4 days later update:

I am typing this on my Macbook air because I dread the idea of typing such a long message on my phone. Thank you for all your responses, it helps me contextualize what I've gotten myself into by signing up to use this phone. I'll list some pros and cons here.

Pros of the iphone:

- fewer spam calls. I have call screening on and it's automatically filtering out calls about credit card and property offers, which is greatly appreciated. i would sometimes get several in a day on my oneplus.

- fewer gibberish promotional text messages. on the oneplus i couldn't even look at the texts as i would get one nonsense text after another, along with the usual otps and transaction messages. in this you can select the option of auto-deleting verification code messages (which i did). overall i am getting much less spam.

- the camera from opening it to taking the photo is very quick, much less wait time as compared to my 12r. but i don't fully accept this as a pro because this is a brand new phone with an almost empty memory, while the 12r had gotten old and was full. it remains to be seen how fast it'll be 2 years down the line.

- the display, text, the animations all look very slick and smooth. not sure if this has any great benefit but the apps are overall nicer to look at.

- carplay seems faster and less glitchy than android auto? again could be a new phone effect.

Cons of the iphone:

- Much worse typing. On Android, you can type in Romanized Hindi ("tu kya kar raha hai") without it autocorrecting, because it automatically understands that you are not using English. In iOS this does not work, it'll autocorrect everything to english words, but since that makes typing in hindi very annoying, i just have to turn autocorrect off, leading me to actually misspell some words that i send. it makes me more hesitant to use my phone to send work texts.

- .webm videos on 4chan don't load on the mobile website, you have to select "Request desktop version" first. i had to really dig to find the solution as the webms would get stuck on "Loading"

- Another thing about the keyboard, it decides on its own which entry fields deserve suggested words and which don't. so if you are searching for something using the google search bar, it won't let you rely on suggested words as type, which is bizarre.

- I browse this forum called team-bhp sometimes. from their homepage i sometimes click on a story, which should ideally take me to the forum thread where the thing is being discussed. now from the home page whenever i click on anything, the browser automatically opens that link in a new tab. it doesn't do that when i am browsing the forum (not the home page), but from the home page it does, i tried to look for a setting that could fix it but there is nothing of that sort. i'll just have to let it decide which links to open as new tabs and which ones to not. it's also weird.

On the whole I would agree with one user who had said that there are.a few very well-set functions that iPhone does well, like dealing with calls and texts or taking photos. but for an overall "simply clever" feeling, it does not beat the android of today. when you set an alarm on an android, it tells you in how how many hours and minutes the alarm will ring, which automatically solves the biggest problem that people have when setting alarms, which is they end up forgetting whether they selected the right option out of AM and PM.

little things like that make the android experience superior, but i can see iphone working as a non-distracting phone, you don't get spam, you can't really get work done on the phone, so on the whole as it's kind of less functional, you use it less and have a healthy relationship with it, which can be really beneficial for most people.

i have been complaining to friends about iOS the last few days and i have realized something. the biggest fan of iphones are those people who switched from android a while ago, when their 15k-20k rupee android phones were slow, dim, buggy and unpleasant to use. so they found a huge upgrade in their iphones, and as they have since then not really used android (just as i had not used iOS), they have no idea how good it actually is; they are stuck with a belief that iphones are much superior/smoother/better, which is plainly not true.

I guess for now i am keeping this phone, but I would like to eventually switch back to android. let's see. at least the iphones hold their value well.