I give up.

I tried to embrace the Android lifestyle. I gave it my best shot, but I couldn't ever get used to it. For a rundown on why...

The camera. Man, it sucked. Even after Google's updates that "improved" it, the quality was never up to the quality of my iPhone 5. Even worse was response time. I couldn't open the camera and take a photo quickly. I missed many great shots with my kid trying to get the camera open and focused. Even on the rare occassion it focused quickly, it snapped the shot slowly. Pics were blurry, out of focus, and generally bad. Constantly. The camera was fine for still objects, but 90% of what I take pics of is my hyper toddler. Still doesn't describe her. 

The app selection sucked. I mean, there's lot of apps but they are all lacking when compared to the iPhone version. No app worked as good on Android as it did on iPhone. 

Customizability. Android wins here. It is infinitely more customizable than the iPhone, but I think what I've found is that I don't want customizable. I want easy. And I want it to work. With Android, I loaded up some notifier app, then customized it with a bunch of buttons, then found it wasn't sufficient. So, uninstall, try another. That sucked. Ok, Google around to find a good one. Hey, okay, so now it worked and it took 90 minutes of screwing around to find it and get it working... and even when it was working, it didn't work as well as iPhone. Customizability is this weird double-edged sword. The tinkerer in me likes to spend hours customizing it. But the busy adult in me just wants the thing to work in a smooth, consistent way. 

Consistency. Android was terrible here. The back button is the worst offender, working sometimes and other times doing nothing. Sometimes it wouldn't just go back 1 screen, but instead swap to a totally different app. Sometime it'd just refresh the screen. 

Ecosystem. This clearly shows my bias, but with my MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, iPad, and AppleTV, I found a lone Android device to be a tough pill to swallow. All my media, apps, music and movies, couldn't be moved easily to my Android. I couldn't AirPlay to my AppleTV without ridiculous workarounds. 

General useability. I understand many of these complaints are because of my years in the iPhone camp, but everything I tried to do on the Android was more cumbersome and annoying. It's difficult to put this into words exactly, but things didn't quite make sense to me in terms of how to change settings. Each app had it's own method, which was different from the way you managed Android itself. It was never just "brainless" to adjust settings. It may be silly to complain about a device that makes me think, but here I am. I hate thinking about it. I just want the thing to work. Android worked, but required more work to work. I didn't like that. 

Anyway, I'm going back to the iPhone. I wish I could say I enjoyed my time with an Android or came away from this with something I wish the iPhone had, but unfortunately there's nothing about Android that I prefer over iPhone. 

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