My mother’s upgrading from a Huawei P9 to an iPhone she received as a gift (don’t know which model it is).
She doesn’t know how to use iOS and I’m finding it difficult to teach her, since I don’t know how it works either, so I was wondering if it was possible to install some version of Android on it.
Sorry if it’s the wrong community to post this in
It’s not possible lol. Apple makes it as difficult as humanly possible to alter their OS. We’re lucky enough to be able to jailbreak iPhones
Honestly, though, as much as I hate how restrictive iPhones are, I gotta admit they’re restrictive in a way that makes things a lot easier for people who aren’t tech-savvy. What part are you struggling with? I haven’t owned an iPhone since the 5C but I could probably help.
I’m not sure that’s so true nowadays, I’m very tech literate, and find iPhones still quite filled with bugs and weird design choices that make me have to actually TRY to be able to use them.
Take the browser for instance, why do I have to click the share button to use the “find on page” option? Well I learned from another dev that it’s actually the “action” button… but it’s almost exclusively used as a share button.
The mail app has some oddities. The pull down to search function is fucking stupid. I can’t quite remember all of them, but there are so many horrible UX decisions made for the sake of a “clean” interface.
And then there are the bugs, my AirPods won’t connect… they take forever to attempt, and then nothing happens. I after a couple of other troubleshooting steps, I figure out that toggling Bluetooth on my phone allows the AirPods to connect immediately.
Lots of bugs, with workarounds that I can figure out… but they’d drive someone else up a wall.
And we had a horrid time trying to use FaceTime on AppleTV to AppleTV. Apparently it was stability issues on my phones iOS version. And my phone wasn’t updating, despite updating multiple times on 17, the latest wouldn’t download until I went and removed an old ios16 beta profile. But I guess that’s kinda on me.
Other things that irritated me when I recently switched from android to iOS:
The keyboard doesn’t have the numbers along the top. Didn’t realize how much I used digits when typing stuff out so switching back and forth is annoying.
When typing long text messages I find it impossible to just click higher or scroll up to reread what I typed
Speaking of messaging the fact I can only do emoji reactions with such a limited range is really amazing especially in 2023-2024
The calculator doesn’t show you what you typed in….maybe I’m the idiot but I can’t figure it out
No ability to do Picture in Picture especially with FaceTime, so everytime I leave the app to look at another window it always blacks the video out
Printing things from my phone is so difficult now
Apple Pay for some reason only works when I double click the side button before placing the phone near the reader rather than scan and then double click
Speaking of wallet I can’t transfer in a local public transit commuter card from android….i need a physical card or number to scan. There is no option to manually enter that I can see
The action button why can I only do 1 action and not multiple with a click and then a hold option?
Speaking of action button I have mine set to silent bc if I keep clicking the volume down button it doesn’t automatically put the ringer on vibrate and then silent
Which leads me to why in gods name can I not turn off send noises from any app? I don’t need to hear the swoosh sound every time.
The Notification Center in general bothers me
Also I really miss the back button and menu buttons on the bottom.
I’m sure there’s more I forgot about but those are little things that have bugged me.
You can download a free app called pass2u wallet and it will allow you to add any image to your Apple wallet. That might be able to help you with your transit card issue
Oh didn’t know about that! I’ll check it out.
You can just type in the address bar to search, you don’t have to share. It’s always been that way since page search was introduced. It shows up under its own suggestion category as “Find on page (results number)”
What a wonderful example, there is a feature, but it’s in absolutely no way obvious, not if you look across your screen thoroughly, or if you’ve got a few decades of computing experience guiding you.
If I don’t scroll down, how would I ever know that the “found on page” is down there. I’ve been using iPhone and safari for years and didn’t know about this method. Other things like that have come up before, hidden features that no one in their right mind would naturally discover.
I wonder if safari on macOS has the same functionality, I bet it doesn’t. But even if it did…
I think that’s nitpicking a little too much.
There’s a hundred features available on every device at any one time. It’s gotta go somewhere. UX and UI design is very difficult, doubly so when discoverability has to be balanced with small form factor devices.
Safari on macOS doesn’t have address bar page search as you suspected but it’s a different device and thus has a different design / experience. More specifically a physical keyboard with shortcuts that are expected to be used but also a menu bar where features can be tucked away logically (e.g. edit > find, etc.) The share (action) button on mobile safari sure seems like a logical place to put it, given the space constraints and hey, you found it! And now you know the search bar also searches the page.
Beyond that, pull down to search has been in iOS for years now and is included in multiple locations, including the Home Screen itself and the settings app.
I won’t sit here and pretend everything is 100% consistent and that the design language is adhered to and perfect. It’s not and it’s probably going to get worse until a new set of rules is developed or is refreshed again.
Hardly anyone is going to find every feature and figure out how it works without help and the more that our devices advance in power and capability, the more that has to be tucked away and designed for. If a useful feature has 2 or 3 ways to activate it and you find one them, its mission success. Just because the other ways would be more convenient for you to actually use doesn’t mean it’s a terribly design. It doesn’t mean anything at all in fact. It just happens because there’s millions of users who use these devices around the world and we’re all different and you just happened to not discover all the ways possible to perform one specific action with multiple routes to access it. But you did discover how to use it. And you were taught a different way by someone else. What’s the problem again?
You could also look into the guides and courses by Apple or a local library. Those are designed to help people get used to the OS and they could help with common points of friction
I remember that era of Huawei copied apple in ui styling. Like my friend had a Huawei from that era and his settings page looked really similar to iOS.