The Lingering Taste of an Old Blend
The first pour and the bloom that follows—that’s my favorite part of the coffee ritual. The smell of the grounds as hot water hits the bed evokes a sense of anticipation for that first perfect sip. I felt that exact same feeling as my digital life began to bloom anew in Notion. And yet, even with that excitement, there was a lingering, stale taste I couldn’t shake. It took me some time to place it. After falling in love with the boundless customization of Notion, I realized I craved that freedom everywhere. The place that hindered me the most? My phone.
I’ve been an iPhone user since 2008—you know, back when the App Store was just a baby and getting 3G felt like touching the future. For years, I was impressed by its seamlessness, the way the whole ecosystem “just worked.” But my digital life has changed. I use a Windows PC for work, my trusty MacBook is long gone, and my world is split between my iPads and my iPhone. While continuity features are nice, being able to copy on my phone and paste on my tablet only gets you so far. The taste of true customization from Notion was like having a specialty pour-over for the first time and then going back to the burnt, auto-drip coffee at the office. I had woken up. I couldn’t go back.
Trying to Customize the Auto-Drip
My first reaction was to furiously customize everything I could on my iPhone. I pulled every app off the home screen, started making aesthetic folders, and added widgets everywhere. I even experimented with Shortcuts to create custom app icons. The result was a home screen that was beautifully “me,” but functionally a disaster. Every tap was followed by a half-second of lag—a tiny moment of friction that grated on my newfound desire for intentionality. The experiment lasted all of one day.
While the new customization features in recent iOS updates were a welcome coat of paint, that’s all they were. The underlying machine was the same. The apps, the functions, the walls of the garden—they were all unchanged. I was craving more than just a new color; I was craving a whole new machine.
Choosing My Own Tools
If I couldn’t rebuild the machine, I could at least choose my own ingredients. I started with the obvious: email. Apple’s Notes had already been replaced by Notion, so Mail was next. After trying a few, I found Spark. Is it for everyone? Probably not. But for me, opening it felt like taking a deep breath. It intelligently sorted the noise from the newsletters, giving me a sense of calm control I never felt with the default app.
Next up was Podcasts. My main requirement was seamless, cross-platform listening between my work PC, iPad, and phone. After a couple of duds, I found Pocket Casts. The moment I started it, I knew. A robust feature set, perfect syncing—it just worked. That success made me briefly, dangerously ambitious. ‘Music!’ my brain screamed. But after a few minutes of honest consideration, that was a hard nope. My meticulously curated library, stretching all the way back to my college iTunes days, isn’t going anywhere. Some digital baggage is worth carrying.
Finally, the browser. I fell in love with Arc from The Browser Company, but the lack of a full-featured mobile app made it hard to move tasks from my work computer to my phone. With a heavy heart, I settled on Chrome. The seamlessness of Safari was hard to give up, but the ability to truly pick up where I left off on any device was a trade I had to make.
The Freedom of a New Recipe
I kept bracing for that “this is too hard” moment during the migration, but it never really came. Sure, there were flickers of muscle memory to unlearn—my thumb would still swipe for an app that wasn’t there, or my brain would momentarily forget what notifications were supposed to look like, but the replacements mostly just worked. The real change wasn’t in the apps themselves, but in my mindset.
This process has shown me the limitations of a system designed to be perfect for everyone, which means it can’t be perfect for me. It has steered me toward wanting to make the big switch: moving from iOS to Android. The thought of that change truly excites me. I’m feeling those old sparks of discovery as I research new phones and apps. I’m back in my pour-over renaissance, but instead of looking up V60s and Chemex brewers, I’m looking up intriguing new folding phones and a whole new world of productivity apps. It’s that feeling of unboxing a new piece of gear—the potential is what’s so exciting, the promise of a brew that’s entirely my own.
Written by Sky Jackson. New posts land in the RSS feed, and there's more about me over here.