But that's not actually it. People who go from iPhone to Android find Android difficult to use. People who go from Android to iPhone find iOS difficult to use.

* The Clock app doesn't let you set a snooze length? Seriously?!

* Not having a notification LED or some other indicator really sucks. I might set my phone on the counter while I'm doing other things, and with Android, it was nice to be able to look up and see if I've gotten something without walking up to the phone and checking. (I know Apple will likely never implement this because it's a great pitch for their watch.)

* Face ID is slow and inconsistent compared to a fingerprint reader (especially during COVID), and I'm bummed that Apple ditched the latter. It works well about 80% of the time, and the other 20% I'm that crazy-looking person that's making faces at his phone trying to get it to unlock.

* If you had any sort of media app open previously and then connect some Bluetooth headphones, the media controls for that app open up and take up most of the lock screen, and there is no way to swipe them away; you have to kill the app to get them to disappear.

* I miss the inline notification controls. On Android, apps can give their notifications extra buttons, so you can do things like delete an email right from the notifications bar without having to open the app.

* My friend and I regularly send each other voice memos. First of all, the built-in voice memo feature in iMessage is atrocious (no seek and you have to restart from the beginning if you leave the screen), so we use the Voice Memos app to send each other audio files. Except, when you play an audio file inline through either iMessage or Mail, the screen will still turn off and lock, which pauses the file. You have to save it to Files, then open it via the Files app to ensure that it continues playing in the background. How are you supposed to know this?!

* If your iCloud storage is close to full, Apple will continually notify you every few days via your phone and email, and there is no way to disable these notifications.

* Needing a special charger sucks. Everything else I own is either USB-C or microUSB at this point, but my iPhone needs its own charging cable that nothing else uses.

* All of the special treatment that only Apple's apps get is frustrating. For instance, why does only Apple's Clock app get a special timer UX on the lock screen, and everyone else's has to use a notification? Why does only Safari support ad blockers? And why is the camera button on the lock screen limited to the built-in Camera app? They really push their own apps with these artificial benefits, which detracts from the plethora of apps in the App Store.

* Syncing files (in both directions) without iCloud is a pain, and I'm not going to pay for an iCloud subscription. There are lots of different ways to achieve this, but none of them are as easy as simply using SyncThing on Android.

Even though Android is lacking in certain areas, I find the UX to be a lot more consistent than that of iOS, and I would take the consistency and flexibility of Android over all of Apple's corner cases and attempts to predict how I will use my device. But again, that's my personal preference, and to each their own.

(Sorry, this turned out to be much longer than I expected. I guess I'm more frustrated by iOS than I realized!)

Have an iPhone for work and it's terrible. I honestly don't know why they're so popular. The UI/UX is atrocious.

1. Google Maps, and navigation. If you're actually driving places, google maps is an amazing godsend. If you're taking mass transit, it blows the doors off what's on the iPhone. Ever get on a bus with your iphone, and have it vibrate in your pants when the next bus stop is the one you need to take? Google navigate shows you your mass transit trip in a schematic view that shows you where all the stops are in list form, and animates the little bullet point in the list as you move between stops. It's breathtaking. It'll be hard to beat Google Maps on an iphone, and I missed this sorely. For me the maps are so superior that during the brief time that I used iPhone, I used it as a wireless hotspot and kept my old android phone around just for the maps and navigation. I'm new to my city (San Francisco) and my whole experience of moving here was greatly enriched by the awesomeness of Google Maps. Many people probably already know where they're going or are already familiar with their mass transit options, so using a second class citizen for navigation (such as the iPhone) is probably fine for them.

2. Google Mail. Google's gmail app UI is awesome. I didn't know how much I loved it until I had to use iOS for a while. Bundling things by conversation is great. And I often receive 20-30 emails that are all divided into a total of about 3 conversations. Google lets me read and archive or delete those in 4 clicks (3 checkboxes for the 3 conversations, then one click of Archive or Delete). The iOS mail app makes me do that in around 60-80 clicks: either a swipe on the index page followed by a delete, or else a click on each email, followed by a delete.

3. Notification bar. I can always look at the top bar of my droid and know what, if anything, needs my attention. Or at the very least, why my phone made a noise in the last few minutes. It was hard for me to see at a glance what things just caused my phone to beep. If I received a meeting reminder, and a text, and something else, it was always clear on my droid which things need my attention, because of the status bar. There wasn't something like this on the iPhone. A few days ago they implemented a status bar on the iPhone, but it still feels like a cheap immitation of what Android does, in much the same way that the author here talks about how Android is a cheap clone of iOS.

But to be clear, the "feel" of the iPhone is superior in pretty much every way. But to me, it's not all about feel.

To honest, I think the goodness of their UI is often overstated.

Me, I've only ever used iPhones. My mom has an Android device. It took her three or four tries to get through to me the fact that many apps on her phone, including some she actually uses and therefore can't uninstall, will start themselves up in the background and cheerfully chug along burning up battery and cellular data and system resource, making the phone run hot and lag when doing anything - and that, while she can (and has to) manually kill these apps in order for her phone to work well, before long they'll just fire themselves right back up and make the phone mostly useless again.

It took her three or four tries at explaining this behavior because I found it totally bewildering. As I said, I've only had iPhones, and while they are hardly without flaws, the idea of a phone that just does what it damn well pleases is entirely outside my experience. It's true that some iOS apps do run in the background, but if they want to do anything that might impinge on system resource or privacy, they have to ask me if that's okay, and if I say it's not, the OS makes sure they don't. If they want to use cellular data, they can, but I have the option of denying them that permission, and if I do so, the OS makes sure they abide by that restriction. As far as I've been able to determine, Android can't provide the same capabilities to its user, and can only even approach them if you root it and install a custom build of the OS and then install some additional apps to expose a UI for those API calls. And even then, it's apparently somewhat dicey.

As it happens, I have a spare iPhone SE in my closet. I won't for much longer, though; when I go home to visit this coming spring, I'm going to be bringing it along, and it's going to go from being my spare phone to being Mom's new phone. I mean, I wouldn't put up with the kind of nonsense she's been telling me about, and I do this stuff for a living! I see no conceivable reason why anyone else should have to, either. It's just absolutely insane to me.

I predominately use my phone for that (calls, texts, email, internet) and apps are only a minor benefit (I use them infrequently).

At some time in the next 2 or 3 years I will change to an Android handset - the OS is improving no end and once the phone functionality is better it will be a no brainer.

EDIT: just to reiterate (for the downvoter...) I think the iPhone is a better phone functionality. I know others prefer Android - it's a personal thing.

Buh bye Apple.

So I got a oneplus one (when they were new), and it was a fairly decent phone truth be told, but the store was woeful and it felt a lot worse put together. On the whole I was left with a pleasant idea of what Android could be, and aside from the huge size of the device and the motivation span I was pleased.

Fast forward to the release of the iPhone 7/8, and I’m rocking my 5s which is what I was using when testing the oneplus- and now Apple are making phones as large as the oneplus and removing the headphone jack. Also that protruding camera is gaudy.

So I bought a Samsung Galaxy S8, which is large but the curved corners made it fit my hand quite well.

I figure since it’s a flagship phone it will be a premium android experience and preceded to make it my daily driver (which I had not done with the oneplus)

Now, something of note: I roll my own carddav/CalDAV and mail servers, in iOS these slot right in to the default apps and you can do nice things like push notify on email if you set your server up to do so. I spent weeks trying to find apps in the play store that could handle CalDAV and carddav. There’s a heavily promoted one that just doesn’t work. The default apps definitely didn’t work, Samsung’s version of android (at the time) was simply incapable of it.

Not to mention the UI bugs, the themes that had black text on black backgrounds in menus, the freezes and crashes and after 4-5months I had started to get quite sour.

The thing that tipped me over the edge with going from disliking the phone to hating it was when it decided on my behalf that it wouldn’t let me send an sms without signing up for a Samsung account.

I had avoided making a Samsung account for over 5 months and then it brings up a dialog that never goes away while I try to open the messaging app.

I gave that thing to one of my colleagues and he’s happy. I went back to an iPhone SE.

Besides, when I need to talk to a client, it's almost always faster and easier for me to make a call. 5 minutes of talking can easily bypass 15-20 minutes of writing an email.

The only benefit Android had was the control. You take that away and make it a walled garden, its just an iPhone...but worse