The iPhone 17 Pro, From An Android User’s Perspective

I have always been an Android smartphone user the moment I got my very first phone, the Samsung Galaxy S4, due to some lucky happenstance as a kind of hand-me-down deal. While I’ve owned smartphones for more than 12 years by this point, my current handset – the 3-year-old Samsung Galaxy A52s – is still only the third model I’ve ever daily driven. That averages out to 4 years per upgrade cycle, and at least for now, I have no plans of getting a new one, because it still (mostly) works as intended.

Contrary to myself, our boss a.k.a. Super Daddy is a converted Android-to-Apple user living cozily in the Cupertino-built walled garden, and so when he tasked me to try out the iPhone 17 Pro, honestly I wasn’t looking too forward to it. Mostly because I’ve had bad experiences in the past when I had my workflow impeded by iPhone’s seemingly isolationist approach towards non-Apple devices. (Also, the idea of iPad users having to wait for more than a decade for tools as basic as calculator and weather app sounds completely ridiculous to me, if that’s how Apple deals with software-related decisions.)

Now you may wonder, what’s the deal with such a long upgrade cycle? You can say the primary reason is I’m not rich enough to do yearly upgrades, although another very important factor I consider is how well it “fits” software-wise. Even by Android user standards, I’m far from the Average Joe kind – I swear by Good Lock modifications on my Galaxy A52s, and with tools like One Hand Operation+ and some of the UI enhancements, I’m 100% adamant that no smartphone UI comes remotely close to how capable and convenient it is. So if the newer model doesn’t give me the same amount of capability, I’m not switching, period.

With that in mind, you can imagine Apple is going to make a huge case to convince me to switch – if I was indeed that easily converted, I would’ve been using any random Android flagship by now. Anyway, here’s my thoughts after using the latest Apple flagship for several weeks, with the things that I like and dislike, in no specific order.

Uhh: Setup Process

It can be said that most people set their phones up by transferring data from the previous phone, which can be a fairly quick process – but what happens when you’re starting from a blank sheet of paper? Turns out, it can be an extremely long process on iOS.

You start by selecting language and region, which is nothing out of the ordinary, followed by font size setting. After this step, the new iPhone will be looking for your old iPhone to transfer data, but since I don’t have one, I have to skip this step. Wi-Fi setup is next, which is straightforward; you’re then greeted with an introduction on Apple’s privacy statements, and a software update check which reboots the device if there is any pending installs.

That’s all simple stuffs that all smartphone setups share – beyond this point is where things get quite specific for iPhones. There’s the parental control setup, then FaceID, passcode, and data transfer options from an old device (this is your second chance to transfer data from old Apple devices, or the only way in if you’re coming from non-Apple hardware). Next is Apple Account, Software Update options, iMessage & FaceTime setup, Location Services, cellular / eSIM setup, Screen Time setting, analytics sharing options, Light/Dark mode setting, Apple Intelligence, Camera Control, Action Button, Siri, and finally, Emergency SOS.

That’s over 20 separate settings you’ll be asked to set up in one go if you do not opt to skip them (which you can do for the majority of them – but finding those skip buttons won’t be the most straightforward process), and that is simply too much! Those unaware may end up not knowing the sheer amount of time required to complete the setup process, and I think it should at least be consolidated into a checklist that users can access after the initial setup to complete the process later on, without having to set them up individually in various Settings sub-menus.

Great: Hardware & Performance

One of Apple’s longstanding advantage for its smartphones are the chipset that powers them. Apple’s A-series chipsets have always been on the forefront of smartphone performance, so it’s no surprise that the iPhone 17 Pro is getting the best stuff Cupertino has to offer. That aside, the entire smartphone is packed with top-tier cameras, speakers, sensors, and a lot of specialized hardware orchestrated together to enable features like FaceID, AR measurement, and more. All in all, it does give a sense of you having a smartphone equivalent of Swiss army knife in your hands.

Here are all the benchmark numbers of the iPhone 17 Pro when compared to other iPhones of the same generation, alongside the last year’s iPhone 16 Pro Max, for reference.

Meh: Liquid Glass

Apple decided its time to fresh up its looks, and so Liquid Glass was born. Am I a fan of it? Not really. In the original iOS 26 release, the glass-like UI was too much form over function – some of the UI elements were greatly obscured by the translucent nature of its glass graphics. Granted, iOS 26.1 fixed that by adding the optional tint, but ultimately there are still UI-related quirks which Liquid Glass didn’t exactly improve, like the camera UI (which I’ll get to later on). Some may appreciate the physics-based lighting and very fluid-like motion when you tap on the buttons, but that’s all superficial stuff that doesn’t improve much in terms of usability.

Comprehensive: Apps & Services

People like the seamlessness of iPhones and its surrounding services – that’s why the “Walled Garden” is a term that depicts Apple’s excellent ecosystem integration with other Apple-branded stuffs, be it hardware or software. Granted, when trialing the iPhone 17 Pro, I wasn’t really exposing the smartphone to many other Apple devices, short for the AirPods Pro 3 earbuds that I reviewed, which was partly necessitated because that pair of audio gear simply wasn’t designed to work with non-Apple devices in full capacity.

Is it a very friction-less experience? Certainly, as expected from Cupertino. I can personally attest that hardware-software integration just wasn’t as deep on the other side of the wall, and some people may find this level of integration a big bonus, especially for the less tech-savvy ones. I for one do reviews for a living, so plenty of knowledge is a must – which meant that I can handle some Android quirks just fine without complaining too much. That being said, as far as Apple-to-Apple experience goes? Can’t really beat this one.

Honorable mention: modern iOS also have plenty of aspect covered in terms of the apps and tools pre-installed. By default, you’re given immediate access to things like Wallet, Find My, Fitness, Health, Watch, Journal, GarageBand, iMovie, and even productivity apps like Keynote, Numbers and Pages ready to roll. Not every Android smartphone has this amount of equivalents from what I have experienced thus far, although you still need to install non-Apple apps by yourself (i.e. Netflix, TikTok, Instagram or YouTube), given that they don’t do the pre-installed-in-the-phone-without-asking kind of thing.

Some Good, Some Not So Much: Control Center

All isn’t bad in terms of iOS’s UI design (although it’s definitely a 50/50): the iOS control center offers a great degree of customization that, thus far, I haven’t seen on Android-based UIs – at least not on the same degree of configurability, yet. By default, you’re given three pages to scroll, where the top is the commonly-accessed controls and tools (i.e. flashlight or QR scanner), while the second page is a dedicated music player, and the third page focuses on connectivity options. You can add more pages, move the buttons, and add more of them as you wish.

Still, it’s not perfect. Smartphone UIs have the tendency to assume that you are already familiar with their set of iconography, so Control Center (or “Quick Settings” as it is referred in the Android realm) without texts labeling what each button does is still an annoyance for me. Sure, I could figure out simple things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth given that the icons for them are universal, but here’s a challenge for you: can you tell what the button below, which depicts two stacked rectangles, does?

(Spoiler: it’s Screen Mirroring. I certainly couldn’t tell, and that’s coming from a user who knows and uses this feature at times.)

Also, I found myself often struggling to close the Control Center owing to its swipe controls. When I swipe up, I was expecting the panel to collapse back to top, but it instead brought the menu to the second page. (I certainly lost count on how many times I’ve done this by accident.) I have to get my finger to reach all the way down to swipe the Home bar up, or tap on very left edge to actually close the panel, which is a bit annoying, to be frank.

The reason I kept repeating this ‘mistake’ was mostly down to how Android operates Quick Settings: the swipe functions aren’t fighting each other for the same swipe axis. Essentially, swiping up and down is exclusively for extending and collapsing a panel, while overflowed items are accessed via left/right swipes. Apple actually does not use left/right swipe at all within the Control Center interface, so I’m hoping that can be added to remove complexity with up/down swipes in the current design.

Bad: Navigation

Disclaimer – I swear by buttons, simply because I believe this is still a faster way of navigating through pages and apps, and I’ll happily trade the visual appeal for that (as some people prefer the fluidness of gesture-based controls). You don’t get offered such choice on iPhones since they killed the hardware home button back in 2017 with iPhone X, so in classic Apple fashion, you will have to adapt for it. Now, for what it does on iOS, that line on the bottom of the screen does the job fine, but if you look at the bigger picture on how iOS manages UI navigation, I will say it’s not up to my standards.

The main problem comes down for the lack of a true “back” button. There are many types of UI prompts that you’d want to get out of, and for each type of UI you’re presented, there’s seemingly different (but not universal) ways of backing out of that screen. While a lot of them can be backed out by swiping down, that’s not always the case – point being, the lack of a universal back function makes it quite inconsistent to exit a page or cancel a function.

For example, exiting from setting up a new alarm clock involves tapping the ‘X’ button on the top left or swiping downwards, but exiting from the Action Button sub-menu or Game Center options will require you to tap that back button explicitly, despite most screens can be returned by swiping rightwards. The cancel button from the search bar sits on the right side, and then there’s editing the Home Screen if you tap and hold on it – the ‘Done’ button of which is on the right side of the display cutout instead.

And then there’s the lack of multi-window support. Here I must point out that Samsung used to have the best implementation of this feature: simply hold down the Recents button and you’re immediately presented to a list of apps to pair the first app with. That got neutered later on (defaulting to a multi-step process that I still don’t like), but it’s still there, while on iOS you just don’t have any option, short for PiP (picture-in-picture) for videos. I can’t tell if it’s a deliberate design decision since iPadOS does support this, but Apple, just put it there and let users decide if it’s worth using.

To be fair, gesture isn’t unusable by any means – for casual use it’s serviceable, but for power users or someone just plain used to how Android functioned in the last 10-plus years, it does feel like a suboptimal method to trade for the edge-to-edge visual appeal.

Mixed: Camera (If You Point-And-Shoot)

I’ll address the iPhone’s cameras in two sections: the hardware (right here), and the user interface (the next section). So, hardware – how was it? That depends on scenarios. For daytime (photo examples above), it’s solid, gives plenty of zoom flexibility from 0.5x ultrawide to 8x hybrid zoom, and generally it does a good job at making sure the colors are correct. However, night time is where I spotted glaring issues with its sensors, or at least, the software that handles them.

Take these photos as example. The iPhone 17 Pro’s cameras have trouble dealing with the LED lighting up these TERRACE signs, instead showing a significant blue hue that spills into the entire photo. For these particular scenes, the iPhone handled it the worst among the phones (all done without Night Mode) I’ve reviewed up until this point. It seemed like Night Mode didn’t help much, and in some cases the bright light source will cause the Night Mode to not activate at all.

However, taking image of the sign from a further distance shows a more behaved color balance (though the red lighting ended up overexposed), which suggests to me there’s something about iPhone’s metering mode that couldn’t handle this scene correctly. Besides that, shooting the rooftop sign also introduces unintended lens flares and reflections as streaks of lines and a bright spot above the roof in the examples shown above, which I have not seen on the Android devices I tested so far. Hard to say if that’s due to extra software processing or just a result of different lens design.

Above are the zoom range tests, in both daytime and nighttime, ranging from 0.5x to 8x.

Here’s a quick comparison of standard and Night Mode using iPhone 17 Pro’s cameras, and you can notice a slight blue-ish hue on the standard photo (especially the lighting on the lower-right edge).

Since the camera doesn’t have manual shutter mode, taking photos of moving objects are impractical even on a relatively slow-moving merry-go-round, shown in the example above.

You can also check out all the other examples I’ve shot using this iPhone, as shown above.

One more thing – since iPhone 16, Apple has included the new camera button which you can press to instantly activate the viewfinder. However, its functionality is quite redundant as the functions are already accessible through the camera UI. Mechanically, it hardly behaves like a real camera shutter button (like ones found in Sony’s Xperia series, or rather, real cameras), and ergonomically speaking, it’s way easier to just scroll the zoom ‘wheel’ on the center of the screen anyway due to its awkwardly inward position.

Confusing: Camera UI, And No Pro Mode?

Now, let’s address the camera interface in two parts. The first one involves how it looks by default: while the blame is technically not on Liquid Glass itself, the changes made in regards to how buttons are interacted and how information are displayed is admittedly a downgrade over the preceding design. For one, most of the quick access controls are now hidden behind a grid menu accessible via a very tiny button on the edge (or by tapping the ‘Photo’ button at the bottom), and each individual control must now cycle through presets instead of selecting one right from a list.

The more glaring omission, in my opinion, is the complete absence of dedicated ‘Pro’ and ‘Night’ mode. Why am I holding a smartphone supposedly branded ‘Pro’ and was boasted for its professional-friendly features, yet the default camera app doesn’t even have a way to properly utilize those hardware? It certainly was a jarring realization as I have long thought Pro and Night modes in any camera app are default features. Also, completely hiding additional modes beyond Photo and Video for the sake of minimalist visuals is just not it, Apple.

Also, you must rely on the software to reliably predict that you’re shooting something up close for it to provide you with a button to activate Macro mode (same applies to Night Mode). When I was trying to shoot semi-transparent objects, this often confuses the camera and caused it to randomly go in and out of Macro mode when you activated it; similar cases happen when I took photos at night that comes with bright light sources, which seem to confuse iPhone’s camera metering.

Again, it must be said that this wouldn’t be an issue if there’s a button that simply puts it into Macro and Night mode respectively, no questions asked.

Could Be Better: Action Button

Action Button is included since iPhone 15 Pro, and for two generations worth of smartphones by now, there doesn’t seem to be any significant changes made to this tiny button since the original Ring/Silent switch was taken to the graveyard.

In its current form, you’re given a fairly wide selection of options to choose what pressing this button does, but the fact that you can’t map it with single-press, double-press, triple-press, or any other combination seems a bit wasteful given the combinations allowed with the presence of an extra hardware button (workarounds apparently exist, but it’s far from elegant based on the implementation).

You could argue single-press should be avoided because some users might press it accidentally (I certainly did), but that’s not too big of a problem to fix as long as that button is given a different texture so users can differentiate; but if we’ve figured out double-press and triple-press in earbuds, then I expect the same to happen here.

Unintuitive: Settings

So I was browsing the web using Safari and, knowing web browsers naturally have a lot of settings to cover, I was looking to tune it to my liking (and I wasn’t a fan of the new default layout). Only then I found out there’s no easy way of accessing settings if you’re already in the app – you must head back to the home screen, tap Settings, tap Apps, then find Safari in the long list of apps to get what you’re looking for. Same goes to camera settings, you won’t find a cogwheel button there, and you must go the long way round.

Looking for a specific setting? That’s even worse, as Apple simply crammed the majority of parameters into one long scrolling page, making things hard to find (sure, you could use the search function, but a well-designed UI shouldn’t require frequent uses of search in the first place). That’s something that I noticed during my AirPods Pro 3 review as well: most of the settings are tucked within a long continuous page, without much categorization of these parameters into the submenus.

I’ve heard arguments that Apple intended for apps to centralize each and every setting into the Settings app, which makes sense on paper – given that many third-party apps each have different spots to place the cogwheel button. Still, in my many years of using Android devices I’ve never seen this as an issue, and for those who does think that it is an issue, surely putting a shortcut as an alternative that redirects you to the Settings wouldn’t be that difficult?

Solid: Gaming & Entertainment

As a flagship smartphone, it’s no question that something like an iPhone 17 Pro can easily run games without complaining much. It does have some rudimentary gaming-specific features, though I can’t say how viable an iPhone can be if you’re looking at it from a competitive angle given that I’m not exactly a competitive gamer (as many phones out there do advertise latency-slashing features and hardware to entice the gaming crowd). Still, I can say its raw and sustained GPU performance are not going to be something that drags you down.

For content consumption, both the display and speakers are excellent by flagship standards. That is to say they aren’t perfect per se – for displays, the “Dynamic Island” cutout is still quite big and gets in the way if you’re watching ultrawide (or smartphone-native i.e. 18:9 aspect) content; and while the speakers delivers great amount of bass, it could do slightly better in the higher frequencies which a system-wide full-band EQ could’ve solved.

Terrible: Interoperability With Non-Apple Devices

Using an iPhone in an environment where you’re not really exposed to other Apple devices does bring us to one big elephant in the room: interoperability with anything that isn’t with the bitten fruit logo slapped on it. I own and daily drive Windows laptops for more than a decade, and as I’ve mentioned in the very beginning of this review, I’ve had occasions where iOS’s walled garden approach actively impeded my workflow.

Specifically, that one time many years ago I couldn’t find any method of transferring files from my friend’s iPhone to any of my devices – be it Windows or Android – without resorting to odd ways i.e. cloud service or chat apps. Technically it was possible to transfer between Windows and iOS using iTunes, but having an app getting in the way while there’s no such issue on Android devices was just added inconvenience for me.

Has the situation improved since then? As far as iOS’s perspective is concerned, not really. You’re still stuck with the same odd ways of transferring files outside of Apple devices despite its impressive AirDrop integration with Apple stuffs, but recently that changed, as Google managed to open up the Apple-exclusive club with its Pixel 10 series smartphones (and here’s how they did it). At least that’s one of the major walls broken down – which also means that transferring files from someone’s iPhone should be a whole lot less painful to deal with.

I can sidetrack this a bit and say that Apple employs basically the same principle with regards to its other hardware, like the AirPods Pro 3 I recently reviewed. It wouldn’t work on anything that isn’t Apple-branded beyond the basic playback controls, plus whatever that is offered via onboard controls. Can I really expect Cupertino to change its approach with regards to iPhones when that’s how they see a non-Apple device even in a supposedly universally-compatible gadget?

Conclusion: Would I Consider The iPhone 17 Pro?

If this hasn’t been obvious enough, the answer is no – while iPhones certainly have their strengths, it doesn’t fit into my usage flow, and for some of the features it excels, there’s an Android equivalent out there can do mostly the same. While I’ve learned quite a few things from testing out this iPhone for three months by now, ultimately that’s still not going to cover every scenario that I’ll encounter as a non-Apple user, so whatever findings I’ve made up until this point is certainly non-exhaustive.

Taking my specific circumstances out of the equation and look at the bigger picture, could an Android user make the switch and not look back from this point on? There certainly is a possibility for it, especially if the usage pattern of the user in question largely matches that of the iOS world. There is also considerations that the ecosystem barrier has been gradually struck down – be it Apple’s own willingness or forced by regulatory changes – which means some users are more willing to commit to iPhones so long as interoperability with other Android devices, and even Windows PCs, becomes reasonable.

If you’re looking to evaluate the iPhone 17 series from an iOS user’s perspective, do check out my boss Super Daddy’s review on all the other models (iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro Max), or even the iPhone Air if ultra-thin form factor is your kind of jam. With that, I’m signing off the long-term review of the iPhone 17 Pro in its striking Cosmic Orange form, and go back to my tried-and-true Samsung Galaxy A52s.