It’s already been nine years since Apple first launched the iPhone. That’s crazy, right? It feels like it’s been ages, and yet we haven’t even reached a decade yet. It doesn’t help for those who have a love affair with the mobile industry that there have been a metric ton of other phones and tablets, including a healthy amount from Apple, to clutter the whole thing up. But still, it hasn’t really been that long since Apple changed the smartphone industry in a major way.

I’ll be honest: I don’t remember which phone I was using back then, back when Apple first launched the iPhone under AT&T’s banner. A friend of mine picked it up at launch, though, and I got to play with it for awhile. It would’ve been impossible back then not to admit that it was an impressive handset, especially since capacitive touchscreens were far from standard back then, but in the end the phone just didn’t do it for me.

I didn’t even make an iPhone my daily driver until the iPhone 3GS, and, even then, that didn’t last long. Back in those days I was fully engrossed in the world of Android, and I was having so much fun customizing handsets, rooting and modifying everything I could, that I couldn’t be bothered switching to something that took all of those things away.

Of course, jailbreaking eventually took off and customizing iPhone OS (eventually iOS) with it, so I tried it out. But even then, I was a fan of Google’s services and their built-in nature thanks to Android.

A lot has changed since then. Mostly that I’ve stopped jailbreaking and/or rooting, or really going out of my way to change anything, and I’ve settled on just using one phone more often than not. I’ve found that I don’t need a laundry list of features, because I probably won’t use many of them after the first week.

And yet, I still want companies to launch phones with a ridiculous number of features. Because innovation!

I was talking with a friend of mine recently who carries an Android phone for work. His daily driver is an iPhone, so, basically, he’s got the best of both worlds. But he was talking to me recently about how he is thinking about switching to Android completely, that he’s considering waiting to see what Motorola launches later this year to make his decision.

And so I asked him the most obvious question I could possibly ask: “Why?” What about Android had his attention so much that he wants to use it full-time, rather than just have access to it through his work phone, but have the “safety net” of his iPhone (he’s used the iPhone since 2007, with very rare exceptions since then) right there just in case.

Turns out it’s not a feature, or a hardware specification, or even a manufacturer that he likes. In fact, it’s not even really about Android. It’s more about the fact that he’s not really seeing anything exciting about the iPhone he’s using anymore. He used to use Apple Pay quite a bit, but he’s got that covered with Android Pay. He doesn’t use 3D Touch and he doesn’t take any Live Photos. He doesn’t use AirDrop, or Handoff, or any other feature that Apple has launched to offer a bridge between iOS and OS X.

Basically, he’s just got a phone that does some things, and those things he could find on other platforms and from different manufacturers. It’s hard to argue that if you’ve been using one device family for that long it would be hard not to get bored with it. And while Apple has indeed made plenty of changes, I can understand where he’s coming from.

It certainly got me thinking about all of you, though, and if you’ve ever made the same switch. If you’ve ditched iOS for Android, when did you make the switch, what device did you switch to, and why? And has Android kept you away from iOS ever since?