, it is in my calendar. You can read my calendar. I don't need to do that anymore with Gemini. And it changes how you, yeah, how you think about like finding information on your phone or just you're wondering something and you you know you can ask it. I find myself like when I switch to iOS, I have like I redevelop that muscle on Android where I'm like, I'll just ask Gemini or this is a Gemini thing. And then I look at the iPhone, I'm like, no. Like I can download Gemini, but I I try to give Siri the benefit of the doubt and it just no. No. Even even if you asked Siri to open Gemini, there's like it's like sixty forty it wouldn't work. Oh my God. I didn't even think of doing that. Yeah. Um speaking of which, actually, you you've been using uh a feature I have not yet gotten access to on any of my devices, which is the task automation stuff, which feels like that's the next step of this, certainly for Gemini and also in theory for Siri, uh, how is that going? Are you are you actually doing stuff on your phone just by asking Gemini to do it? Yes. It's going I I am both like my mind is kind of blown um because it's the thing. It's like the thing we've been promised. You can ask Gemini, like, order me a pizza and it's gonna open the app and do the thing for you. And it works on a phone that I'm holding in my hand that isn't like in a keynote. Um, it is wonky. It will sometimes fail at things. It's slow, um, like like painfully slow if you watch it. Yeah. Um, but the key things to kind of remember are like it's sort of it's in beta first of all and whatever. Um it's designed to work in the background. So you tell it like like my uh use case is I'm running around the house trying to get my put socks on my kid and pack all the snacks and do all the things. I've like frequently want to order a Starbucks at that point. That is the time for this feature, is to be like, hey, order me that thing for pickup from my Starbucks and and it will do it. It's wild. Like you can watch the phone, use use the phone. Um, so I'm existing in two states of like I don't want to oversell this thing. It is a little wonky and limited right now, but also like holy crap, this is the future. You know, I I say like, hey, I have a flight tomorrow, schedule me an Uber to get me there on time. Totally. And it I had a follow-up question I had to answer, but it did it. And it like did it right. I'm like, oh my God. That is very cool. Yeah, I was actually thinking about the food example. Uh for whatever reason, all the restaurants near me use the Toast app uh for pickup and stuff. So I'm I have basically just like a run of every takeout order I've ever done in toast. And just the idea of being able to be like, order me the the usual from the junction, which is the coffee shop down the street. And it's like just take the I I try to time that as I'm getting in the car to take the kids to daycare so I can just sort of pick it up on my way home. And if if I could just say that to my phone instead of having to put them in while with one hand scrolling to find the recent orders and do it, like that's the kind of thing that is a a relatively small task, but if I can just offload the twelve taps, it instantly makes my life better. Yeah. It sounds it sounds ridiculous. It sounds like an extreme first world problem. But once you do it and you see it, you're like, this is this makes so much more sense than the way like tapping around the phone. I ordered a Starbucks coffee from the wrong Starbucks when I was at the JFK airport. I ordered a coffee a thousand miles away. I welcome a robot doing that for me. Like 100%. Yeah. Every time I go to the Starbucks app, it still defaults to California because that's where I lived when I set up the Starbucks app. We're doing we're doing great, everybody. You live there forever now. Yeah, apparently. Alright, let's take a break and then we're gonna come back and I have some more fiery takes to throw at Allison. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a new business, it could be a lonely endeavor, especially in the beginning. And if you're just starting out, it's more important than ever to make sure you have the right tools at hand. If your business includes e-commerce, a great next step is to try Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that millions of You can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. If you're asking yourself, what if people haven't heard about my brand? Shopify helps you find your customers with easy-to-run email and social media campaigns. And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer support. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You could sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash vergcast. Go to Shopify dot com slash vergcast. That's Shopify dot com slash Virgcast . Support for the show comes from granola. Meetings are a mess. A lot of circling backs, and we're actually covering that in a different meeting. And whoever's in the car, can you please mute yourself? But for as messy as meetings are, remembering those meetings is even harder. Granola fixes that. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You simply take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, granola securely transcribes that meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. You need to do your job better. So if meetings are eating up your day, granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai/slash verge. That's granola.ai/slash verge to get your time back. Get three months free at granola.ai/ver ge. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether it's online, in a storefront, full,-time or a side hustle. You already know how hard it can be to sell your product. A lot of the time, you set everything up and then simply have to rely on hope you get noticed. Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On Whatnot, you can go live and sell directly to people in real time . You show what you've got while buyers can watch, ask questions, and purchase on the spot. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, WhatNot says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling that's W H A T N O T dot com slash cell whatnot dot com slash c ell All right, we're back. So back to my phone journey. All of the little AI nudges inside of Android, I think, are awesome. Like it and and they're getting increasingly useful, especially for me in like text messages where if I'm I'm talking to somebody about a thing we're gonna do that evening, it just pops up a little thing that's like add this to calendar. Yep. Like those just these little sort of subtle nudges about like how to go find more information or add this to something or send this to somewhere or whatever. L ike, that is the kind of stuff that it just makes my whole phone make more sense to me. And instead of me having to like open up an app and then and then open up the other app just so I can swipe back to that one, look at the information, and then you do the thing where you sort of half swipe so you can see both apps simultaneously so that you can remember the information to type it into the first app. Yep. Just to be able to hit the thing and hit add to calendar and it just moves the information over to the Google Calendar app and starts a new e vent. Yeah. Terrific. Like insane that phones have not worked like this the whole time. I know. If I love it. And yeah, on Pixel it's called like magic cue. Yeah. And um I I it's been a minute since I used it like regularly, but you get some funny kind of false positives where it's suggesting like, oh, you have a ticket to go park at the zoo parking lot in a week. Like here do you want that? But you just ignore it and Yeah, they're they're tiny little they're they're like little little badges that pop up. I have not found them a nuisance at all. Exactly. And when it's helpful, I'm like, oh, this actually is helpful because I was going to forget to put it on the calendar or I was going to put it on the calendar wrong. Um it it sort of feels like when you see it work all the way through correctly, it feels like the first time you saw like um a one time password fill in by itself and then just like submit. You're like, oh this yeah, this is easy. Like do this for me. I love it. A thing by the way that Google does not do as well as iOS. Like oh yeah. You get the text message notification and it prompts you to copy the the code, which is fine. But just the thing where it pops up and it's like copy for messages and you just go b and it pop it pops it into the thing and presses enter for you is like iOS is vastly superior in that way. But authentication is the next thing on my list. Um this is this is maybe my most esoteric phone theory at this moment, which is I think authentication is the biggest problem with day-to-day life of using a mobile phone. And this just has come up for me so often because I've had to log into things a million times. But one thing I love about the Pixel, again, in particular. Like again, I'm being very nice to the pixel, and I thought for a very long time I was going to end up picking a pixel because I actually like this phone a great deal. It has both face unlock and a fingerprint reader, which I think is awesome. Uh having that fallback before you get to your passcode is really useful. Yeah. Um, a lot of other phones have like less secure face unlock, which I've mostly found really annoying. They're like, we'll unlock your phone, but we can't do anything actually important with your face. What are what are we accomplishing here, guys? Yeah. Then you have to re enter your pin if you're gonna order some just I don't know food or something. But having the multiple things is is great, but uh across the board the password app integration is messy and not very good. Uh it it sometimes it pops up a suggestion, sometimes it pops up a like open one password, sometimes it pops up nothing at all. You just don't know. And so the the actual experience of trying to log into something is really annoying. And then when I'm in uh like I I log into a bunch of things with an Amazon account for whatever reason, uh like I I use the Kindle app, I use the Amazon app, I use ReadWise Reader, which logs in with an Amazon account, those things are all entirely unaware of one another. Oh. In a way that doesn't make any sense to me. But it's like this this phone has, I just typed in my Amazon password. This this feels like it should make sense. And if I'm in the Amazon app and then it pumps me to Amazon.com for some reason, we have to start this whole experience over. Yeah. Uh at least Android's browser is more aware of itself across apps. The whole like in-app browser thing that on iOS, every app has a different browser and you have to log into everyone separately. Yeah. Full nightmare. But I think so many like little bits of friction for me in every phone experience has been just trying to be logged into things is so much harder than it should be. Right. It it's one of those places where I I try to calibrate myself because I'm constantly annoyed by logging into things and I'm logging into things way more than any normal human should. Yeah. I've used eight phones in the last two months. Yeah. You spend 30% of your waking hours like logging into things. Um I I've like adjusted to the Android way of things, which is kind of wonky. It's like sometimes you have to tap the password field or long press it to get the autofill option. And then maybe the one password chip will show up. Maybe it's not and you're going to have to go copy and paste it. But yeah, every time I switch back to iOS, that is one of the things I'm like, oh, this is so much smoother. Like it just the apps know when I'm trying to log in. It's I always get the pop-up for one password and it's yeah, life is easier. Um okay. I have three more. We're we're getting to the end here. Okay. Um one, I think messaging lock-in is massively overblown as as a problem for switching. Leaving iMessage was not hard, and none of my friends are mad at me about it. Okay, good. Just not a problem. Yeah. I I missed a couple of texts. Uh, our friend David ML sent me a screenshot of a couple of text messages that he tried to send me that failed. But uh by and large, I went to the website, I deregistered for my message, I switched my phones. It it helps that a lot of my group chats have already moved to platforms like Signal and WhatsApp that are just better for those things anyway. You have better friends. I do. Yeah. Honestly. And the thing that really helps, honestly, and this is very specific to me, is that my wife uses an Android phone. Uh-huh. So we've already broken all of our group chats together. Yes. So I think it it's definitely a your mileage may vary kind of situation. But at least for me, ditching iMessage was not a a problem. Yeah. And in fact, in a lot of ways it was great. I switched out of iMessage and started using the beeper app, which integrates really well with Google Messages. Uh and that's like an all in one messaging app that I found really useful and was able to port across phones. The Google Messages web app is really good. So like I I didn't miss iMessage at all. And and no one yelled at me about it. It was fine. Nice. I yeah, it's way better than it was even a few years ago. And yeah, the group chats all basically work. I I RCS I think has done a lot of the job. Like you can send good pictures, you get the typing notifications, like the stuff works. Yeah. We're gonna tell our children one day about the days before RCS. All the grainy pictures of them we sent to their grandparents. Truly. Okay. I the the last two, and this is where we come to why did David buy an iPhone? Um, I think on balance, I like Android better than iOS. And I don't actually think it's super close. Like just at a pure out-of-the-box operating system perspective, um, a thing that this whole experience made me realize is that notification management is like half the experience of using a phone. And Android is really good at it. Uh it's very good at understanding what is and is not an important notification. It's very good at categorizing things for you in such a way that you can triage it in a way that's useful. It's very good at letting you manage what does and doesn't send you notifications in a way that Android is or that iOS is awful at. There's just a lot of little things like autocorrect on Android is better than auto-correct on iOS. I think i this sounds stupid, but the fact that you swipe down to get the notification shade and you swipe up to get the apps makes a lot more sense than swiping down from the top and down from the corner and down or from the middle. Like there's just little, little tiny usability things about Android that just make more sense. I think iOS is a much more sort of aesthetically consistent operating system. But I don't care about that. Like yeah. Android is easier to use. Like I I really earnestly believe that. And I think is actually a m saner operating system. Like I looked at my phone less on Android than I did on iOS. It bothers me less. And that that it means something to me. Am I am I crazy here? No, the iPhone on my desk has been buzzing this whole time that we've been talking and it's like nothing important is happening. Yeah, I I totally feel the notification thing and it is one of those like you just get used to it on Android and there's less things bothering you and you kind of don't even register it because they'll they'll just appear as you know in the silent notifications. Yeah I really like I I open it up and I swipe down and it's like you got these eleven notifications from ESPN that we didn't buzz your phone with every single time. But here's some stuff that's happening. That is like that's actually a thing about push information that I like. And it's like here, look, here's a list of stuff that this app thinks is important, but we didn't bother you with it. But when you want to check, here's a little digest. That's a good thing. Like, yes, this is what notifications were supposed to be. And then we ruined it. Yeah. I think Apple is just kind of pretending there's not a problem and they're waiting until they can fix it with AI. Because they're like they have that um yeah, some kind of AI focus mode, right? Where it's like, we'll just figure it out for you. You know, don't worry about it. I like I'm summaries are bad. Apple intelligence is bad. All of it is bad. Yeah. I would rather have the deluge of notifications and not miss something important um then trust Apple intelligence right now. Yeah. But yeah, one fun thing about this project was this was the first time in a long time I have really settled into Android. Even when I've used other Android phones that's like for a couple of days for something. This was like I spent I spent months using Android and like really got comfortable with it again and it is better than iOS. Like I really, I really believe that it is. Um except and here here is the thing that did it for me. Mm-hmm. Android apps are bad and iOS apps are good. It's the it's the whole I I am it was astonishing to me how many times I encountered an app that exists on both platforms and it is always better on iOS. Always. Like th there are the only exception is there are a bunch of things you can do on Android that you can't do on iOS. So like the Pebble app for the smartwatches is better on Android because it just has a level of permissions you can't get on iOS. Um there are apps like Tasker that let you do things to the operating system that you're not allowed to do on iOS. That's all fine and good, and I think a a good case for Android again being better than iOS. But any one-to-one compar ison, I have I literally have never found an Android app that is better than the iOS app, just on balance. And then there are a million great iOS apps that don't even exist on Android. This is why I'm back. Half the apps that I like and use every day straight up do not exist on Android. Or they're web apps. Or they're like half-baked, you can tell somebody vibe coded it in an afternoon, and they were like, this is for Android. Like I it the the app discrepancy there, I think shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did, because I talked to a lot of app developers who were like, well, there's a big audience on Android, but there's no business in the Play Store. All of the money is on iOS. And like I intellectually knew this, but it it feels sort of disastrous in comparison. Yeah. It is a thing you you like viscerally feel in it is another thing I've I feel when I'm on Android for a while and I switch over to iOS and I'm like, oh I see okay like this is your app and you just kind of update the Android app like when you get around to it. Yes. I am constantly the person like the the Android version of the daycare app will break in some way. And I am the person who fills out the feedback form to be like, hey, there's this bug. I'm not getting these notifications. And like, I don't hear anything back. Someone fixes it. But it's like they don't, you know, they are developing for iOS and things look beautiful and work, you know, wonderfully on iOS. And then they uh it's like the Android app is broken until someone is like, um, could you guys fix this? It I can't buy Yeah, yeah and there's so many examples that like the the built-in video players on Android are mostly bad. The the like little camera things inside of a lot of apps don't work super well. Like you're talking about. To me, there's so many apps that look like somebody built them for iOS and then like uploaded them to a website that was like make your iOS app work on Android.com. Yep. And just sort of did w whatever happened there, they just shipped it as an APK and never thought about it again. And I don't know if that's because they think people who use Android don't have any taste or that they won't spend any money or or what? But but it it is like the the discrepancy in quality just absolutely blew my mind. And leaving aside the fact that like I write a newsletter about new apps, and the single biggest piece of feedback I get from people is why don't you cover Android apps? And the the true answer to all of them is that everybody builds their iOS app first, and all of the good apps are only on iOS. And it it's just people people don't like that. I don't like it. It's not the answer I was hoping for. But like in this period, probably a dozen apps launched that I was like into and excited about and couldn't test because they didn't work on Android. So like my my iOS test flight is just like teeming with cool stuff that I haven't been able to touch in terms. And that's the thing. Like I came to the end of this and I was like, I would rather on balance, like if you were just like David, you have to take a phone out of the box, download nothing, and use it forever. I think I would have picked a Pixel 10 Pro. That is just out of the box. I think that is my favorite phone of all the ones that I've tried. Yeah. But that's not how it works. And in fact, what I have is 200 apps on my phone that are actually my experience of using my phone, and 195 of those are either better than what's on Android or straight up don't exist on Android. And that was the decision. Yeah. There's only so much that like Google and Android can do and they they can make the system you know the operating system as wonderful and as useful as we want but then yeah the we are once you open an app you're at the mercy of whether that developer was given any time to work on the Android app and thought about all the different formats and screens and and hardware that Android presents and I think it is it it's I I have sympathy for them. I have sympathy for Android, but it does that the sum total of it is like it is cleaner and easier and works better on iOS just, just like living your life. Yeah. One thing I think I do blame Google for in all of this is Google has spent a lot of time trying to convince people to make an Android app that works everywhere on all screens and all devices forever, no matter what. Um witho ut giving people the requisite tools to do that very easily. I think from from what I understand from developers, it's very easy to make an Android app that sort of expands and contracts to screen sizes. And how to make an Android app that is sort of cleanly, successfully usable in all of those places, not so much. Whereas Apple is the exact opposite, right? Apple is like incredibly opinionated about how you're supposed to make everything for every platform, which drives some people crazy because if you want to do something new and interesting, you actually have to fight this sort of system that is thrust upon you. I would argue that is a better outcome if what you want to get is a lot of at least pretty good apps, than to just be like, God help all of you. Right. You can either have the out the outside of a razor ultra or an eighty five inch television. You figure it out. And that like that's not that's not it either. Yeah. Yeah. And like maybe Google needs fewer screen sizes to care about, or maybe it needs to just actually go all the way in on picking one between foldables and flippables and actually start to develop some opinions about how these things are supposed to work . Because until then, like I don't know. The sense I get from every app developer is they have a whole team of people working on iOS and then just like Richard over there on the side building the Android app. And Richard is like a high school student who's there for the summer. And they're they're they're building the Android He's building it on his Mac and then just porting it to Android at the end. He's mad. Yeah. Yeah. It's just bad. So th that's this is essentially where I've landed. Do you think did I miss any phones? Did I land in the wrong place? What do you think? What a what a journey. Um I yeah. I mean the the iPhone 17, the base iPhone 17 is so good right now and it is such a I have people in my life who are they've they've bought Samsung phones for the past fifteen years and that's just what they're gonna do. I'm like great, okay. I know that' thats where you stand and that's what you want. If you are in the iOS ecosystem, it's so hard to argue for anything but like stick with it. Yeah, it's it's comfortable, all your stuff is gonna work exactly the same way as it did on the last phone, and and the base model is finally like very good. Um I'm not ready to to uh declare the death of the the book style folding phone yet but I'm glad not I this is this is a good hill for you to die on and I do believe you will die on it but I I respect the We all need one. Yeah. Yeah mine, is that somewhere inside of this razor is the phone that I want to use. Yeah. And no one will give it to me. No. And it's just a race to see if you either you or I is right or if we just don't have iPhones again. I'm bored by this outcome. Like for all the people who are going to send emails and call the hotline and yell at me about this, please understand this is not the outcome I was hoping for. But I hit a point where there's a bunch of apps I want to use and I have to use the phone that runs the apps. Yes. It's not my fault, it's theirs. That's right. This is where we are. All right, Alison, thank you. I I needed to just get some of this off my chest. And I I appreciate you being here to do this with me. I I've been dying to know. I I'm so happy to like absorb all the emotions for the And if you do want to send me that Z Fold seven, please do. And if it it I really hope that just blows my mind to pieces and we get to do this all over. Great. Yeah, you're gonna have to start all over again. Yeah, it's gonna be great. Alright, we gotta take one more break, and then we're gonna come back and do a question from the broadcast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from hosting her. Every business has its impact, and with AI changing the landscape, the barrier to entry has never been lower. Whether you're starting a side hustle or building the next big thing, Hostinger lets you go live in minutes, not weeks. Hostinger is an all-in-one platform that brings everything into one place: your domain, website, email marketing, AI tools, and AI agents. You can create websites, online stores, and even custom apps without coding or design skills. Then use AI agents to automate tedious tasks and help grow your business. Turn your one day into day one. Go to hostinger.comslash vergast to bring your idea online for under $3 a month. Plus, get an extra 20% off with promo code VIRGCAST. That's less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. That's hostinger.com/slash VirgCast. Promo code VirgCast for an extra 20% off. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer-first, asset compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build . Security program on spreadsheets new regulations piling up an audit dread. It's time for Vanta. Vanta automate security and compliance brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it compliance. Get it? Join the Alright, we're back. Let's get to a question from the verge cast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge11. The email is vergecast at the verge.com. I'm DavidPierce.11 on signal. Find us any way you want. I have Threads DMs now. I just downloaded the Threads app for the first time and discovered a pile of DMs. Sorry to everybody who's reached out that I haven't gotten back to. I have Threads DMs now, so get at me. We're easy to find. This week, our hotline question, as so many of them have been these last few weeks, is about AI. Let me play it for you. Hey uh David, this is Dax. So I work at a pretty big tech company or a company that is pretty big involved pretty involved in tech. And so anyway the point is I have to work on I use AI models pretty much every day to help me with my code, to automate stuff that I used to have to do manually. And that's all well and good. But often I'll be screen sharing with coworkers of mine and I realize they actually don't really know the basics of Mac OS. Like I had to show someone the other day how to like swipe up three fingers on a trackpad to go to mission control because they probably have never heard of that in their lives. And I think I had to tell them these here's how you make a new desktop. And that's fine. I like to do that. But it made me realize that maybe am I just like the weird one for knowing how these things work or is there something to be said I guess for a lot of tech companies hiring people to work with like Mac OS or Windows or any of these you know OSs that have been around for so long and yet the people using those tools and using those new AI tools can't actually tell how to use something efficiently. You know, what I I don't know I've been echoing this all day. What point is what good is a cloud code workspace like workflow automating like a bunch of stuff if you have like five screenshots open and a bunch of stuff all over your desktop, you know who you are, and like, you know, you don't have like multiple desktops, you just have one desktop with a bunch of things. I just it drives me I don't know. It's maybe it's like maybe I'm thinking like abundance politics here. It's like you know, abundance is like you gotta make government work for you. Maybe I'm like, why don't I make my computer or my technology work for me? Otherwise, what's the point, you know You? know I, don't know. Okay, I I love this question with my whole heart. And if if you know me or have followed anything that I do, you know that as a a true like productivity computer hack nerd, this speaks to me. So I have two big thoughts on this that I I just wanted to share that this hotline question made me think about. Um the first is this interview I did about two years ago with this woman named Laura May Martin, who was at the time the executive productivity advisor at Google, which is a very cool title. But what it means essentially is she was like an internal consultant helping people be more productive inside of Google. And one of her biggest theories is that everybody should spend 10 minutes, 10 minutes learning how to use their software. Like she had this idea that maybe when you download an app, you should be required by the app to spend 10 minutes mucking around in the settings to get it set up the way that you want, or going through a really elaborate setup flow that actually teaches you all the features. It's the sort of thing that I think resonates with me still to this day because of questions like this, right? Most people don't know how to use most of their things, right? You you set up Slack, you learn the very bare minimum number of things required to Slack successfully with your colleagues. And then you kind of never think about it again. And what you end up with is this weird mishmash of lots of tools that all kind of do the same thing but do it slightly differently and you're not making full use of anything. So I think I am a big believer in actually it is worth taking the time to learn how something works. Um, one thing I recommend to lots of people and and to all of you is go to the YouTube channel of whatever app you download. Um any sufficiently complicated piece of software these days seems to have a YouTube channel where they do a bunch of, you know, explainers or they'll interview users about how they use the app uh Raycast, which I think I've mentioned on the show a few times before, does a particularly good job of this. Notion does it really well. Just like helping you understand what this app is and some reasonable, maybe non-obvious ways to use it. Do I think every piece of software should be a lot more obvious about how it works and how you can use it? Yes. But I also loathe the the scourge that is like tooltips and pop-ups telling you about all the new features and having it both ways is very hard. So I think spending a few minutes, forcing yourself to spend a few minutes to say, okay, how does this thing work and what can I actually do in it goes an incredibly long way. This also happens to be a thing that AI is actually unusually well suited to do. Um One thing I think about AI is that it is very good at finding and reading and synthesizing the manual. And I mean the manual in like the broadest possible way, right? If you have a literal manual for a dishwasher, it can find things in that manual very quickly. I know this for a fact because my dishwasher sucks and this happens to me all the time. But you can also get an AI tool like Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT to just give you a sense of what is possible inside of a tool. So like one thing I've been doing a lot is just asking, you know, I need to do XYZ. Here are here are the apps that I use every day. Are any of these apps well suited to doing that thing? I need to I need to a way to quickly text myself reminders. What's a good way to do that? And it'll actually be like, oh, actually, Slack is very good at this because you can just set yourself reminders for Slack messages inside of Slack and it will send you reminders. Cool. Feature most people probably don't know about, super useful. So asking a tool like this what is possible and how you can do things best with the tools you already have goes a long way towards starting to solve some of this problem, right? And the thing like mission control on the Mac is really complicated because on the Mac, there are a thousand ways to switch between apps, right? You can go to the applications folder, you can go to the dock, you can do command tab, you can do mission control, you can go to the launcher. Like it's feature creep in a way that I don't think is actually very useful. And in general, if you don't know mission control exists on the Mac, I don't know that your life is any worse or you're any worse at your using your computer. But if if you are finding little tiny problems that you have, things that you're doing over and over that don't feel right, small things where you're like, how do I get from here to here? Why am I constantly you know copying and pasting? Why can't I find XYZ? Those are good problems to work with chatbots on because A, again, they're very good at finding needles in haystacks. Like if if AI large language models are good at one thing, it is searching through haystacks to find needles. You have to verify that the needle is real and correct. But it's very good at that process in a way that humans I think are not, and frankly, it's not a good use of most people's time. Or a thing that I've discovered is that you can actually start to build tiny bits of software with some of these tools to solve some of these problems for you. In general, a thing that I need a lot is I need markdown links from web pages. Just a small thing I need. I'm constantly pasting them into other Google Docs where I want them better formatted than just like a bare link. There are a bunch of wacky tools and Chrome extensions and stuff for this, but in in five minutes and like three prompts, I was able to make one of these with Claude Code that now just sits on my computer and I just drag a link into it and it gives me a markdown link. Like it's great. I I drag a I drag a tab, it gives me a markdown link in the clipboard, I put it wherever I need. Perfect. No notes. Um I've spent a lot of time working on different kinds of productivity tools. Like I got really excited about I'm just gonna vibe code my perfect productivity app. And that went terribly for reasons actually I should talk about on the show, but not here. Um but then I found something like there's this app called Raindrop, which is a a bookmarking app that just lets you save links. Again, I don't know if you've noticed this a lot of my life is just like moving links from one place to another. Um Raindrop is great. I think the app itself is really ugly. It's like really good, really stable infrastructure. It saves all the right stuff. It does everything you need. I just don't like looking at the app. But Raindrop has an API. So I just went to Claude Code in this case and was like, hey, I don't like the way Raindrop looks, but I want to use the API. I'm a paid customer. I have all the access I need. Can you just build me a very quick, simple front end? And now I have a web page that is literally just a super simple front end to raindrop that just makes the thing look better and gives me the two keys I need in order to manage the links in my list. This is the scope of software that I think is really interesting for AI for most people.