Ten days ago, I was able to get my hands on an unlocked Google Pixel 3a, Google’s newest foray into smartphones, and also their newest budget version of their Pixel 3 and 3XL. Needless to say, I was impressed. At only $400 (half the price of the regular Pixel 3), I had the same great camera as the Pixel 3, a great-feeling plastic two-tone case design, fast fingerprint reader, vibrant OLED screen (although not edge-to-edge) and decent processor that I can’t tell is inferior to the Pixel 3.

By all accounts, this is a great phone. And if you’re an Android person, this is a wonderful deal.

But for me, a long time iOS user, there’s only a couple of things that keep me from switching to this phone and Android overall - iMessage, Overcast, and Things.

iMessage envy is very real. I didn’t really believe this would be the case, but just hours into my transition, iMessage envy set in. The first reason was, primarily, the painful switch. If I wanted to get any text messages at all on my Pixel 3a I would have to sign out of iMessage on all my devices (in this case: an iPhone, iPad Pro, and Mac). I would then have to De-register iMessage at Apple’s website some reason and then restart my Android phone a couple of times to get messages to come through. One more hurdle: people that had existing conversations with me on blue bubbles would have to delete that conversation and start a new one with my green bubble. It’s maddening. I love the benefits of iMessage, but it must be a nightmare for regular tech reviewers who switch SIM cards very often.

Since my family and most of my friends and coworkers are iPhone (and therefore iMessage) users, things didn’t sync very well. Movies and GIF’s were low-quality or just didn’t come in at all. And then I got the green bubble texts: “Why are you not a blue bubble?!?”

So iMessage envy was definitely real.

Things is THE task manager not on Android. Cultured Code does an incredible job with Things, my go-to task manager on iOS and the Mac. It’s superb, and it basically keeps my life in order. But it’s not on Android.

Sure, there are lots of good task managers on Android. Asana is cross-platform and had great collaboration features. Todoist is also very good and hard been around a long time. Google Keep is even pretty good, and if you’re 100% into the Google system, it’s a fair alternative.

But it’s not Things. Just thinking about moving my entire task management system over gives me cold sweats. Yes, I am old and inflexible.

Overcast is the cherry on top. So admittedly the only other podcast player I’ve really ever used is Pocketcasts, an excellent podcast discovery and player app that’s also cross-platform. I love the Pocketcasts user interface. The podcast list screen and the Now Playing screen are my favorite differences between it and Overcast.

The thing that stops me from it being my replacement for Overcast is when you actually go to play a podcast. Marco Arment, the developer, has probably spent an inordinate amount of time perfecting his podcast playing engine. The Trim Silence and Voice Boost features are both found in Pocketcasts as well, but they’re just not that good. It doesn't take an audio engineer to realize the difference either. Put both side-by-side and Overcast wins every time.

Overcast also launched an incredible new feature for sharing 1-minute snippets to social networks that’s just fantastic. Overcast is just two to three steps ahead of everyone else now, and it shows.

In an ideal smartphone universe, I would be able to find apps to replace these on iOS in a heartbeat and be able to go about my business. But it just seems to me that Android is equal in hardware (or exceeds Apple’s in some cases) but they are only about 95% of the way with certain applications. Unfortunately for me and many others, they are apps that I use multiple times a day, every day.

A classic from Seth Godin that I had forgotten about:

I’m sitting on a black couch in the lobby of a nice theater. The couch is cracked and peeling, with seven strips of black gaffer’s tape holding it together. And you don’t have to be an interior geologist to see that it has developed this patina over time, bit by bit.

The question is: Who was the first person who decided to fix the couch with tape?

The third or fifth person did a natural thing–here’s a ratty couch, let’s keep it the best we can.

But the first taper?

The first taper decided that it was okay for this theater to have a taped couch. The first taper didn’t make the effort to alert the authorities, to insist on getting the couch repaired properly.

The first taper decided, “this is good enough for now.”

This is how we find ourselves on the road to decay.

Instagram is more popular than ever, especially with kids. This video shows you how to enable a Private Account on Instagram (it's more buried than you would think) which is the first step to preserving the experience and protecting your child.

From Matt Baker at Useful Charts: This chart shows how the letters used to write English (and many other languages) evolved from Proto-Sinaitic, through Phoenician, early Greek and early Latin, to their present forms. You can see how some letters were dropped and others ended up evolving into more than one letter.

For obvious reasons, this hits my Venn Diagram of my love for Biblical languages (Hebrew & Greek) and my love for typography and design. This one may find its way onto my office wall as a print.

I’ve always been a multiple-browser kind of person. I used to prefer the aesthetic of Google Chrome and its angled tabs and great looking favicons in the browser. I used Firefox for website debugging and testing, but most of the time it supported nearly every standard out there.

But I was never able to really stick with Safari. Safari has always been capable, but I just didn’t prefer the design. Until Safari Technology Preview.

Safari Technology Preview is a long name for the beta version of Safari that I’ve been using exclusively on my new MacBook Pro ever since I got it in late July. I’ve always been at the least a two-browser guy, usually switching between Google Chrome and Safari, and 75% of my time would be in Chrome.

Not anymore. Safari (specifically Safari Technology Preview) has been outstanding for me. The most annoying thing for me has been resolved as well - favicons in tabs. That’s now a setting that you can toggle on and off and it also looks great on pinned tabs as well. I know it seems like a small thing to most people, but I even had John Gruber on Twitter respond to me talking about them - this was a very important visual thing in the browser to a lot of people.

Safari is fast. Granted, you can only get it on a Mac, but Safari consistently beats out Chrome, Opera, and Firefox in HTML load speed tests. There are also great privacy features as well - one thing as a Chrome user that you always need to assume is that Google is tracking, logging and even predicting your every keystroke online. Now I don’t visit any sites that I shouldn’t, so I’m not afraid of anyone tracking me - I just don’t want it. I know that Google is tracking me in other ways, but the problem is not that Google is tracking me to make my experience better, but that they’re tracking me to sell my data to the highest bidder. And when you give Google an inch, they’ll take a mile.

If it’s been a while since you took a look at Safari, I’d invite you to go back and try it. It’s already on your Mac, and if you want bleeding-edge versions of it, you can download Safari Technology Preview, now available through software update on macOS Mojave.