After the announcement of the blocking of unsigned Android apps from September 2026, the announcement of the death of Nova launcher and the disappointment of the Pixel 10 release it’s safe to say morale is fairly low in the Android camp right now. I’ve been quite vocal in that I’d be keeping a close eye on the iPhone announcement that happened last night and really I have just been waiting for an excuse to jump ship.
The content of that Keynote was the excuse I was waiting for, and I suspect it will tempt quite a large number of others to swap sides.
For me at least, it was the base iPhone 17 that stole the show. Yes the Air, the Pro and the Pro Max are technically impressive, but it’s the standard model that stands out as the bargain this time.
I don’t like to buy storage upgrades, as the extra cost generally doesn’t translate a proportionate amount of extra resale value. For this reason any phone that starts at 128GB of storage was off the cards for me (it’s not only Apple that are guilty of this… Google too). 60Hz refresh rate was also a negative that plagued the Standard iPhone, and was something that annoyed me when I tried the 16e. When sub £200 budget phones have 120Hz, it’s unacceptable in a device that costs 4 times that.
This years base iPhone solves all of those issues and includes more premium features than ever before. The starting storage is 256GB, with a £100 option to upgrade to 512GB. Personally I am perfectly fine with 256GB. It also has a 120Hz LTPO screen, which means that as well as being able to refresh the image 120 times a second, it can also drop down to as low as 1Hz, to preserve the battery when displaying static images. They’ve also given it ceramic shield too and an anti-reflective coating that previously you’d have had to buy a Samsung S24 ultra or S25 ultra to get. The bezels are small on the display, and it’s still in a neat compact form factor, and weighs a lot less than the pro models. All this and they didn’t increase the price from what the 16 launched at.
I was fully expecting to only be impressed by the Pro/Pro Max devices, and would’ve probably gone with a Pro if it wasn’t for this unexpected bump in specs. Needless to say I’ll be putting a preorder in on the 12th when they open them up. I can imagine a lot of other disenfranchised Android users doing the same.
It seems like Google are not self aware enough to realise that they are not the premium brand they think they are. They are too disorganised and spontaneous to be premium. “Stable” releases feel like beta versions, products that users grow to rely on get removed or discontinued without notice, their hardware is prone to failure, the performance of their devices is below even mid range devices from other manufacturers and amongst other things the play store is littered with malware. If Google think they can lock users into a “walled garden” with all these negative points, and hope to charge as much as much more premium brands I think they’re going to have a very rude awakening.
Aside from the flexibility currently offered by Android, and maybe better integration with Windows and Linux machines there are very little benefits of using an Android device over an iOS one. If Google go down a path of locking down their devices, stopping unsigned app installs, locking down ADB, and even locking down the file system then the two operating systems become very easy to compare. Android would lose every time.
I may sound very negative about all this, but it comes from a place of passion. As I’ve written at length in previous posts, Android is an operating system I’ve been very passionate about for over a decade now, and I’m sad to see it come to this. I really do hope that this doesn’t happen, but I feel like Google have set themselves on a path that can only lead to a completely locked down environment. Given no alternative, I’d rather be locked into a environment controlled by Apple, than one by Google and that’s why I’m making the move now (or at least in a couple of weeks).
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