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Airpods goes with the iPhone and Galaxy Bads go with a Samsung device (or any other Android device), or at least that's what logic says. But what happens when the tech-savvy Romeo and Juliet meet and you own pair of Airpods with the Galaxy S20? Or Galaxy Buds with iPhone 12? Well, you can still listen to your favorite music and podcasts, but there is a but.
So what AirPods users lose when they do not own an iPhone
If you happen to have a pair of Airpods and you're not Apple's ‘closed garden' people, whether it's iPhone, Mac or even Apple's smartwatch – you miss quite a few features, and it sucks. One of Apple's most successful features allows ultra-fast connection of AirPods to its devices via the H1 or W1 chips (depending on the model) – and guess what? It is not available on Android devices.
This feature becomes very relevant in Apple's ecosystem, because it allows you to easily and quickly skip between the various Apple devices you have without having to get involved in annoying submenus. If you want to make the transition between an Android smartphone and a PC, it will be significantly cumbersome and will require you to disconnect the headphones from the smartphone and only then connect manually via the PC. Headache.
In addition, you miss the ability to perform firmware updates to your headphones. These are OTA updates that can fix bugs in your headphones or even add new capabilities to them – like improving their latest location detection capability. And speaking of identifying the latest location of the AirPods, today you can get a very broad indication of their latest location using the Find My network, but it is about to be upgraded in iOS 15 so that their location displayed in the app will be more accurate by receiving an indication from other iPhones – similar to Apple Did with the airtags, its tracking tags.
In addition they can be made to beep if one of them has fallen or disappeared. Unlike other features that simply do not exist – you can access this feature, but you can only access it through a browser. Not optimal, but possible.
And there are a few other features that you will be missing: for example an indication of the battery status of the Airpods and Case, which appears every time you open it next to the iPhone, but this thing will not really work for you on Android devices; Spatial Audio – the “spatial audio” feature of Apple headphones, which allows you to listen to music in 360 degrees – is also not available for Android users. You will also lack the ability to customize the actions that your touch of headphones will do; The ability to change the built-in EQ of the headphones; And the ability to turn to a voice assistant with the help of AirPods.
Beyond that, the basic features like active noise cancellation and the gestures of the Airpods will continue to operate as usual.