Thirty-six people work at 37signals. Only six of us don’t have iPhones. Out of the six of us, three have Androids. I just recently became one of the Android minority.





I’ve been a die-hard “Apple evangelist” for over twenty years — first an avid Mac user, then an early adopter of both iPod and iPhone. In the 90s, when everyone I knew used Windows, I tried to switch them to Mac. In the 2000s, when everyone had Creative-brand MP3 players, I tried to switch them to iPod and iTunes. A few months ago I switched from iPhone to Android. Now the running joke is that I’ve become an Android evangelist.

4 Specific Jobs Android Does Better

In all seriousness I’m surprised I like Android as much as I do. I don’t want this to be yet another tech-blog “Why I switched to Android” essay. There are a bunch of those online already. This is not a manifesto about the “openness” of Android. This isn’t a “these are the apps I installed to approximate my old iPhone” article either. Instead, this is my personal experience with both iPhone and Android. I’ll focus on 4 specific jobs I believe Android is better at than my old iPhone: 1. Audio on-the-go.

I know what you’re thinking: iPhone does this perfectly well. And it does, to a point. With the iPhone, I had problems with Bluetooth streaming. While driving I’d play something from my iTunes library via Bluetooth. The music would stream from the iPhone to the car stereo. Absolute magic. Sometimes I’d switch to Spotify for the Radio feature. Again, awesome. Exiting and entering the car then reconnecting via Bluetooth, however, would reveal a quirk. iPhone always defaulted to the iTunes library. It didn’t matter if I was listening to Spotify when I left the car. Once I got back in the car and the Bluetooth connection was established, bam iTunes. Thanks iPhone, I don’t want iTunes now actually. I want Spotify.

I’m also an iTunes Match customer. iTunes Match is Apple’s “cloud music” offering. That means the music doesn’t have to physically be on the iPhone. When you play a song it will stream from the iTunes Match “cloud”. The problem with this is sometimes iTunes Match flakes out. In my case it would flake out quite a bit. Sometimes it would take a while to authenticate. Sometimes it would hang on a song because of buffering.

This wasn’t a huge annoyance for me though. Twenty years of using Macs conditioned me to think, “well, that’s the Apple way.” It’s such a small price to pay for such a user-friendly device. Besides, why does this annoy me? I should be grateful. This is incredible technology. Apple is probably working on a fix with iOS 7. It’s not a big deal.

Then I switched to Android.



When I first connected Android to the car Bluetooth I thought, “wow, that was 5 minutes faster than the iPhone.” Most importantly, Android appreciates that I use different apps for listening to music. When I listen to Spotify, exit and enter the car and reconnect via Bluetooth, Android still serves up Spotify.

Google’s cloud music offering also seems to work better than iTunes Match. There’s less start-up lag. Google will even allow you to add up to 20,000 songs from your iTunes library for free. For example, I pre-ordered the new David Bowie album exclusive to iTunes a few months ago. It was downloaded this morning on iTunes. In less than a minute I’m listening to it on Android. Between Google Music and Spotify I’m pretty well covered.

What started as a small annoyance on the iPhone became an eye-opener on Android. Since the introduction of the iPod and iTunes, I saw Apple as a leader in the world of digital music. While my iPhone music problems were minor, I had assumed there simply was no better way other than the one Apple had designed. Yet here was Android doing it just a little bit better. Maybe Apple didn’t have it figured out after all.