I switched from Android to iPhone because I hate Apple.

I am not joking one bit: I seriously just bought an iPhone 17 Pro this fucking week, despite absolutely fucking despising Apple, iOS, and more importantly.. Webkit.

Fuck. Webkit.

For those of you who don't know: Webkit is the "engine" (literal term as well as metaphorical) underneath Apple's Safari web browser.. And it is also the most buggy, non-standards-compliant piece of shit right now.

Internet Explorer - which uses the same rendering engine as Chrome - is no longer the worst.

But Will, just use a different browser! You can install Chrome, Firefox and more on iOS, too!

Technically, you'd be correct..

..Except Apple requires ALL web browsers on iOS to use the Webkit engine. Full stop. No exceptions.

If you're an old bastard like me, you probably remember the monopoly investigations into Microsoft regarding setting Internet Explorer as the default browser on Windows.

Apple's situation? It is literally, demonstrably worse, because at least with the IE situation you could still install other browsers easily, set them as the default, and not have to worry about IE ever again.

With Apple and iOS? Yeah, that's not the case here, yet for some reason they are fucking allowed to keep their monopoly (and no, it's not because they paid off Trump - although they fucking did pay off Trump - this has been going on through multiple administrations).

So, that's how we got to where I am today.. Owning a fucking iPhone so I can actually test my shit on it (because Apple does not provide any developer resources to folks who don't live and breathe the Apple ecosystem).

I actually was going to wait until the end of the year when I had finished paying off my Samsung Fold, but recently someone reported some issues with my website on iOS and.. Well, I decided to chuck it into the fuck-it bucket and switch to T-Mobile now since they will pay off my remaining balance anyway.

I make a lot of noise and swear way fucking more than normal about hating Apple, but honestly? The iPhone is.. just fine. It really is. As a whole the device isn't bad; There are a number of things that piss me off about it - which I'll talk about below - but overall? It works.. And I knew it would; I'm not unfamiliar with iOS, but this is the first time I've daily-drove it.

Let's break down a few of the shitty bits of the iPhone and iOS that I've personally gotten annoyed with recently, though.

The notification drawer took a minute to "click" with me because the indication that it is a drawer is not totally obvious like it is on Android; It's a glass-transparent thing that slides down, yes, but once it's down the only indicator you have that you're looking at a drawer is a little white bar at the bottom.

Multiple apps will lock up when attempting to open the keyboard for some reason. This may not totally be Apple's fault, but you'd think with such a locked-down ecosystem shit like this just wouldn't happen.

Speaking of the keyboard? It fucking sucks. Punctuation (and numbers) of any kind requires switching to the numbers/symbols keyboard. Yes, there is a press-and-hold function, but here's a pro-tip: Press-and-hold isn't always the most accessible way to interact, especially when precision is needed.

"But you can change the keyboard!" you cry? Yeah, you can.. Except all the keyboards I saw in the fucking app store are either AI-first garbage (I don't need to give up my data and burn down more of the world just to train the AI that I really fucking meant to say fuck and not duck), or generic "change the keyboard background and font" garbage.

Oh, and probably the worst of them all: They completely ditched having any common system buttons in the core UI. No back, home, or task switching buttons. Everything - except for the fucking back button - is done through gestures.

Sure, you can utilize some of the accessibility features like Assistive Touch to give you some control outside of gestures, but not all..

..Which specifically means the goddamned back button is a reliant on the app itself to fucking implement rather than being a common system function.

It gets worse, though, because - once again, contrary to accessibility - The core design language for iOS seems to be "Back buttons go in the upper-left 100% no matter what", which is a teet every fucking app I've used seems to suckle on greedily.

Here's another tip: Requiring users to reach all the way across the longest distance of the phone to access a critical, repeatedly-used function is a bad fucking time.

I could go on about the negatives, but I will say this: It's not all bad.

The cameras on the iPhone 17 Pro are pretty goddamned good; This was reason #2 I switched to an iPhone. Plus, I'll be able to get fun lenses for it, giving me some extra utility in my on-the-go photography work.

Additionally, the UI - while being a dumpster-fire for accessibility - is fairly pretty overall. As someone who likes pretty UIs (next week I'll probably be writing about my CachyOS dev machine setup), I can safely agree that Apple does have a nice core design language.

The iPhone - however - is not this amazing gold-standard device that so many people hype it up to be, though. Instead, it's more like a twisted simulacrum of a standard that fails to totally deliver, being off just enough to be noticable to anybody who has any desire for something better.

Oh, and that issue with my website that was reported?

Yeah, no, it's fucking fine.