iPhones are fantastic, I just wish that Apple/Google/Microsoft wouldn't make it such a pain to sync between their various ecosystems. While I like the idea of sticking to one of them for simplicity, it's just impossible sometimes - yet they all seem determined to make life as difficult as possible for people who cross boundaries.
Case in point. I do all the scheduling/billing for my business with calendars. Part of the billing process requires a 3rd party app which exports all of the week's info from Google calendars in a format in which an app I wrote myself can use to create the invoices. However, Google calendars are ridiculously lame and lacking in basic features, especially when it comes to editing them. I much prefer to use Outlook for that. So there's an Outlook/Google sync tool. My phone's calendar syncs with Google, so I have a 3 way sync going on. Except the Outlook/Google sync tool is horribly problematic and has been for years. It frequently makes a mess of my calendars (e.g. I'll delete 5 appointments in Outlook but only 3 of them will sync to Google). I've been back and forth with Google support for months but they are absolutely useless and to be honest have no interest in fixing the problem. Why should they? It involves a competitor.
I also have my business email going through Google Apps so I can use the Gmail interface. Up until last year, you could sync Gmail to your iPhone seamlessly via Exchange. But then Google decided to stop supporting Google Sync (which uses Microsoft's Active Sync). You can only get Gmail pushed to your iPhone using Exchange if you're a paid Google Apps customer, otherwise you can only do it via manual fetch (meaning emails aren't instant). Luckily, I'm a paid Google Apps customer. Only ever since I upgraded to iOS8, the Exchange sync is very sketchy. Sometimes I won't get emails for hours and then a whole bunch come at once. It's totally unacceptable. When I contacted Google about this, once again they had no interest in the problem and told me that I shouldn't use the native iPhone mail app, I should use the Gmail app instead. Except the Gmail app sucks in many ways.
I have no doubt that all of this is because Gmail/Apple/Microsoft want to encourage you to use their ecosystem, and
only their ecosystem. If that's not an option for you, you have to put up with the various annoyances and problems which none of them are interested in fixing because they don't want to cooperate. I guess that in time, someone will come along and offer me exactly what I want without any of these BS problems, and I'll happily pay good money for it. Until then, it sucks. They all suck.