Going to have to disagree.

There are no redeeming qualities for Android. From a sloppy, disjointed user experience to an incredibly shady app store, Android doesn't compare to iOS.

That's not to say iOS doesn't have issues. It certainly does, but in terms of comparability it's not even a contest.

Luckily for Android many people really don't care about design.

I'm always amused by this kind of comment.

I have been from ios to Android back to ios in the last few years. The two of them are so similar nowadays it's laughable. The UX is nearly identical.

I felt this so hard! Switched to iOS a few months ago after 14 years of Android (OG G1 user) due to privacy concerns and the lack of a small phone on Android.

iOS applications are almost universally better than their Android counterparts, but when it comes to the OS itself Android is light years ahead of iOS in terms of usability, convenience, and features. The iOS keyboard is such a steaming pile of bull dung compared to Android, and then there's call screening, notification actions, copy history, inter-application shareability, webview->browser state sharing, etc...

I don't think that's true at all. As of ICS, Android is much better. Especially considering the horrible state of notifications on iOS and the siloed nature of apps. And usability took a serious hit in the move from iOS 6 to 7.

I've got a Nexus 4, iPhone 4S, iPad and a few others beside and I'd argue for me that Android does have superior UX.

There's no way I could use the 4S as my daily phone, and I've put off getting a new tablet until there's a decent 8" Android one out.

Sure iOS has plenty of polished apps but the integration between them is at Apple's whim - to share a webpage from Safari to GetPocket, I have to rely on bookmarklets FFS.

iOSs keyboard is another deal breaker for me, after using Swype hunt and peck for typing on a touch screen is horrible and then there's trying to make sense as to whether shift is on or not!

That's funny because I heard my friend say this at work yesterday when I suggested that he should gift his mother an iPhone:

"Oh my mother would have too much difficulty switching from Android to iOS. I know because I use iPhone and things that have dedicated buttons in some Android phones are gestures in iOS. Like the back button for example."

Okay, I'll bite, because that's amusing(I find that interacting with anything Android is consistently a torture) and I don't use Apple devices so I have no idea what you could be thinking of. How is iOS stuff becoming more like Android, and how is it better than whatever it did before?

Having had experience recently with top-end Android devices, I'd beg to differ. Functionally an Android device is roughly equivalent to an iOS one, but the design, UI, responsiveness etc. is IMO miles apart.

It may be a matter of subjective taste but I would recommend that anyone reading the above and considering switching spent some serious time using Android first.

I kind of disagree. If you can't make a UI run fluidly on a phone from 4 years ago, you might be doing it wrong. UIs have tight timing budgets, true, but computers are _plenty_ fast enough to keep up. Android has more overhead than iOS and it shows.

I put up with Android because I can run my own code on my own hardware. But I'm increasingly looking at iOS favorably.

This hasn't been my experience

> Stock Android is just as mature and capable as ios

It's fine, but everything is just (imo) a little bit less cohesive and polished, and then there's the Google spyware, a shorter lifetime of updates, etc. And then if you aren't going off the beaten path and customizing stuff anyway, what are you actually gaining in exchange for those downsides?

This is true. I find Android UI so offensive that if I did not have iOS as an alternate I probably would carry a dumb phone and live like a monk. I can’t stand the miles of white space and brightly coloured tiny UI controls.

Evokes such a visceral reaction in me that even I am startled at times haha

You do not have any iOS device but claim that iOS have advantages over Android? This sounds a bit weird but ok, try to find one single reason why iOS should be better. But you won't because it's easier for you to bail out from the discussion and go to the meta level by telling that this is a rant, bullshit and fanboyism instead of giving some valid reasons (but how? you do not have an iOS device anyway).

Again, this is not a rant, this is reality, it's just that in the last two years Android developed much faster than iOS did, in every regard. And it seems that it's not allowed to address iOS' fall.

I wonder how much of this is "the thing I'm used to is the best thing?" every time I hear this sort of comparison (regardless of which type of machine the commenter thinks is "best".)

The thing that makes me wonder is because my experience is the opposite of yours -- I think Android is much superior to iOS. But I suspect much of my opinion is because I'm much more used to Android than iOS.

Feel is highly subjective and de gustibus non est disputandum; to me, iOS clearly has a much stronger design aesthetic (not just visual, but especially there), but also a much less appealing one, even after it abandoned it's older, all-in skeumorphism aesthetic to follow the trend (which Apple did not lead) of cleaner, flatter design.

Not in the last few years, not even close. Android is pretty amazing right now, I love it.

Well then, the CTS and VTS are so weak they are useless then.

> When was the last time you saw an Android phone? 2008? Name those WinXP themed OEM skins.

Have you worked with Samsung or a no-name Chinese brand? There's plenty of errors arising from bad ROMs customising low-level stuff they should not do.

> Considering all of the bugs and security issues iOS has had I would have to give that award to iOS.

At least iOS fixes them and they can update their devices.

> Not only do Android apps look better, but they also take up considerably less space than their bloated iOS counterparts.

That's only for the top-notch part of the Store, the rest is just a dimension below iOS in term of usability (and I say this using only Android). The reason being that you need more dev time to have the same result on Android compared to iOS.

This is sort of blowing my mind. After the release of the iPhone, Android shifted from a trackball-based design to a touch-based design (which is a big shift), and copied the Apple homescreen for its app drawer layout, but to call it a "slavish copy" is disingenuous. Android diverges - and innovates - in a lot of very significant ways. Google has been offering voice search/commands/voice-to-text for Android long before Siri. It did notifications and task switching far better than iOS did (and iOS has now "slavishly" copied those concepts). The back button and activity stack make the device usage behaviors ridiculously different from iOS usage. It's been doing wireless sync and cloud-based stuff for a long while; Apple's just now starting to integrate that stuff.

iOS has better-looking stock art assets/widgets, and the application approval process guarantees an adherence to Apple's UI design policies, which does help produce a more consistent experience for the things that Apple cares about, but to me personally, iOS feels like a toy next to Android. As non-fanboyishly as I can say it, I genuinely believe Android is better software than iOS. Apple has the vertical integration down better, no doubt, and their marketing is about a thousand times better than anything that any of the Android handset makers are doing, but I don't think you can use both OSes and seriously dismiss Android as a cheap carbon copy.

IMO Android UX is way better than iOS when used on a right device. I switched from iPhone to Pixel and it's a delight to use. I am not going back to iPhone soon ...

Sorry, this is just delusional. Android has no unified standard for how the OS is implemented between devices. Every time you get a new android phone, you need to relearn new UI quirks specific to that device. I honestly don't know how someone could claim with a straight face that Android is easier to use than iPhone.