The best advice I can give is: don’t immediately abandon the stock apps. I see tons of people who get an iPhone, immediately install Chrome and Gmail and all I can think is, what’s the point?

AdGuard or a similar adblocker for Safari will give you the results you got from Firefox. Safari on iOS also supports full desktop extensions if the developer chooses to make them available. So things like 1Password work great on it.

Same with the Mail app, Calendars, etc. Try setting up your accounts and services in the stock apps and see if you like them. Besides that, there isn’t much to tweak, that’s kind of the point.

If you want app recommendations, it depends on what services you use. Some of my favourite apps are:

Weather - CARROT Mastodon - Ivory Lemmy - Bean or Voyager Package Tracking - Parcel RSS - Reeder Password Manager - 1Password Remote Management - Remotix Home Server Management (Sonarr/Radarr/SabNZBd) - LunaSea

One more tip: this probably applies to Android as well, I’m not sure as I haven’t used it extensively. But iOS has very good, deep, system-wide autofill.

Make sure you have a contact card in your contacts marked as you (“My Card” at the top of your contacts list) and populate it with all the phone numbers, emails, and addresses you can think of. Tag them all properly (work, home, secondary, etc) and even add usernames and whatnot, go all out.

iOS will use those details to autofill signup flows in many apps and services, as well as autocompleting stuff like “my address is” and “my phone number is”. Saves a lot of time.

It also has deep password manager autofill integration. So you can enable your favourite 3rd party password manager as the system autofill and you can call it up even in apps to create new logins or retrieve saved ones.

One piece of advise I can give; do not try to replicate your android experience on iOS. More than likely it will leave you frustrated. Make the switch with an open mind to a new way of doing things and you will have a much better time.

To get that ad-free YouTube experience, I use Vinegar safari extension and have pinned the YouTube site to my home screen rather than using any apps.

I also use Banish to remove all those annoying "Open in our app" pop-ups in Safari.

Lastly, I use AdGuard to block ads on the phone locally and have also set up my own Wireguard VPN server at home with PiHole so that I'm always protected ad-wise when I'm out and about over 5G and on any public Wifi (I used to use my own Wireguard VPN with my old Pixels too).

Absolute bliss.

You'll want to spend some time learning how notifications work as they're quite different.

Also - seriously consider buying an Apple Watch - doesn't have to be the most expensive model. iPhone and Apple Watch are good products on their own, but combined they are amazing.

Install adguard, i rarely see ads anywhere. I also like dark reader to make websites dark by default

Get Wipr for ad blocking on Safari

Always remember that you can add any website as app to the Homescreen using the share menu in Safari while being on the website. PWAs (webApps) will look like installed apps if opened from Homescreen. (No browser UI)

If you're looking for a very similar experience to YouTube re-Vance’d you should try YouTubeRebornPlus. It's a modification to the official YouTube app with all the features one would expect, No Ads, Skipping Sponsor Spots, proper PIP support. Similarly to side loading APKs on Android you can side load IPAs on iOS. It's not as simple, but it's not difficult either.

Anyway, here is a link to the GitHub for the IPA. https://github.com/arichorn/YouTubeRebornPlus/releases/tag/v18.29.1-4.2.0

As far as something like YouTube Revanced: the App Store rules make it harder, but you can still do it! Check out an app called Yattee, which is fairly barebones—until you connect it up to a third-party YouTube front end for wonderful effect. https://www.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_up_and_use_yattee_to_watch_youtube/

You can use NextDNS to block ads at DNS level

Yeah, I’m trying to de-Google my life while not going all out, if that makes sense. Thanks for the suggestions. I gotta say I never realized just how much I used my Gmail address as the login. I’m never tying my logins/passwords to a behemoth again.

In addition to the adblockers, you can install Hush to get rid of the cookie notices.

If you’re willing to tinker a little, check out AltStore. It’s a way to install apps Apple doesn’t want on the App Store (so things similar to re-Vance’d, torrent downloaders or emulators).

If you want something similar to Vance’s, you can sideload uYouPlus, you don’t need to jailbreak, but you need to use something like AltStore for that

Just install whatever apps you want to use. Maybe get an AdBlock for safari.

It doesn't require much tweaking to work properly.

I’ll give it a go, thanks for the suggestion

If you have used YouTube ReVanced on Android, I think you can figure out how to use https://github.com/Balackburn/YTLitePlus using SideStore

Try AhaDNS Blitz as a dns adblocker. It installs as a vpn profile so it works anywhere you go.

iPhones have Adblock, but it is not obvious how to install it.

Some random tips:

Poke around the Accessibility settings. There’s lots of customization options hidden in there.

Learn the Shortcuts app. You can use it to create macros and save them on the Home Screen, in the share sheet, or as a voice command.

Customize the share sheet. Options are limited but there are some useful commands in there that are hidden by default. You may need to repeat customization with each files type (images get a different sheet from text, etc).

Set your AirDrop to “contacts only” or else you’ll get spam pushed to you when in public.

If you turn off wifi from the control centre it only disconnects. To turn off the radio completely you need to do it from Settings or switch to airplane mode.

You probably don’t need a calculator app, but if you do: pCalc.

Focus modes aren’t limited to “do not disturb”. You can have several with different home screens and different communication restrictions.

Apps that don’t have filesystem privileges can only access their own subfolder inside the “On My Phone” folder, so you sometimes need to move stuff into there manually. This is rare, but one common example is Minecraft worlds/texture packs.

If you dismissed the prompt to install Files, you can get it on the app store. Do it. Then install all the other cloud storage apps you use (Dropbox, etc), log in, then delete them from the Home Screen only and forget they exist. They’ll all be accessible in Files.

You can do a similar thing with the TV app, but personally I prefer separate apps on that front.