Looking at maybe switching from GOS to iPhone 17

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Morning all,

So, I’ve recently got a “14 day test” of an iPhone 17 from my mobile phone provider but I am wondering if I should switch to iOS, I’ll list some key points below.

  • Wanted to try iOS, I’ve been on Android for a long time, it was more just a see whats happening over the fence thing.
  • I’ve used GOS for roughly a year or two now, works well but has some annoyances and isnt as “convinent”, but that isn’t GOS’s fault.
  • While using the iPhone, I’ve enjoyed:
    • Car play - its soo much nicer than AA, its faster, doesn’t have crappy voice quality like AA voices do
    • Nice apps, Manet is great, Ivory for mastodon is also excellent.
    • Apple Maps is soo nice, it looks great, works great and is quite privacy friendly.
    • Proper contactless payment system, not using curve.
    • Hardware feels nicer, OS feels snappier (again, thats a pixel issue not GOS).
  • What I enjoy about GOS:
    • I love the idea of GOS.
    • Profiles.
    • The toggles like network and sensors.
    • They release security updates extremely quickly, even compared to Google.
    • FOSS apps are easier to get, for example you can use F-Droid, Obtanium etc.
    • Not bloated
    • No calling home.

Now I find my self at the point picking which I want, and I’m struggling.
I’ve got another 7 days with the phone, but I want to try decide now so I can get it returned in the coming days, if I decide to go down that route.

Any suggestions / thoughts?

Thanks!

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You have not shared some key info. What is your threat model? Why are you wondering this in the first place or what’s making you ask this question? Have your value system and preference with privacy tech changed?

But my follow up questions notwithstanding, the answer is quote simple - go with what you want to use. If you have cognitive dissonance where you want to love using GOS but don’t feel like it anymore for the niceties of iPhone, then you really want to use iPhone even though your mind loves the idea of you using GOS instead.

But do keep in mind that Apple is becoming enshittified too and with Apple Intelligence and other restrictions for how you can use your smartphone that you paid for is not going to go away.

If you value digital freedom, the aboslute best privacy & security - GOS is the way to go. This really comes down to your stark preferences.

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Hey,

My threat model is mostly degoogle, I already use OS agnostic apps like Ente, tuta, bitwarden etc so mostly, the data side is sorted, I also use services like Ente to try keep data outside the UK (where I live), given potential changes that may come our way, this is likely being over paranoid, but given how the govt is acting currently, its also not an impossibility.

Basically, get rid of tracking mostly aimed at advertising and other potentially malicious stuff.

But I also want to bring back some convenience back to my setup, contactless is quite a nice to have for example.

And yes, I agree apple is becoming a bit enshittified, however, I don’t plan to use Apple intelligence, its mostly useless in my limited testing anyway, its not at the same level as say gemini.

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Based on this comment and the fact that you’re in the UK, I recommend you sticking with GOS because you’d want to retain the digital freedom that has thus far been taken for granted in the West.

I know iPhone is pretty and shiny but that’s how they seduce you. At-least that’s how I look at it. But ever since moving to Graphene, I’ve been happier with my deGoogled life and digital minimalism and freedom.

That’s all I have for you. Choose wisely is all I’ll say.

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I don’t use Carplay or AA so idk about that topic specifically.

I’m also not sure what Manet is given a quick search on the App Store. Ivory looks like it has quite some good reviews but at the same time, there are also plenty of ways to interact with Mastodon.

Apple Maps are good yes, but would that justify moving to Apple just for that? I’d still agree that GMaps are overall better or that Comaps is just fine for my personal use case.
Also, I just discovered but apparently you can simply access Apple Maps online?
If you put your privacy aside and want something cool but monthly paid, there is probably better apps too. :+1:t2:

Contact-less payment is also not a problem for me anymore since I’m using a physical bank card. I know, call me old-school :old_man:t2: but I can definitely live without the need for NFC payments from my phone.
A nice classy wallet also doesn’t need to be recharged daily. :low_battery:

Overall, I’m not sure if it’s me going on a detox regarding my phone usage maybe? I would have not mind a dumb phone even, but it’s quite unrealistic and a phone is (unfortunately) still needed as of today.

So I’d say that given the amount of FOSS apps available, I don’t need to look back.[1]
Some apps are good but they might not apply to me or the friction is just too big for basics: like a good alarm or weather app on iOS without being bloated with ads. :man_shrugging:t2:
The store for the Apple Watch was also a BIG disappointment and the fact that basic stuff just doesn’t work well at all[2].

You can feel that the grass is greener on the other side. Might be the case for you and I would still recommend you to pull the trigger, pay the premium and try it for yourself.

But I’d say that for me, those were deal breakers by a long shot:

  • awful battery life (when comparing iPhone 15 Pro vs Pixel 9a), like low refresh rate + low brigthness + power saving mode barely was enough for me given 1 day of use
    • cruising at 3/4 days currently with my Pixel, same comparable settings
  • UX. People do praise Apple a lot for this one. I’m still not sure why, MacOS is quite bad but the iPhone is even more annoying on that regard. Swipes to go back are inconsistent, there is fluff everywhere[3] and it is overall just slow to go from point A to point B.
    • like going into the settings with 6+ steps/prompts to disable GPS, for real??
  • things work great overall, but I wouldn’t say there are crazy hard to pull out by yourself hence no, universal copy, iCloud and consorts are not a huge sale
    • moreover, some feature are just straight lies, for example this is not available in :netherlands: for some reason…while it was sold during a Keynote and was one of the biggest reasons I wanted to give the Apple garden a try :man_shrugging:t2:
    • I’m also fine self-hosting my own stuff and not being locked-down into an ecosystem where I need to pay because of being held hostage with my photos or not being able to simply share a file to an Android user because…standard protocols like Bluetooth are has-been in 2025? :sweat_smile:
  • price also, pixel 9a can be found for 350€ while I paid 1500€ for the iPhone, is the iPhone 4x better than the Pixel? I’d say the opposite actually. :joy:
    • I made the mistake of spending 1000€+ on a phone first and last time in my life tbh, never again, not worth it
    • I’m also extremely careful with my devices and never really drop them or whatever, but my experience of sturdiness/survivability is far greater with Android devices. I choose function over looks.

So, if you’re the kind of user that will use the official apps like Contacts, Email, Safari, iMessage etc, you’ll be delighted by the yearly incremental improvements and can cruise happily in a safe and up to date ecosystem.

I personally regret spending so much time and money and the iPhone and Apple Watch. I still do stand by the fact that:

  • Macbooks are quite nice (if you don’t even need to repair them, that is)
  • the Apple Mini/Studio are beasts too :star_struck:
  • the Airpods Pro are still my go-to recommendations for on the go buds
  • the AppleTV 4k has some quirks but is overall a very nice TV box if you don’t want to hack your own OTT Rockchip SoC :+1:t2:
  • the iPad is quite decent for what it does yet with a poor battery too

Meanwhile, all the other products not in the list above are an awful value and/or product as a whole, unfortunately. They’re trying but fall short in unexpected ways and with no ways to get around them unfortunately.

Again, it’s my personal experience. :dove:
Feel free to make the switch if you feel like it might ease your daily mental burden of trying to figure out a nice way to achieve your daily tasks.
For me, it was slowing me down more than anything because I wanted more/less and not the Apple certified way of doing things.

I also value privacy more than ease of use nowadays, and are fine doing a concession there. It is also more sta(b)le, in a good way.

EDIT: as mentioned above, I also don’t want/need/wish any AI on my phone.
I’m fine writing my messages by using my fingers.
EDIT2: since you do live in the UK, I doubt moving to the iPhone is a good call given how the UK government is pushing on them for a backdoor… :sweat_smile:

  1. PS: for context, I’ve used Android for 18+ years and recently tried an iPhone Pro for the past 2 years. I’m also a big FOSS enthusiast developer fulltime + big fan of Linux ↩︎

  2. no way to reply to WhatsApp messages from your watch, for example ↩︎

  3. no, I don’t need fancy 300ms animations everywhere all the time, make it snappy! ↩︎

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Do you know Moshidon, on Android? It’s a nice Mastodon client.

What Pixel do you have? I switched from the 7 to the 9Pro and I feel the difference. Also Android 16 QPR1 feels really modern, practical and intuitive. I recommend trying a newer Pro phone with A16 QPR1.

Did you ever consider using more cash? Try to get a wallet you like. Otherwise you can use a physical card. Maybe this doesn’t look as good but who cares, I bet you can live with it! :joy:

I would recommend GOS no matter your situation :

A point of view: I see GOS as a substantial improvement no matter your situation, but if I were to introspect and only consider issues internal to my relationship with tech - never mind the external considerations, or threats - the benefits have far exceeded my expectatios. Unexpectedly so. I’ll elaborate.

Moving to GOS was the impetus to start cleaning up my digital life. The questions I had to answer led me to adopt digital minimalism, forced me to declutter and organize. For the first time ever, I feel like a have a degree of grasp over my affairs. I also spend less time on my phone now, a great benefit. And I’m keen on keeping improving, as pondering best course of action game-ified it. My memory is also better - number of made up words I committed to it would have boggled my own mind just a couple of years ago.

But the biggest benefit - far bigger than any of the above - is this: Sure, IMSI, IEMI, SMS, and all the other acronyms are a problem. But, those are the things happening to you. Are you going to just give up? Sitting with the head down, like a sheep and taking it? GOS, HOWEVER MODEST OR FUTILE IT MAY SEEM ON THE OUTSIDE, ALLOWED ME TO HAVE AGENCY OVER WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO ME. IT’S ONE WAY TO TAKE BACK SOME OF THE CONTROL OUR SOCIETY HAS CEDED. AND THAT IS, AS THEY SAY, PRICELESS.

In my opinion, using GrapheneOS is an act of resistance against surveillance, closed source software, Big Tech, AI, etc. It allows us to gain full control over our phones, to regain agency over our (digital) lives. My phone feels so much more “mine" and private. It gives me peace of mind.

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Have you thought about using two phones? That might be an expensive set-up, but for your threat model (I also live in the UK), GOS is the best option for degoogling. But I also have a second phone with stock Android when GOS is inconvenient. I have a work profile on my GOS phone, but after the latest update, my MS apps just stopped working. So now I’ve set-up my second phone to use for work. I can’t give an unbiased answer because I don’t use apple.

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Hello there,

Personally I’ve been debating this switch for a while aswell. Thats also the reason why I decided to make my first post on the forum :slight_smile:

Honestly, both are pretty decent options and like you’ve described both have their pro’s and cons. Its basically a nicer user experience vs better privacy/security.

I know saying this might upset some people; but I genuinely think that most of the extra security things GrapheneOS have implemented isn’t going to make a real difference for average users (if you think you’re a high risk target, please seek better advice).
The biggest gain of GrapheneOS is the privacy aspect in my opinion. The network/sesnor toggles are very nice indeed. iOS also has very strong security and especially the iPhone 17 series with their new MTE.

Personally I’ve made the switch a few months ago from GOS to a recent iPhone. The usability is just way nicer, and I also think the news around Apple (from a privacy perspective!) has been way more positive compared to Google and Android in general. While Google is out there trying to block sideloading (this has been reversed kinda), releasing Android 16 QPR source code 3 months too late, not releasing Pixel device trees anymore, and their new delay on security patches. Apple on the other hand has implemented Lockdown mode, E2E encryption for most of iCloud, Memory Tagging, and way less invasive AI. Another thing I like about iOS is the fact that in the Settings app, when a setting has something to do with sharing data, they give you a short privacy policy explaining what data is shared and how it it shared/secured.

In the end it is your choiche: most things in this thread will be personal opinions. Will you be better of privacy (and maybe security) wise on GrapheneOS? Yes. Will this gain be something you actually care about? That’s up to you.

I’ve not regretted the switch. The usability and general feel of the device is just way nicer than the Pixels. If GrapheneOS were to work on another phone (i know, it wont) the story would be very different. But paying iPhone like prices for a Pixel feels wrong to me. Another benefit of iOS is, like you’ve said, the apps. The Photos app is especially nice and their Calendar app aswell. With shortscuts you can make easy shortcuts for exporting data regularly and combining that with Synctrain (a foss syncthing app) works very well. For Newpipe I’ve found that using Netnewswire and Brave works really well for tracking subscriptions and watching Youtube.

Hopefully I’ve given you some helpful information. Like you did: try both. For me, after using iOS for 2 months now or so, I am very happy. Does Apple collect some data? Sure. Will this actually impact you? That’s for to you do decide and nobody else.

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I agree with what others have said about iOS privacy and freedom being nowhere near GOS. To be honest, I am consistently surprised that privacy conscious people find iOS usable at all. Most of the conveniences I’m able to give myself while still having a decent level of privacy simply do not exist there because of Apple’s draconian restrictions. It wasn’t until relatively recently that Apple even allowed non-facetime video calls to use picture in picture, and in part because of that, Signal still does not have PiP on iOS. On iOS, there is simply no way to automatically redirect links to privacy-invasive services like YouTube, Reddit, X/Twitter to frontends both because the apps do not exist and because iOS doesn’t allow redirecting links in that way. Torrent apps do not exist on iOS. On GrapheneOS, I can use virtual numbers from jmp.chat integrated into the dialer, which obviously is not an option on iOS. With GOS, Nextcloud has the ability to automatically sync in the background unlike on iOS where the OS prevents the app from continually running in the background as it should. Similarly, Phonetrack does not really exist on iOS for the same reason. You can forget about split tunneling VPN apps on iOS or compartmentalizing your trusted apps from your untrusted proprietary ones. I could go on.

Of course I am in a different situation because probably the only thing I miss about iOS is that autofill with password managers works a lot better. The advantages you mentioned just are not appealing to me.

Because you mentioned performance being one of the main reasons, I have to ask - what model Pixel are you using? I have a 6a and it’s more than fast enough for me. If you have a lot of apps running in the background, I would recommend changing the App battery usage from unrestricted to optimized for all of them and then change them back one by one if you notice feature breakage. This will help free up RAM if that is a limitation on your device.

Because you mentioned Apple Maps - have you read that they’re introducing ads? Doesn’t that worry you about the future and present of Apple and privacy?

Finally, I find that far too few people in the privacy world have read this study out of Trinity College Dublin, which is some of the only objective evidence of Apple’s privacy invasions I have come across. It was a major wake up call to me personally that Apple is simply not what they advertise themselves to be. I would highly recommend reading before you make the switch: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf

The most important table is this:

image
image912×180 23.7 KB

Even when users opt out of everything during the setup process, this is the information collected by Apple (and Google Android for comparison). I would argue that iOS is even worse than Android by this metric since it collects the MAC address of every other device on the network and location data by default. What’s more is they reached out to Google and Apple for comment. Google actually provided an explanation, whereas Apple simply refused to respond.

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You can redirect in Safari via extensions though. I use StopTheMadness on my iPad to redirect Reddit to Redlib and Youtube to Invidious.

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Interesting, I hadn’t heard of that app. Too bad that it’s closed source and paid, but nice that it exists nonetheless.

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I think that sandboxed Google Play services is also one of the most important features.

I see you point and I think that you are right. But the main point of goa for me is that it allows me to have ownership/control of my phone. I feel that it is not betraying me. by default it connects only to Grapheneos servers. I much prefer to have an open source privacy and security project to be responsible of my OS than a capitalist company.

Google also released lockdown mode (advanced Protection Mode) and, I believe, memory tagging. At least, they advanced/pioneered MTE in some ways.

However iOS per se is not bad and what matters is that you made an informed decision

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I recommend trying out the iPhone 17. Where GOS has privacy/security advantages they are both narrow and largely can be mitigated.

  1. Resistence to physical exploitation - can be mitigated largely on iOS with lockdown mode+alpha numeric password
  2. Inherent privacy from Big Tech - Apple does collect telemetry and will know what apps you buy in the App store. The telemetry can be partially mitigated with DNS filtering (NextDNS has an Apple filter) but there is no way around the App store issue

For remote attacks I’ve seen no evidence that GOS is more resistant than an iPhone in Lockdown Mode. Lockdown Mode has real world cases of resisting in the wild state-level attacks with 0-Days. GOS is probably as resistant to such attacks, but we lack affirmative data to confirm it.

TL;DR - The security benefits of GOS are debatable and depend on configuration choices. The privacy of GOS are real but limited depending on usage/configuration. However, the usability advantage of iOS is significant.

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I want to agree with you. Though one thing your point did miss is that GOS is also chosen for the digital freedom it provides given the nature of the software. And that coupled with your points makes a case for GOS instead if privacy and security is paramount (which in today’s day and age, should be for all, threat model warranted or not).

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By default? Yes. But once your GOS is set up the way you like it, its equally great on it especially if you like to have control over all your apps and settings and account set ups that work with your workflow (and not what the OS can allow you to do).

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Very subjective take that goes back to Android vs iOS war tbh.

I don’t see anything objective that Android lacks in its vanilla version.
NFC payments maybe? Yeah fine.
The rest is just preference on how you prefer your ice cream, vanilla or chocolate.

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I have both iPhone 17 and Pixel running GrapheneOS. If it it wasn’t for Play Integrity checks being shoved at me I would never own an iPhone or a stock Pixel. Everything outside of GrapheneOS is just revolting to use, and the overall design of AOSP 16 QPR1 is so much more mature compared to iOS 26, which has to be the worst iteration of iOS since it was introduced.

I’d miss the profiles, the first-class VPN support, and the network toggle, at a minimum.

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Going into iPhone/iOS is a nice experience but have you ever tried going out of it? It really is painful and counter-intuitive and you will regret going into it and trying iOS because they will make it difficult for you to extricate yourself out.

Exporting photos and videos are extremely tedious. I did this for my spouse with 26k+ photos. We have it now in our locally run Immich server and when deleting photos, it is also very tedious because Apple doesn’t want you to manage your photos at all, - no you have to subscribe to their cloud to better integrate yourself.

And for a while, I did enter the ecosystem myself but I knew enough not to tie myself completely and tried to deploy as much open source software where I can, instead of using their built in apps. But then you would not experience the magic of the Apple ecosystem and wonder what was the fuss all along. Eventually you will encounter that Apple would demand that you use its subscription as part of their integration into its ecosystem but doing so demands that you use iCloud and I don’t really trust them to do it the correct way. I can only trust them to do it technically legal correct way and that does not always fall in line with my privacy and security needs.

Looking back, recently I just realized that the nice looking animations taken during camera photos, I think they are meant to fill your phone storage up really fast and have to resort to iCloud because Apple is preys on the unsavvy majority of its users.

Its a caveat. You need to have an exit strategy to the ecosystem, if you dont, Apple will prey on your laziness and pay for things the right way, the Apple way, and you will continue to pay for data storage subscription that you really can provide for yourself, if you are technically savvy enough. But they sort of do nasty things like the “Live Photos” function that significantly eat up your data and you have to wonder, what else are they being underhanded about?

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Your digital freedom point is legitimate, though (like the usability issue) depends on the user. Do you live somewhere actively curtailing digital freedom like France or the UK? Then something like side loading will be very important. If you live somewhere that this is not a big issue, then the usability trade offs could out weigh it.

They do for me. Well that and other stuff about the GOS project that is off topic here and discussed ad naseum else where.

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make sure all of the possible use-cases for your phone have equivalent apps that work well on iOS. e.g. moving files between phone and pc and stuff like that. But if you’re happy with all that I don’t think switching is a bad idea