Got an iPhone some months ago because it was cheaper than getting a Pixel or S24 and I hate it.
The apps suck, sideloading sucks ass because of both apple restrictions and the lack of modded apps, browsing sucks because the adblockers suck because the extensions suck, FOSS is pretty much dead of iOS, call spam detection sucks, keyboard sucks.
I never saw an ad on android for the past three years because of how good my setup was with modded apps and Firefox+uBlock but iOS is pure Advertisement Hell.
The OS visuals and responsiveness are better than most android skins but 60Hz is trash as well and 4GB ram means that I can not even open like 3 tabs at once without the others shutting down.
The photo management sucks the most. Any photo I save goes straight to my Camera Roll and has ZERO organization which memes no more epic funny memes are getting saved on my phone anymore.
The integration with Google Photos is also non-existent and images get saved only when I manually sync them and I will never buy iCloud because I hate the locked down apple ecosystem.
Modded apps also suck and nothing is as good as revanced plus the 7 day refresh limit sucks because of course apple wants 99$ per year to have the godlike ability to install your own apps.
Airdrop is maybe the only positive I remember about this. And maybe the battery life which is better than my previous phone's battery.
I took the Android leap from Apple about six years ago and never looked back. Androids are superior in almost every way when it comes to privacy and customization
Apple stopped being innovative around the time Steve Jobs died; each update is just more ways to spy and spam you with a slightly better camera. I will say iPhones are very user friendly, so there is like a 20 min learning curve converting from Apple to Android.
Also not sure where you are getting your phone plan, but there's only 3 tower providers in the US now. Verizon, At&t, and T-Mobile. I'd avoid any of those as a carrier because they tend to overcharge.
Low cost carriers still operate service under 1 of those 3 company's towers, so you'll still get the same service but at a cheaper price. I use Boost Mobile, $50 a month with no hidden fees, month-to-month and somehow the price hasn't gone up in five years.
I'm using Visible, it's in house Verizon MVNO, $25 a month with good data throttling limit for me.
Android is only good for privacy if you explicitly install a custom rom or do a bunch of stuff to modify your existing rom. And you can’t do that on every phone. Shit you can’t do that on most phones.
By default android is as bad as you can get. The only thing worse is like red star OS.