Last Thursday I became eligible to upgrade to a new phone. Since I felt that I had a terrible experience with my Droid X, I decided to go back to iOS, and purchased a 16gb iPhone 4s. Now before we continue, I want you know this isn’t going to be an Android bashing session. I have been finding some things that I am missing from my Android based phone and also been finding things that are handled quite well. Also, I’ve found a couple things where I thought iOS handled it correctly, but it made an app work not as well.
Hopefully I will be able to frequently add posts regarding the Android vs. iOS battle. I will note my discoveries, disasters, and whatever I feel like blabbing about.
Google Voice
The first app I knew I had to figure out how to get working was Google Voice. I have a Google Voice number, and a lot of people use that to get a hold of me. Also, I didn’t want to call people using my “real” cell phone number if they have my Voice number.
So in iOS, all operations regarding Google Voice have to be done from within the app. iOS allows push notifications from apps to alert you when something relating to an app occurs. For example, in Google Voice, when you receive a text message or voice mail, the phone will alert you. But since the app may not actually be running, its state doesn’t get updated with the new message until AFTER you open/reopen it. Even then, you have to wait a few seconds before the messages will update. This can be quite annoying if you’re in a text convo with your buddy and you keep leaving the app.
Why iOS is doing this correctly, but its still hinders the app…
A major issue I found in my Droid X was the fact that too many apps would be running in the background, whether I knew they were or not. In a lot of cases these apps would start ramping up the processor and start consuming my battery’s life at an alarming rate (discharging completely in a couple hours). While allowing multitasking this way allows info in apps to stay up to date, it means your phone has to constantly process code from them. Ok, so why is iOS doing it right? iOS doesn’t actually keep apps running when you return to the home screen. It saves the state when you exit so that when you reopen, it “feels” like it stayed open. This keeps the phone from having to worry about running background processes, and you don’t need a third party Task Manager to keep constantly killing processes.
I will admit, with iOS handling “running” apps in this manor, makes Google Voice incredibly annoying to use. But, once the data in the app updates, the app seems to run really well.
Ok, so I have another complaint about the iOS version of Google Voice. On my android device, I was able to set Google Voice to automatically ask which phone number I want to call from when I used the phone’s built in dialer. So when I would type in the recipients number, or chose a contacts phone number from my address book and hit dial… A popup would appear asking if I wanted to use Google Voice or not. iOS on the other hand doesn’t allow this type of integration. My guess is so Apple doesn’t have to worry about some third party app breaking the dialing process. I’m not sure. So if I want to call anyone with my google voice number, I have to open Google Voice and use it’s dialer… then it will pass the Google Voice exchange number to the iOS dialer.
Hopefully you found this somewhat interesting and feel that I am being fair in my assessment. If you have anything that you’d like me to cover, feel free to email me at ryan@rychannel.com or leave a comment below.