Golly, my IMEI is blocked

[Rod]

Back in 2020 during the border closures and lockdowns for COVID-19 the Indonesian Immigration Dept with not much else to do decided to introduce a regulation that required any visitor to register their personal cell phone on arrival. The idea was they would pay a duty on that device on arrival and then be free to use a local SIM card also available at the airport on arrival.
As it happened I had a new iPhone SE 2 but with all of the pandemic pandemonium at the time registering my iPhone was the furthest thing from my mind. Indeed it was never mentioned during the incredibly complex, time consuming process of verifying our COVID status on top of the usual customs regulations and inspections.
I popped in my local SIM the next day, visited the local Telkomsel office reactivated my number and topped up my credit. No mention of registration.
Then 4 days ago my iPhone said "No Service". I called into the local Telkomsel office to be told my IMEI had been "blocked" by customs/immigration. I travelled to Denpasar the next day where a very friendly, frustrated official told me that he agreed my IMEI should not have been blocked because I fell into the "cooling off" period but the software at his disposal would not allow him to unblock it because we arrived (this current stay) in May 2022 and he could only enter travel pass details no older than 3 days.
His solution; leave the country, come back again and return to that office within 3 days with a valid travel pass and passport confirmation and register the device. Then he could unblock it. There would be no charge.

So, I now have a Samsung Galaxy A03s with my local SIM and an iPhone which is essentially redundant except for its interactions with my Apple Watch and Apple 2FA. It continues to function on WiFi for all functions locked to that iPhone like Authenticator apps, banking apps Government services in Australia and so on but for day to day use, phone calls, SMS, WhatsApp, Google Maps, Translator, Email etc the Android is my go to and the phone I carry.

I will never complain about the complexity of settings on an iPhone if indeed I ever have. The Galaxy has so many menus, preferences and settings it's unbelievable. Some settings effect other settings and every function seems to have at least 10 options some greyed out because they have been overridden by other settings it's a nightmare. It has taken me 3 days of tinkering to setup notifications the way I want them.
It's all sort of working now but give me an iPhone any day, I could have achieved the same results in an afternoon.

There are a few upsides though: The battery life is amazing, I charged it 2 nights ago at it's still at 51%. It is much bigger than my iPhone SE and although considerably heavier the big screen is amazing, the same as my wife's iPhone 13 Max. We already had this phone as a standby phone for the business but it seldom got used so its cost me nothing to swap, originally only cost AU $180.00 so I cant complain.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Yeah, I've never used an Android phone short of helping a couple people work out some settings, but if I did switch (and if Apple starts getting too aggressive with advertising as reports suggest. I just MIGHT!), the only way I'd go is something with vanilla Android, like a Pixel. I've just read too much of 3rd parties like Samsung littering the UI with extras. It reminds me of my PC days. I always built my own PCs and naturally had "vanilla" Windows. I'd occasionally get recruited to help people wiht Dells, Compaqs, and even (shudder) Packard Bell, and wow... what a nightmare those always were.

 

[Rod]

Yes, I can relate. This is a stock standard Samsung Galaxy and as you can imagine the first thing I did was quarantine all of the native Samsung apps. Then replaced them with my own choices of browser, calendar, contacts, messages, email client etc.
For the first time I'm able to use Vivaldi mobile browser which I've synced with my macOS version. I think I like it even more than Brave.