I have been using Android for years apart from iOS. And although there are more and more similarities between them, they are still very different. Curiously, the big differences now are the small ones, since it is in the most minute details where the key is to choose one or the other and the volume management on devices with one or another operating system, they are the ones that I feel the most.
When I spend a while using Android and go back to my iPhone, I always have the feeling of lose a utility that has the Google operating system. Something I wish Apple would implement on iOS, but they haven’t. It is not that it is a drama, and in fact it is a first-world problem as many would say, but in the end it is still a differential element that, although it does not prevent the purchase of an iPhone (far from it), makes iOS look something below in this regard.
Why is there no quick access to volume management in iOS?
If you don’t quite see where I’m going, you might think I’m crazy. That on the iPhone there are already up to three ways to manage the volume. And it is true. On the one hand we have the possibility of, with the side buttons, raising or lowering it. Also from the control center and, of course, from the settings.
However, what I am referring to is the possibility of differentiate the multimedia volume from that of calls and notifications. That can be done in the settings, yes, but it is not the fastest. On Android, by simply pressing the buttons we can find the sound bar with quick options to raise and lower the volume of the content we want.
What’s more, with Android 14 it improved by further differentiating the different types of volume, since they no longer only differentiate multimedia (the content we are watching, such as videos) from notifications and calls, but the latter two also They are now differentiated.
In iOS, as I said, we can make the buttons control one volume or the other, but not both. For that you have to open the settings or the control center. And I insist that in the end it is a detail that for many is not important, but in my case it is something that I miss a lot when I return to the iPhone.
However, to counter I must say that iOS also has a unique feature that Android does not. It is basically about reducing the sound of notifications and calls when, through Face ID, the iPhone detects that we are in front of the screen. It does it automatically and saves us a lot of scares when a notification suddenly rings at full volume and we have the iPhone stuck to our face