Howdy y'all, here's another iPhone update.

Good thing: Resale value.

My old phone was dying, and I'm going on a big trip soon. I couldn't risk losing my boarding passes and communication device, and wanted to upgrade. The iPhone 12 won't be here for awhile, and the current flagship iPhones have a notch and no fingerprint scanner. I'd like an iPhone with no (or at least, a small) notch, TouchID, and a USB C port.

Luckily, if you keep your iPhone in good condition, you can usually resell it for close to its resale value. I'd easily sell this for 50% or higher, losing only $200-ish if I were to upgrade in the next year or so.

I bought a case and a tempered glass screen protector, but I'd be waiting a few days for them to arrive. I'm staying inside for these days, so no rush.

Glass is hard. My screen won't scratch from light usage.

Bad thing: The Screen Will Immediately Scratch from Light Usage

Wow, this is really bad. I'm dismayed by how damaged my phone has become after just one day of light usage.

TLDRL If you're like me, upgrading from a mid-2010s phone, you need to buy a screen protector and case/skin first and have it ready to go from the start. Phone screens scratch much more easily nowadays.

I look at my old Android phone from 2016, with its gorilla glass 4 on the screen and its aluminum body. My understanding is that at the time, smartphone glass was scratch-resistant at the cost of being less shatter-resistant. (I've dropped my phone many times over the years and never had the screen crack or have a significant scratch. But alas.) The common understanding was, if you weren't expecting to get sapphires or diamonds or sand near your glass screen, you wouldn't be at a risk of scratches. In 2016, I removed the pre-applied screen protector from my Oneplus (something the iPhone SE 2020 does not have) and applied a tempered glass screen protector. I'd done this out of an abundance of caution, and discarded the protector a year later in 2017 so I could better clean and dry my phone after a drink was spilled on it at a party.

Some time in mid 2018, I noticed something on my Oneplus. Tiny, curved scratches around the edge of the screen, as if gently caressed with a single sand-tiped fiber. For a two year old phone, this was acceptable to me. It had gone almost a year without a protector. Over the four years of life, it accumulated more such scratches, losing the oleophobic coating at the very edges of the phone screen. After three years, these tiny abrasions have left a slight texture at the edges of my phone. The scratches on my old Oneplus-braned Android were superficial and did not interfere with the operation of the phone. They were only visible in bright sunlight, or housing light if you really looked.

So I was dismayed to find, after one and a half days, my iPhone SE had already accumulated a lot of very visible scratches. It doesn't look as bad as my old phone, but it's on the path to intercept it in a day or two. This is a punch in the gut after spending so much on a phone, and it undoubtedly hurts the resale value I can expect from it.

I noticed these scratches yesterday after writing my original post, and they seem to have greatly increased since then. I'm a careful person! I don't dump sand on my desks! There is something in my environment (on my hands? in my pockets?) that scratches my iPhone but not my Oneplus. I'm afraid to touch my phone while I wait for my screen protector to arrive.

If anybody knows a good reference for hardness scales of various smartscreen glasses and common particles, I'd love to know. Does the human body perhaps secrete tiny chips of manganese? Perhaps the oleophobic coating can visibly scratch and the screen is fine? Maybe small bits of glass from my old phone have forever corrupted my pockets with sand of superior hardness?

I'm now sitting with an iPhone that has twelve days left on the return clock that, while only superficially damaged, is evidently not new. A return may not be accepted. This is frustrating.

Good thing: Apple will proxy your AppleID email to apps for single sign on.

Bad thing: Shortcuts seems good, but Siri breaks at the "Wait" instruction.

Bad thing: Control Center

In Android, you swipe down to see notifications, as well as control brightness, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. It's very ordered and good, and you can rearrange the elements as you see fit.

In iPhone, this is called the Control Center, and it's so far behind Android that it isn't even funny. First: You can't turn off Wifi or Data without going to settings (they'll still connect for localization and whatnot), a surprising downgrade from Android. Second: The control center is a grid of controls that you can't rearrange. (See here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202769) Third: You can't remove the "Music" control, which takes up the space of four buttons, nor the Screen Mirroring control, which takes up the space of two buttons and is only compatible with certain smart TVs. Who seriously fuck owns a TV nowadays?! Fourth: Apps can't add optional Control Center controls (something you can do in Android.)**

Bad thing: Can't report in the App Store

I'm weird and I read Privacy Policies before downloading apps. Browsing the app store, several apps had a broken link to their privacy policy, and with a working link don't point to the Privacy Policy (you need to find it yourself). This is another surprising downgrade from Android, as I've very rarely encountered this issue in the Google Play Store. And you can't even report these apps!

That said, I don't know if you can report on the Play Store, and I don't think the Play Store even requires a Privacy Policy.

Bad thing: Can't install a bare-metal OS.

So, my old Android will likely stay my old Android for awhile. There's a litany of exclusive apps and abilities, like Pufferfish (free and legal TV streaming from Stanford), Sleep As Android (alarm app with NFC functionality), StreetComplete (tool for contributing to OpenStreetMap), and the simple fact that I can develop for Android using any of my computers.

But even better, once I fully sunset this phone, I can install Ubuntu Touch onto my old phone and use it as a moderately powerful ARM-based touchscreen-enabled Linux server!

But... I probably won't ever be able to install a different OS to my iPhone. Emulation and cool root-enabled things will probably be possible with Jailbreak, but from what I see, I'll never get real Linux on an iPhone. When this phone reaches end-of-life, that is end of life. It'll be useful only as a paperweight or a historical novelty, but more realistically, I might be able to sell it for a better phone.

Bad Thing: Can't view image metadata

What the fuck!