On Day two with my android phone, I started bright and early, determined to move a bunch of accounts over and set up my apps. I got my email set up, Reddit logged in, and...after about two hours, I knew I had to find a better way if Android was going to be viable for my use cases.

While none of the issues I was having with Talk Back were show stoppers or blockers in any way, I use my phone eight hours a day, for absolutely every aspect of my life. So every tiny papercut, and small slowdown, quickly add up to high stress levels, hours of time wasted, and a general feeling of irritated exhaustion. Depending on your use case and level of experience, not all of these will apply to you. However, the issues I was having were:

• mushy and slow keyboard: the on-screen keyboard just didn't feel nice to type on
• slow scrolling: TalkBack takes a long time to scroll lists, making flicking quickly through long screens take more time than it should
• explore by touch crashing: every hour or so, explore by touch would just stop working entirely; I had to lock and unlock the phone to bring it back
• lagging response times: some of this was caused by the sounds, some by the android text to speech engine, and some by the haptics. I think TalkBack itself is also slower than VoiceOver, but the previous things made it feel even worse than it really was.
• unintuitive gestures: as an Apple user for life, TalkBack's gestures just never felt intuitive to me
• difficulty reading notifications: sometimes tapping notifications didn't open the associated app. Sometimes notifications didn't read when they came in. I couldn't find any pattern to these issues, though.

If I was going to learn to love Android, I knew I had to find bandages to these papercuts, each small in and of themselves, but quickly adding up to an unsatisfying experience. One of the things most frequently touted as a strength of Android is it's complete customizability. It was time for me to see if that was really true.

The first step? A third party screen reader. On Windows, I don't just use Narrator and call it a day. Instead, I use NVDA, a third party screen reader developed by, and for, blind people. As I researched my options on Android, there appeared to be two major contenders, both developed in China. The first is Prudence Screen reader, and the second is Jieshuo. Prudence is free, and available in the Google Play store. However, as I read more about it, it didn't seem to be as featureful or configurable as Jieshuo. The price of Jieshuo is also reasonable, though the licensing is not automated, and requires manually paying via paypal and copying a user ID into the memo field. Never the less, I decided Jieshuo is where I would start.

That meant it was time for me to learn about sideloading apps. This was nowhere near as terrible an adventure as I thought it would be; I had visions of connecting my phone to the computer via USB, somehow rooting the device, and so-on. Instead, all I had to do was download the APK file on the device with Chrome, and click allow on a couple of prompts. Sideloading on Android is actually easier than installing a third party unsigned app on mac OS. Wonderful for tinkerers like me, though I'm sure there are scarry security implications here for average users.

Unfortunately, after installing and enabling Jieshuo, it became pretty clear that Google really, really wished I wasn't doing this. I had to click allow on multiple device prompts, often repeatedly. You'd think once I'd clicked on "allow full device control" that would be enough. But nope. Some accessibility permissions didn't present a prompt at all, and I had to go digging through the settings to find them and turn them on so Jieshuo would work. Then I had to enable notifications, then allow reading notifications, then enable call control, then enable files access, and microphone access, and camera access, and location access, and on and on it went. Even after enabling everything, I still get constant notifications that Jieshuo is displaying over other apps, with no obvious way to turn them off. As well, overnight between days two and three, something updated on my phone, and Android turned off "full control" for Jieshuo again, breaking the entire screen reader. I had to load TalkBack and fight to get it turned back on a second time.

Once I did get it installed and working, I found the default settings inexplicable. If you're considering doing this, the biggest and most important thing you can do is go through every single setting. At the least, you want your gesture scheme to be the second granularity scheme, and then you need to go and customize all of the available granularities, both in apps and web browsing. Eventually, though, you can get to a point where swiping left and right does what you expect, and you can swipe up and down to change what swiping left and right navigates between. This is actually easier than IOS; no tricky two-finger rotation gesture. Also, you can configure Jieshuo to remember your granularity setting per window, and it won't randomly change on you. This is the first time where I felt like something on my Android was much faster and easier than on IOS.

Jieshuo also fixes my problems with notifications. Swipe down with four fingers always works to pull open the notification center, and double tapping on notifications always does what I expect. Also, using two different speech engines for notifications is the second time where I felt happier on Android than IOS. Notifications no longer interrupt what I'm doing; instead, they just read out with my secondary voice, and I can listen to them in the background while I continue working. This is absolutely glorious, and I wish IOS would adopt this feature.

Another useful tip: "read all" or "read from focus" are called "automatic browsing" in Jieshuo. I wasn't expecting that, and it took me a while to find out how to read the entire screen. But once I did, I appreciated how I could configure automatic browsing settings, and actually have it skip some types of controls in this mode.

Lastly, Jieshuo fixed almost all of my problems with speed. The keyboard feels much snappier, explore by touch no longer has issues, and swipes and touches respond quickly. My only remaining issue is that it still takes too long to scroll down in long lists. However, installing Jieshuo was the first time I felt like using Android could be just as productive as using IOS. But I wouldn't expect a non-techy blind person to be able to complete the tricky install process, navigate through payment and licensing, and fix it when Google disables a permission the app depends on. There's probably a decent business here for someone, selling preconfigured Android phones.

Life isn't perfect, though. For some reason, voice typing isn't working. Also, when I press and hold the lock button, Gemini now opens, but isn't listening for instructions by default. Instead I have to tap and type. I guess I know what I'm doing for at least part of Day 4. I'm also hoping to find a launcher that doesn't force google and google voice search on me at the bottom of every screen, and gives me quicker access to my list of all apps. I also want to find something that's equal to spotlight; I'm really missing a quick way to just search my apps and stuff stored locally on my phone, the way I can on IOS. But once I find these things, my Android experience will be equal or better than my out of the box IOS one. But it took me over two full, 12 hour days of work, plus paying for a screen reader, to get here.