Photos Killed Android

My Blackberry is ageing. It still works many days on a single charge but barely copes with the new software. Apps are slow and some even fail to run. But the biggest issue is the camera which has gathered a lot of duct on the internal lens surfaces, so photos come out washed out and often not sharply focused.

I've been waiting to "pull the trigger" and buy the new Samsung Galaxy S23 but after a careful examination of pros and cones I passed on it. To be honest passed on Android as such. In a surprising move I have become an iOS guy. Not yet, as Apple must first release a USB-C iPhone. But that is definitely in the works, so it is all very probable I will be buying the iPhone 15 when it comes out.

I did a list of features I wanted from a new phone and surprisingly there have been several points where Android lost to iOS. And even more surprisingly many of them have been around handling photos. This is surprising as Google Photos is definitely the leading personal photos archiving and sharing platform, used also by many iOS users.

But the fundamental difference between iOS and Android is you cannot copy/paste photos on Android. While it is super easy on iOS.

I use an iPad as my second mobile device, so I have this opportunity to compare both OSes based on the everyday experience. And sharing / manipulating photos (that includes screenshots) is so much easier on the Apple platform. Android makes the same operations (such as taking and cropping a screenshot) so much more convoluted. And on top of that I simply cannot pick a photo from one of my Google Photos album, "copy" it and "paste" wherever I want. I can though on Google Photos running on iOS. Seems like there may be a system enforcement to offer photo copy/paste option in every app in iOS.

On top of the lack of copy/paste for photos, there is no object lifting (a super nice feature when combined with note-taking apps or Freeform. And iOS even allows to force-download photos in the Google Photos app for full offline experience - something that is super annoying on Android when despite having terabytes of local storage you cannot display photo albums when not connected to the Internet.

We'll see how it goes. There is still some waiting time ahead, as iPhone 15 will be in the Fall the earliest. Hope the Blackberry survives until then.