I have used many different mobile phone carriers in my life as a gadget geek. I started out with AT&T, played around with Sprint, Cingular, Nextel, and T-Mobile for a while, before finally landing on Verizon. At the time I switched, most of my friends and family were on Verizon, and back then, it actually mattered which carrier you used (e.g. free talk/text to other Verizon customers). While I have never had any real issues with their service, it has always been their price that has been my main complaint.
Fast forward to today, and I have taken the plunge to switch to Google Fi, primarily because of the value of the service. One of the biggest factors that made the switch even possible is that my wife has been having a lot of issues with her iPhone lately, and she finally agreed to switch back to an Android phone (we both had the original Droid phones, way back when). Since we have lately been trying to keep our costs down, any time we can switch to a better value service without sacrificing quality, I am all in.
We also decided to go with lower cost phones in the changeover. I chose the Moto g7, and Mindy has the Nexus 3a. Coming from a Note 8 and an iPhone 7, respectively, we did anticipate some performance and feature loss. In my case, the only real feature loss, which I likely won’t miss, is the lack of NFC. While it was handy being able to swipe my Samsung Pay app at the grocery store, we are trying to avoid the use of credit cards anyway, so it will probably end up being an improvement.
Aside from a shipping delay in getting Mindy’s phone from Google, we haven’t had any issues with the service. While I don’t anticipate any, it is rather an adjustment for Mindy to switch back to Android after so long on the dark side. I don’t think either of us have any apps we can’t run, though Mindy is going to have to deal with only having half the space she is used to on her non-expandable Nexus.
One of the Google Fi features I am looking forward to is the international use allowed on the unlimited plan. I have a trip to India coming up, and I have never used my Verizon smartphones internationally before. Instead, I had an unlocked feature phone I used a UK SIM card in. Traveling with my smart phone will be a definite improvement.