The best iPhones also rank among the best phones period, with high-end specs, great designs, impressive cameras, and generally slick software. But these phones aren’t perfect, and even as someone who uses an iPhone as my primary handset, I still find myself getting annoyed by some of their limitations.
These issues are on both the hardware and software sides, and they’re things I really wish Apple would address.
So below, you’ll find five things that especially annoy me about iPhones – and which if fixed would keep me from considering a switch back to Android.
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1. Their telephoto cameras aren’t the best
The iPhone 17 Pro Max (Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)
While iPhones largely have excellent cameras, their telephoto cameras arguably aren’t as good as the best of the competition.
They top out at 4x optical zoom if we’re talking the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, or at 5x optical zoom on some older models, which is broadly in line with most rivals like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL. But when it comes to digital zoom, Apple’s phones simply can’t compete in my opinion.
That’s probably because Android brands – and in particular Google – are making use of more advanced AI to power their digital zooms, but the end result is that you can get quite usable shots on some of these phones at well beyond the optical zoom range, which isn’t really true with an iPhone.
I also quite like how with the Galaxy S25 Ultra you get two focal lengths for optical zoom, thanks to there being both a 3x and 5x lens. This isn’t the case on any iPhone – Apple will advertise ‘optical-quality’ zoom at other focal lengths, but this is a misleading term with inferior results.
2. They charge slowly
The iPhone 17 Pro (Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)
Apple’s phones are even less competitive when it comes to charging power. Or rather, they are broadly competitive with Samsung and Google – the two brands Apple probably sees as its main rivals – but can’t begin to compete with Chinese brands like OnePlus and Xiaomi.
On the iPhone 17 Pro Max, Apple claims you can reach up to a 50% charge in 20 minutes with a 40W adapter or higher, implying that 40W of power is the most it can harness, whereas the OnePlus 15 for example supports 120W charging and the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max can manage 100W.
There’s a similar gulf with wireless charging – both of those Chinese brands support up to 50W wireless charging, while no iPhone can take advantage of more than 30W.
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This is a major weak spot in iPhones, and as someone who values speedy charging, it’s something that tempts me towards the Android side.
3. You can’t tap in the middle of words
The iPhone 17 (Image credit: Jacob Krol/Future)
One thing that’s a constant source of irritation for me is the fact that you can’t just tap in the middle of a word – as you might want to if you need to correct a typo. Instead, tapping somewhere in a word will just bring the cursor to one or other side of it.
Sure, there are of course ways to move the cursor into a word – you can long press on the word and then drag the cursor, or long press on the space bar and drag the cursor around the keyboard, using it a bit like a trackpad, but neither of these methods are as fast or intuitive as simply tapping.
And sure, you could argue that tapping in a word can sometimes be imprecise and leave the cursor in the wrong position, but I know from having done this on Android keyboards that most of the time it works fine – and when it doesn’t you still have other methods like those above to get a bit more precision.
So why Apple won’t just give us this option I don’t know. They could still keep the other methods too, allowing people to simply choose which approach they’d prefer to use.
4. Their battery capacities are lower than most rivals
The iPhone 17 Pro Max (Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)
As well as charging slower than many Android phones, iPhones also have lower capacity batteries.
Now, in fairness Apple has gradually been increasing the capacity of its phones, and now the iPhone 17 Pro Max actually has the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra marginally beat (or at least eSIM-only versions of the iPhone 17 Pro Max do). But at 5,088mAh its battery is still lower capacity than the 5,200mAh Pixel 10 Pro XL, and far, far lower capacity than the likes of the 7,500mAh Xiaomi 17 Pro Max.
So there’s still lots of room for improvement here, because right now, iPhones are well behind much of the competition for battery capacities.
5. You’re stuck with Siri
The iPhone 16 Pro Max (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
Siri has pretty much always trailed behind Google Assistant in most ways, and personally I even prefer Alexa. But the situation has got even worse in recent years, because we’re starting to see AI assistants like Gemini and ChatGPT emerge, and with Apple trailing in AI capabilities, it’s leaving Siri feeling even weaker.
Now, in fairness you can link your ChatGPT account to Siri and then get ChatGPT-powered responses to some queries, but this always feels a little clunky compared to just using ChatGPT itself.
Thankfully, there’s some hope here, for Apple to either massively improve Siri or give us alternatives.
For the former, we’re hearing that Siri could get a big, Gemini-powered AI upgrade in March or April. And for the latter, there are signs in an iOS 26.2 beta that Apple might one day let you change the default voice assistant – though at least initially this ability might be exclusive to Japan.
But right now, if I want to use AI I’d much rather be doing it on an Android phone, because the experience is almost always better.
So that’s what rubs me up the wrong way with Apple’s phones, despite them being some of the best phones around. But let me know in the comments below what annoys you about iPhones, unless nothing annoys you about them…
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