Pre-amble
Imagine this scenario: It's 2024. A man convicted of 34 felonies (and rape!) gets elected president of the United States of America. As soon as he is installed he starts turning the US into a banana republic at breakneck speed.
Apple bends the knee, donates 1 million dollars for his inauguration and presents a weird golden plaque to the new Fuhrer to appease him.
I know, it sounds wild and unbelievable, but here we are.
I was so disgusted I decided to break my Apple habit. I've been a user since Apple switched to Intel back in the aughties and have steadily increased mine and my families armada of Apple gadgets. I've gone through several generations of Macbooks, Mac minis, Airpods, iPads, iPhones, iPods, Apple TVs and have branched out to Homepod minis and even an Apple Watch.
But enough is enough, I decided I wanted to go european first.
I didn’t quite make it with my choice of tablet.
When it comes to phones though, I knew there were options. I had looked at Fairphone in the past, more like a curio than anything else, because Apple. As it happens Fairphone Gen. 6, from the Netherlands, hit about the time I was looking for a new phone and I turned it down at the last minute because Nothing (a UK brand) launched the CMF Phone 2 Pro (CMF is Nothings budget brand, apparently now being spun off as an independent company I’ve read) and I absolutely fell in love with the orange. And yes, this was before the launch of the iPhones 17.
Both phones have mid-range specs which suits me fine, I can’t remember a phone feeling slow since at least the iPhone X days.
I already knew I could live with an Android phone because of my tablet experience but the awful truth is that in the end I didn’t want to sink too much money into my first Android phone. There’s still that… hesitancy? Anyway, the CMF Phone 2 Pro is a sub $300 phone. Yes, you read that right. It has a 6.77 inch 120Hz AMOLED screen (it’s a big, but slim, boy), 8 gigs of RAM and my model has 128 GB of storage (a 256 GB option exists but knowing that after 3 years of use my iPhone 14 Pro uses just 61 of 256GB I knew that would be a waste of money), expandable with 2TB more via an SD card. It has a pre-installed screen protector and there’s also a see-through case in the box. Other specs include the mid-range Mediatek Dimensity 7300 Pro 8 core SoC, a whopping 5000 mAh battery, triple camera system (2x50 MP and 1x8MB) and of course a selfie cam. Photos is another of those things that since iPhone 5 or so hasn’t really been an issue for me and this phone delivers photos just fine for my use - i’m not picky.
In short, sure, there’s the occasional stutter but overall the experience is smooth and dare I say it, fun! Nothing OS, the particular branding of Android that Nothing néé CMF does is a fun take. It’s obviously very well optimised and it has a playful retro aesthetic that I appreciate.
Maybe i’m just not a heavy phone user but that big battery is still around 70% charged when I go to bed. I’ve never seen anything like it.
When it comes to apps, besides the things I’ve had to swap because they’re made by Apple (Notes and Health was a biggie) or they’re just not cross-platform (Ivory), I have found alternatives I can live with for the few apps that aren’t cross-platform.
If, like me, you take medication every day but still want to be reminded to, I now use MyTherapy. A free app made in Germany that besides medication I also record my occasional blood pressure readings into. They accept donations so I’ve donated.
Before moving to Android and even before you remove the SIM card from your iPhone - make sure to turn of iMessage and Facetime. Do this ON ALL YOUR APPLE DEVICES before switching or you can have a bad time.
Then there’s the tedious task of downloading all your videos and photos from iCloud, luckily I have a Macbook Pro synced up so I just copied off from there. I dropped it all into a folder on my NAS (a QNAP) and started using an app called QuMagie. It’s a free (well, you need to buy the NAS I guess) photo management system where apps for iOS and Android automagically sync photos to whenever you’re on your home network. I’ve found that it just works and I now have a backup system in place and control my own photo library!
The Notes app has been replaced by Simplenote, I spent the better part of an hour doing cut and paste between Notes and Simplenote on my Macbook and then it just syncs between my systems, Mac, Android and yes, I even have a Windows 11 system in here somewhere. I know Simplenote is made by an american company though so the search goes on, but it’ll do for now.
Even though I started migrating in late august it’s still not completely done, the most tedious work is all the MFA. You need to go to a site or app, log in, do the MFA on the iPhone, disable the MFA, enable it again but now with the MFA app on your Android phone. At least I now use Ente Auth that syncs my MFA tokens between my systems. Ente is european but it’s still tedious to make the switch.
In Sweden we have BankID, we use this national digital ID for many, many things. So many in fact that it would prove difficult to live without it. Sweden is a shockingly cash-less society, it’s disturbingly common for stores to not accept cash at all. You can either tap to pay (Apple, Samsung and Google Pay all work) or use Swish, an app to easily transfer money to and from your bank account. And yes, Swish uses BankID, as does, unsurprusingly, every banking app. And pretty much every government organisation that requires an ID uses BankID.
Let me derail here for a moment about Google Pay. Not many banks in Sweden support it. Mine doesn’t. But Klarna does. So I now have a Klarna card just for the pleasure(?) of using tap to pay. A habit I have mostly worked out of my life by again carrying my bank issued Mastercard (I know, I know) and just doing contact-less payments with that.
The thing with BankID is that it, of course, only works on iOS and Android, and on Android you need the Google Play stuff for it to work. So right now there’s no real escaping american companies to ID yourself digitally. I feel this must change in the future, EU needs a homegrown alternative and stick to it. Maybe Sailfish OS? Maybe just Linux for mobile phones? I don’t know the answer, but we need something, and fast.
As I got my CMF Phone 2 Pro I also got 2 other Nothing products - the CMF Buds 2 and the CMF Watch 3 Pro. That’s right, I went all in and dicthed my Airpods Pro 2 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 at the same time as I switched phones.
The buds are available for just a smidgen under $70 so there’s no way they can be as good as the Airpods Pro 2 and they’re plainly not. But they’re good enough that I haven’t switched back. They sound fine and the ANC is OK and they look really cool (same bright orange as the phone). The watch is by far the piece of kit I like the least. It’s very plasticky and while I guess it does the basics of showing time, weather, messages and measuring steps and heart rate - all this for $129 mind you - I still think it feels cheap. I’m looking for alternatives.
I sold my Ultra 2 watch, netted $500, and got a phone, buds and a watch and still had pocket change to buy a hot dog. That in itself is amazing. That I also kicked my Apple habit and no longer rely on an american company for my phone needs feels better still.Â