It takes a week to switch phones. First, there’s the technical process of moving eSIMs across devices, which takes either a few minutes (if you’re switching from one Android phone to another) or two days, a half-dozen calls to Verizon, a verification text message sent to your mom, and approximately 11,000 restarts of your phone (if you’re switching from iPhone to Android). Then comes a few hours of app downloading, settings tweaking, and personalization, because every phone has a bunch of unique ideas about everything.
You can be up and running on a new phone in an afternoon, but by the time you’ve downloaded all your Kindle books, synced your podcast queue, moved all your two-factor code generators, and reconnected to all your Bluetooth devices, it will have been a week.
I know this, because I spent the last few months switching phones just about every week. I’d grown tired of my iPhone 16, a phone I bought almost entirely because it was blue, and decided to see what other options I really had. I’m also in an unusual position: I used to be a phone reviewer, which meant I spent nearly a decade switching phones every few months, but for the last five years or so I have been almost exclusively an iPhone user. I think I qualify as a normal phone owner at this point. But I do have one distinct advantage: I can ask a bunch of phone manufacturers to send me their devices to test, and some of them will! So I spent the winter on a Tour de Android, looking to see whether there was a phone — or, more exciting, a whole new concept for a phone — that might entice me.
I’ll just spoil the end: Last week, I went to the Apple Store and bought an iPhone 17. I know, I know. I’m not thrilled about it either. But I can explain.
For even more of our thoughts on the state of phones, check out this episode of The Vergecast.
The first phone I tested was the one for which I had the highest hopes: the Motorola Razr Ultra. I remain convinced that flip phones are a good idea, and that the combination of smartwatch-style outer screen with a normal-sized inner screen is a compelling one. The Razr Ultra’s hardware is pretty close to right, at least for my purposes. Flipped open, the phone is a little tall, and can be hard to navigate with one thumb, but that’s true of every big phone now. I didn’t mind the slight crease in the middle, and I love the squareish shape of the phone when it’s closed. I found myself treating the closed phone like a tiny Gemini-specific walkie-talkie — bring the phone up to my mouth, hold the side button, and ask inane questions about cherry blossoms.
The problem, which would become a theme in my tests, was the software. Neither Motorola nor Google has figured flip phones out. There are a few useful widgets for the outer screen, but the organization system for them makes it hard to add or find stuff. More often than not, what you get on the outer screen is just the full-bore Android app smushed down small, which is all well and good until the keyboard opens and covers up the message you’re responding to and the text box you’re typing in. Even if I could get past that, I eventually couldn’t take all the “allow this app to access the external display?” warnings. Some apps manage to shrink and expand well enough, while others just shrug and demand you open up the phone. I spent days changing settings, downloading utility apps, trying to make the Razr Ultra feel seamless. It never did. So I switched.
I had a slightly different experience with my foldable phone, a Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold. (I tried to get my hands on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, by most accounts the best foldable on the market, but couldn’t get one in time.) My foldable problem is all hardware: The phone feels big and blocky in my hands, it’s not easy enough to pry the thing open, and foldables come with lots of durability, battery, and camera sacrifices. I did enjoy having the larger inner screen for watching YouTube videos and a bunch of Champions League soccer. But faced with this many sacrifices — and the eye-watering $2,000-ish price that comes with every foldable phone — I gave up on Bigger Screen.
Next I tried the Unihertz Titan 2, a rectangular monster of a phone with a big, roomy physical keyboard. It felt like using a BlackBerry again! I discovered almost immediately that I do not miss using a BlackBerry — while I loved having the keyboard for quick access to numbers and symbols, I never typed as fast on the physical keyboard as I did on the screen. Plus, this phone is just gigantic (which is why I’m intrigued by the much smaller Titan 2 Elite coming later this year).
My single favorite new Android experience came from the Fairphone Gen 6, a generally solid phone with one remarkable feature: a physical slider switch that transforms the device into a much more locked-down, minimalist take on a phone. Fairphone calls this feature “Moments,” and it’s awesome. You can have a few different moments, each with whichever handful of apps you pick; I spent a lot of time with my phone winnowed to Phone, Messages, Maps, Pocket Casts, and nothing else, and it was glorious. Everything else — even your wallpaper — disappears. It’s the most compelling version of the two-phones-in-one experience I’ve wanted for forever, and it really works.
The Fairphone had just one problem: It’s not really optimized for US coverage, and doesn’t work fully on Verizon. So that’s out.
My next and last test was the Google Pixel 10 Pro, which is easily my favorite Android phone of all time. It’s a little heavy, but really well made; the camera is excellent in almost any conditions; I love having both fingerprint and face authentication; Pixel phones nearly always have the cleanest and most feature-rich version of Android. (Though my Pixel still doesn’t have Gemini task automation…)
The Pixel 10 Pro solidified a feeling I’d been having through all of my tests: Android is a better operating system than iOS. Gemini is a useful and usable voice assistant, neither of which you can say about Siri. Android is excellent at sorting and triaging notifications, which meant far fewer buzzes in my pocket. I also got far fewer spam and robocalls during my testing, which was an unexpected but nice change — I actually started answering calls from unknown numbers again, because they were almost always calls I actually wanted. I like the Android keyboard better than the iPhone, in part because its autocorrect is so much better.
There are so many little differences between Android and iOS that can make it hard to switch between devices, but I prefer the Android implementation in almost every case. You can customize everything about your Android homescreen easily, while even dragging apps around on an iPhone is a crazy-making experience. Android’s app tray makes more sense than the bizarrely organized iOS App Library; swiping down for notifications and up for search is simpler than swiping down from different parts of the iPhone screen for everything. And did I mention how much better Gemini is? When I’m using Android, I actually use my voice assistant. On purpose! What a world.
If all you got from your phone was the out-of-the-box experience, I’d have picked the Pixel. But unfortunately for Android, app stores exist. And the App Store absolutely wipes the floor with the Play Store. Lots of the apps I use every day — apps like Puzzmo, NotePlan, Mimestream, and Unread — either don’t exist on Android at all or only exist as web apps. Most of the ones that do work on both platforms are better on iOS. And forget about the kind of handcrafted, small-developer stuff — apps like Acme Weather, Current, and Quiche, just to name a few recent favorites — that’s all over the App Store and absolutely nowhere to be found on Android.
Android apps only have one advantage: They’re allowed to do things iOS apps simply can’t. The Beeper app, which I use for messaging across platforms and devices, integrates beautifully with Google Messages and not at all with iMessage. I can do more with my Pebble watch when it’s connected to an Android phone. The Tasker app is an automator’s dream. But for everything else, and for almost every app people use, iOS is better.
There are plenty of reasons the Play Store can’t keep up. The Android ecosystem is more varied and thus harder to develop for; most developers use Apple products; iPhone owners are apparently for whatever reason much more willing to spend money than Android owners. But the fact of the matter, and the thing I realized most at the end of my phone-switching experiment, is that phones are app machines above all else. And the iPhone has better apps.
And so, at the end of it all, I went through another bizarrely complicated eSIM switch and upgraded to an iPhone 17. This is the best the base iPhone has been in some time, and my iPhone 16 trade-in offset about half the cost. I’m not thrilled with it, honestly. My phone is back to buzzing too often with robocalls and unnecessary notifications, and I’m back to fighting with Apple’s ridiculous homescreen layout tools. Siri is still terrible. But until and unless AI changes the way we do everything on our devices, my phone remains an app machine. All my apps are here on this iPhone, and they all work.