My mother’s upgrading from a Huawei P9 to an iPhone she received as a gift (don’t know which model it is).
She doesn’t know how to use iOS and I’m finding it difficult to teach her, since I don’t know how it works either, so I was wondering if it was possible to install some version of Android on it.
Sorry if it’s the wrong community to post this in
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It’s not possible lol. Apple makes it as difficult as humanly possible to alter their OS. We’re lucky enough to be able to jailbreak iPhones
Honestly, though, as much as I hate how restrictive iPhones are, I gotta admit they’re restrictive in a way that makes things a lot easier for people who aren’t tech-savvy. What part are you struggling with? I haven’t owned an iPhone since the 5C but I could probably help.
I’m not sure that’s so true nowadays, I’m very tech literate, and find iPhones still quite filled with bugs and weird design choices that make me have to actually TRY to be able to use them.
Take the browser for instance, why do I have to click the share button to use the “find on page” option? Well I learned from another dev that it’s actually the “action” button… but it’s almost exclusively used as a share button.
The mail app has some oddities. The pull down to search function is fucking stupid. I can’t quite remember all of them, but there are so many horrible UX decisions made for the sake of a “clean” interface.
And then there are the bugs, my AirPods won’t connect… they take forever to attempt, and then nothing happens. I after a couple of other troubleshooting steps, I figure out that toggling Bluetooth on my phone allows the AirPods to connect immediately.
Lots of bugs, with workarounds that I can figure out… but they’d drive someone else up a wall.
And we had a horrid time trying to use FaceTime on AppleTV to AppleTV. Apparently it was stability issues on my phones iOS version. And my phone wasn’t updating, despite updating multiple times on 17, the latest wouldn’t download until I went and removed an old ios16 beta profile. But I guess that’s kinda on me.
Other things that irritated me when I recently switched from android to iOS:
The keyboard doesn’t have the numbers along the top. Didn’t realize how much I used digits when typing stuff out so switching back and forth is annoying.
When typing long text messages I find it impossible to just click higher or scroll up to reread what I typed
Speaking of messaging the fact I can only do emoji reactions with such a limited range is really amazing especially in 2023-2024
The calculator doesn’t show you what you typed in….maybe I’m the idiot but I can’t figure it out
No ability to do Picture in Picture especially with FaceTime, so everytime I leave the app to look at another window it always blacks the video out
Printing things from my phone is so difficult now
Apple Pay for some reason only works when I double click the side button before placing the phone near the reader rather than scan and then double click
Speaking of wallet I can’t transfer in a local public transit commuter card from android….i need a physical card or number to scan. There is no option to manually enter that I can see
The action button why can I only do 1 action and not multiple with a click and then a hold option?
Speaking of action button I have mine set to silent bc if I keep clicking the volume down button it doesn’t automatically put the ringer on vibrate and then silent
Which leads me to why in gods name can I not turn off send noises from any app? I don’t need to hear the swoosh sound every time.
The Notification Center in general bothers me
Also I really miss the back button and menu buttons on the bottom.
I’m sure there’s more I forgot about but those are little things that have bugged me.
You can download a free app called pass2u wallet and it will allow you to add any image to your Apple wallet. That might be able to help you with your transit card issue
Oh didn’t know about that! I’ll check it out.
You could also look into the guides and courses by Apple or a local library. Those are designed to help people get used to the OS and they could help with common points of friction
I remember that era of Huawei copied apple in ui styling. Like my friend had a Huawei from that era and his settings page looked really similar to iOS.
The other replies answered your question already, but this may solve your little “problem” here: Apple offers free in-person training sessions on how to use their products. They’re intended precisely for non-technical people like your mother.
So, if you don’t want to be the person teaching her how to use iOS, you could look into getting her to attend these sessions instead.You can fault Apple for many things but this offer of theirs is just great on every level IMHO.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if this programme made them a rather sizeable profit even if they had a typical margin on their products.
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It’s just a less expensive OEM with smaller profit margins can’t afford to do things like this
No, that’s what I mean by “even if they had a typical margin”. I’m saying it could be profitable despite their insane margin because you get people buying more of your products.
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Updoot for this - my ex-mother-in-law got a lot out of this by both taking classes and dropping in to ask questions. They were always helpful and polite, and spent whatever time she needed
Technically speaking its a ‘plausible’. Practically speaking it’s a hard no.
It’s perfectly possible for tech folk to create a version of android for any iPhone. Apple has locked the hardware so that that can’t happen.
As others have said, you can sell the iPhone and get a nice Android.
There’s Project Sandcastle but it’s nowhere near ready and it looks like development has ceased.
Project sandcastle was always a PoC thing to me. On release, only the iPhone 7 was even close to being able to properly house the OS. Most devices would be missing important things like sound and cellular support, and wouldn’t be able to use the camera (among other things, some losing out on more than others depending on the exact device, there’s a whole spreadsheet that shows what works and what doesn’t for all Sandcastle-compatible devices)
Not to mention, file changes on Android using Sandcastle wouldn’t save, essentially meaning every time you reboot it’s like a factory reset (your iOS files are fine, just the Android bits wouldn’t be saved through a reboot)
There was some fork or continuation of this that brought on a bit more progress since then, but I can’t remember the name anymore. No new updates from that one for a while either
Just sell it and get an Android if iOS isn’t working for them. No reason to go through all that extra trouble trying to make iOS like Android when it isn’t.
Looks like you technically can, but it’s not really worth it.
TL;DW: it isn’t really usable.
Technically yes, but basically nothing works on it and it works on one phone (iphone 7)
Outside of settings being somewhat confusing, everything is basically close enough to most Android phones in terms of usage. Iirc that era of Huawei phones had basically similar looking settings pages to iOS.
I’d just compare both side by side and I’m pretty sure there’s guides on specific things you’d worry about.
What is something youre struggling with?
(I currently own an iphone x)
Pretty much the UI has been the biggest problem, I’ll try to find something like the microsoft launcher to make it look more familiar, thanks anyway
This is apple - that isn’t going to be an option.
iPhone is easy for people to use because they are all exactly the same. The downside of this is apple products start losing features and app compatibility after like 2 OS versions.
Does iOS allow launchers now?
no
Nope.
As you just learned, launchers aren’t a thing on ios. You can customize it a lot to make it more familiar with widgets and shortcut. I have never used the Microsoft launcher, only the pixel one so I don’t know how it looks
No Android and no custom launchers on iPhone, she’ll have to learn using iOS, I think it’s just a tad more of a fuss than moving to a different Android flavor, I’d try to look up some videos and materials about it to help her if I were you
Simply put - no its not! I would try to return it and get her an Honor phone. Honors “Magic UI” Software is very simmilar to EMUI on Huawei phones but they still have Google Play Services.
Sell the iPhone and use the money to buy another Honor phone.
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don’t know how helpful it is but here’s a video https://youtu.be/O0_Aou3eZl8?si=2OZRbLw7iAIi-VyL
Sell that thing, get a Google Pixel with GrapheneOS
