Comment by AlotOfReading

I don't know about categories overall, but I'm attached to my iPad and won't switch to Android in part because Affinity is not available there, nor is there any near equivalent as far as I can tell.

I still think Overcast is nicer to use than Antenna Pod.

Microsoft Office apps work much better on iDevices, in my experience. (I know they exist for Android, but I've never had much luck editing there, where it actually works pretty nicely on iDevices.)

I don't game much, but my kids like gaming on iDevices much better than Android. (I have an Android tablet that I use for testing things, and they consistently reject it in favor of iPhone or iPad.)

Flowkey (music instruction app) works much better with my MIDI keyboard on iDevices than on Android (where it doesn't work and has to resort to microphone, which is buggy as hell).

I'm sure some of this is just a matter of the platform being more polished in general, but these are some apps that keep people in my house on iDevices despite having plenty of access to Android. The quality of the Youtube app doesn't move anyone, nor do the browsers.

> In which category are there better iOS apps?

Almost all of the prosumer apps on iOS offer a consistently better experience. This is maybe less relevant on phones than on tablets, but music production, video editing, digital painting and drafting, etc...

There's a saying in mobile development that in most companies the Android version of the app is a second class citizen. It usually brings substantially less money and so less money are invested in it. As a result the Android team is often understaffed and the app is almost always behind in feature development, less polished and with overall worse UX and more bugs compared to the iOS app.

Also iOS still has a community of iOS only indie devs that publish polished apps for iOS, it's very common to find very popular iOS app with very curated UX that are exclusive to that platform and have a good fanbase.

> Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in no way better. What else is there, where is the advantage?

This is incorrect. The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly.

Sure the best way would be for people not to use them, but if you "have" to, then it's better to use those on IOS.

iOS apps consistently get updates a few weeks to months earlier than the Android version. Including some of Google’s own apps, sometimes.

To give examples:

- https://www.phonearena.com/news/google-photos-update-to-reac...

- https://www.t3.com/tech/iphones/google-maps-gets-an-iphone-u...

Both of the above are updates to Google apps that released on iOS but are planned on Android. Haven't seen any examples of the reverse.

Camera apps.

Everything else I agree with, but the Android camera APIs do not allow developers to build good device independent camera apps the way they are available on iOS.

The iOS YouTube app is not worse than the one in Android. Texting in iOS is arguably better or, at the very least, there is one more app to choose (Messages). And I’m curious to know what makes Antenna Pod so much better than the thousands of other podcast apps out there.

Social media apps have historically been worse in Android, because of lax app and privacy controls.

> What else is there, where is the advantage?

Personally, I’d rather not have Google buried deep inside all aspects of my phone.

The iOS version of most social media apps is better. IOS simply has better API integration to it's hardware, where with android, many OEMs (hell this was even the case to a certain extent with older pixel phones), do a number of things that make the hardware not as easily accessible as quickly from the OS API for said feature.

This is especially relevant for the camera, but also various other sensors and hardware modules that exist inside these phones.

That said, in recent years there are just a number of other areas that android is much better at such as deeper AI integration, which goes back to even prior to the current LLM craze.

> In which category are there better iOS apps?

Audio, and it's not even close. On iPadOS you get full-fledged DAWs like Cubasis and Logic.

If you’d like an example, every single person who flies has an iPad to use an app called FOREFLIGHT. It doesn’t exist in android. Other EFBs exist on android but they are not as good. To a point that among things a new pilot student has to buy, like headsets and such, is an iPad.

For one, I can actually use gesture controls without constantly triggering backswipes. Even something as droll and first party as Google Photos suffers this problem, where, say, cropping a photo and pulling too close from the screen edge will result in a backswipe detection instead.

Another example is Sonos, where the iOS app contains TruePlay to tune your speakers. They can do this because there is relatively few iPhone models (microphones). But this is a general, noticeable trend, where developers will add more / better / polished features to the iOS app.

>I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore. That was maybe true in the very beginning, during the gold rush time of the app store. But not since then. In which category are there better iOS apps?

I researched iOS vs Android last year so some of my info may be out of date but this is what I collected.

Apple iOS exclusives (or earlier app versions because devs prioritized iOS):

  ChatGPT iOS app -2 months before Android
  Sora -2 months before 2025-11 Android
  Bluesky iOS app -2 months before Android (February 2023 iOS invitation-only beta; April 2023, it was released for Android)
  Blackmagic Design camera 2023-09-15  -9 months before Android  2024-06-24
  Halide camera app  https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/17klq40/what_are_some_good_examples_of_iphoneexclusive/k7efznt/
  Zoom F6  https://zoomcorp.com/en/us/software-product-page/software-sub-cat/F6-control-app/   https://apps.apple.com/us/app/f6-control/id1464118916
  Godox Light    https://www.diyphotography.net/godox-finally-launches-android-app-for-the-a1-but-only-for-some-phones/
  ForeFlight Mobile   https://support.foreflight.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004919307-Does-ForeFlight-Mobile-work-on-Android-devices  https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1883eya/the_authoritative_answer_to_why_isnt_foreflight/
  Adobe Fresco
  Procreate
  FlexRadio SmartSDR SSDR  2023-10-27T13:15:09+00:00  https://community.flexradio.com/discussion/8029186/smartsdr-for-android-device

Google Android app exclusives

  TouchDRO for milling
  Kodi media player

There really aren't many popular/prominent Android-only apps that's intended for direct consumer download from the Google Play Store. Instead, Android dominates in OEM use as "turnkey" and "embedded" base os as the GUI for their customized hardware devices:

  Amazon Fire Stick, car infotainment, music workstations, sewing machine GUI, geology soil tester, etc

If it's a typical mainstream user (browser + Youtube/Tiktok + WhatsApp etc), they won't see any iOS ecosystem advantages over Android.

> In which category are there better iOS apps?

Just one example, but aviation.

Foreflight is iOS-only. Literally the only reason I have iOS devices is because of app availability in this category.

I switched from Android to iPhone last year, and this just isn’t true. There’s so many tiny issues with android apps that just don’t exist on iPhone, because the android apps have to work on all these different devices. You don’t even have to look for the kinds of apps you’re talking about because things like Safari and Apple Podcasts work really well. I know people have a lot of complaints, but things on the iPhone really do “just work”.

> while the Play store is an equally ad-riddled

That made me realize how little I go to the Play store these days to just browse compared to the early days of Android.

I personally can't stand Apple products ... dbut with Google doing their crap and Samsung acting like Microsoft with all the crap they load in I have to disable just to make the phone usable; I've seriously thought about moving to iPhone the past couple of years.

iOS has less device models to target for. This makes it easier to support and deliver a more consistent experience, especially for gaming. I have also heard a few other points back in the day, but I am not sure how true they are now. One is that some social media apps might offer better quality in app camera experience. Another is that iOS userbase is more willing to spend money so devs are more likely to target iOS.

So many amazing open-source developers just don't want to publish their app to app store because of the fees. On android, this is way way easier. If google keeps making this difficult, then i'll just have to switch to linux phone

iOS apps are truly sandboxed, they cannot carry out stunts like this:

https://localmess.github.io/

There is not a single android app that is ever better than its iOS counterpart. At the very top margin, the android app is equivalent to its iOS counterpart. But there’s really only Gmail, photos, and Google Maps, and the big tech co apps that this small exception covers. Android apps don’t have to be worse from a technical standpoint, but in reality they are always worse than the equivalent iOS app.

There's many iOS only apps that either don't have anything comparable on android or the alternative is just nowhere near as good (a lot of it is more creative-focused stuff)

It’s not “strictly worse” for browsers unless you care about esoteric web spec features that few sites actually need today.

Safari works fine. 99% of users legitimately do not give a fuck.

The YouTube app on iOS is superior to the Android app for one

I don't understand how, almost 20 years after the release of these platforms, there are fully grown adult mobile OS fanboys still out there that either consciously or unconsciously spread lies about the difference between the platforms. Not just the parent comment, but this entire comment tree. For both iOS and Android. It's an almost religious cult-like type of behavior that reminds me of teenagers back in the early 2010s engaging in flamewars in YouTube comments arguing in favor of whichever gaming console they happen to own.

In that context, it made sense because they were kids, but also, these platforms were new with not much information out there, and the users were basically forced to pick one platform or the other because of the diminishing returns from owning both. 15 years ago, a PS3 or an Xbox 360 cost around $500, which adjusted for inflation is around $800 today. Not worth dropping an extra $800 for a few exclusive titles.

In the context of Android and iOS, you can gain access to both of these platforms quite easily... I mean, presumably, you already own an Android or iOS device already. For $150 you can get a decent device on the used market. Not state-of-the-art, but pretty good, all things considered. And with that you can gain a holistic perspective.

I seriously just don't get how you can stay faithful to either Android or iOS. They both are awful. I sort of see it as a necessary evil, pick your poison sort of thing. But some people get Stockholm Syndrome and never bother to try the alternatives I guess? I find that really odd.

Just wanted to chime in to say Antenna Pod is really good.

ForeFlight

> I assume worse

You know what they say about assuming.

iOS has the advantage of having a more closed app store, google play will shove whatever ad infested slop in your face and show you thousands of generic ad infested solutions to your problem, whereas iOS will usually have an easier to find not as sucky solution

Foreflight is iOS only. There is nothing even a third as good on Android. I literally have a one app iPad just for this. Sigh.

This is a really ideology driven push. I don't think you really think the iOS browsers are worse, there's just less choice, because they all fundamentally use WebKit. Having to use Chromium is a worse experience, and not being able to use Gecko under Firefox is not a clear upgrade - particularly as WebKit is so tightly integrated with the hardware, leading to less battery use. If you really don't like WebKit for whatever reason, I get it. But that's not worse.

Whenever there is an app with full feature parity (WhatsApp) you assume at best it can be equal, based on nothing. You have specific apps that work for you, and that's great, but my practical experience is much different: whenever I haven't had a choice in an app (think banking apps, carrier apps, local library apps, the Covid apps) the experience has been much better on Apple. Whenever there is a choice in apps, they're often cross-written in something that allows easy porting, and very similar, or the native Apple solution is much smoother. It's rare that an app just feels better on Android, and usually limited to cases where a specific app is only available on Android or, you know, Google.

sorry this is not correct. (do you consistently use both?) iOS apps are consistently better, because people prefer using swift

Honestly, you’re so wrong about the app situation that it’s almost staggering. iOS apps tend to be more stable, better polished, have better integration with system features (like the Dynamic Island), and even often have more features. This isn’t even an unfounded opinion, it’s a material problem for Google and led them to vastly investing in automated testing and quality efforts

App addressable user base is another problem for Google, one that they have mentioned in developer conferences. It’s a big part of why they’ve been trying to ship a tablet and unify android and Chromebook. If Google isn’t careful they could find themselves in a downward spiral situation, stuck between apple on one side, and android forks on the other.

And the last answer is, as always, money

- browser is deemphasized on iOS, and so it’s weaker feature set matters less

- iOS is generally easier to develop for because of less device differentiation

- on average iOS has significantly wealthier users who tend to be higher return or paying customers (seriously, look it up). This in turn leads companies to invest more heavily in iOS.

- easier integration due to a narrow system services ecosystem (no Google vs Samsung slapfights)

- unified platform advantage (apps written for iOS easily port to the watch and tablet, unlocking larger markets, and justifying greater spend in developing apps)

- apples review process is significantly stricter (for better or for worse)

Yes, Apple doesn’t have something like fdroid, and that’s really disappointing and honestly a legitimate dealbreaker for a lot of people

Personally I feel that their emphasis on privacy by design was a very winning marketing strategy. Not sure if it played with the general pop.

I’ve been an iPhone owner for a while, but recently was required to get an Android phone to be a secondary work device. I got a Pixel 10 Pro—- brand-new, Google’s flagship device—- and within about a week there was a rattling noise from the camera module any time the phone moved.

The consensus online appears to be “oh, yeah, that’s the OIS module, you have to expect it, they all do that”. Well, iPhones also have OIS and they don’t do this.

Android might be “good enough” in hardware now but it’s definitely still behind.

> Google stopped being aware of their customer's needs a really long time ago

Google's customers are advertisers. They cater to that segment very well. They only need to attract users with "free" and cheap services so that advertisers think their campaigns are reaching enough eyeballs. Whether or not that's the case, and whether or not the end user has a good experience, is hardly relevant.

> they think the audience is now fully captive.

It is, for the large sub-$800 segment of the smartphone market.

> they think the audience is now fully captive.

the audience is captive. Do you have a choice to move from android, if you didnt want to have an apple device? Do you want to use a different search engine other than google? Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own). Is there another browser other than chrome (and dont say firefox or edge - because both don't compete)?

Google behave in ways that they think makes them more profit. When users cannot migrate (nor even threaten to), then it simply means they can do this.

I can't remember a youtube change that did not degrade my experience on their platform.

Google's AI in their docs suite is so bafflingly bad. I wanted their AI to automate a sheet for me and it just choked. I switched to Claude for making a sheet that I ended up hosting in my local NAS using Microsoft Excel format.

It's true, but the main reason I haven't just switched to an iPhone is the ecosystem that lets me write apps without having to pay Apple money or use their computers.

If Google is narrowing their moat on this, there are a lot fewer reasons for me, personally, to stay on the platform.

Price hasn't been a particularly compelling difference between iOS and Android for a while. Here in the states, you can get a new iPhone 13 for $200 USD, which is 170 euros at today's exchange rate.

https://www.metrobyt-mobile.com/cell-phone/apple-iphone-13?i...

That's a prepaid cell phone company (no contracts); not sure how many months (if any) you have to pay for to unlock the phone. Renewed and unlocked ones are about $270 on amazon.

Sure, but uninformed consumers won't see it that way. Maybe in their circles it just sounds like a great idea and they thank Apple for implementing it.

Saying they were forced to implement USB-C is really overstating things. Apple loooved USB-C - so much so that their ill-fated butterfly switch laptops went all-in on it. They also helped design it. It's highly likely they were planning a move to USB-C anyway and the EU just pushed it forward a year.

> One could argue Android itself was a reaction to iOS

It quite literally was a reaction to iOS considering it was originally a copy of the BlackBerry OS (the older one in their keyboard phones) until the iPhone came out and they pivoted to copying iOS instead.

EDIT: to get ahead of any negative replies about them copying iOS, I’m fully aware that they work quite differently under the hood and Android has had various features before iOS, etc. I mean they were creating from a UI/UX standpoint a copy of the BlackBerry when Google bought them, and then when the iPhone came out they completely changed the UI/UX paradigm to match.

Android was in development well before iOS was released, really the only big change was the touchscreen, which is obviously revolutionary, but that's a long-way from "Android is a reaction to iOS".

What's the long-term strategy with Android. How does one know it exists

> One could argue Android itself was a reaction to iOS

and it definitely was, to mitigate the risk of losing sight of the web users behaviour

The Play Store was riddled with scam apps last time I used it. Be it fake apps that pretend to do something while doing at best nothing ("system optimizers", "antivirus" apps) over user data mining apps (often targeted at children or young people) to hundreds of clones of commercial or open source apps - you do not have to search very long to find the real scams.

Making sideloading harder has only one goal - growing the wall around the garden a bit higher, piece by piece, layer by layer, while everything within slowly grows more toxic.

If they actually cared about scams on Android, when I explicitly searched for <App I'm going to pay for anyway> in the Play Store, they wouldn't put <Some other random app that pays money to appear above the app I searched for> at the top instead lol

I can say that my parents have never once complained about a scam on their phone caused by sideloading.

In fact I don’t know anyone among any of my friends or family that have ever had that issue.

Every last one of my non-technical friends and family have been hit by spyware on their windows devices.

To say I’m extremely skeptical that this has anything to do with protecting users is an understatement.

In fact I’m willing to go out on a limb and say it’s a nearly non-existent issue outside of people being targeted by nation states.

Would love to see some numbers backing up the claim that sideloading is resulting in mass exploiting of Android devices because I can’t find them.

That's a bit of a surprising postulation.

If there's a reputation, that means it's reasonably widespread. 5% doesn't seem like much.

Does this mean there are so many advanced users sideloading apps to compromise them?

Except users aren't so advanced that they are getting scammed because of side loading?

Or might it be the cascading delays in security updates that don't seem to reach devices between Google, manufacturers, and telcos? This is a much more massive (the 95%) of security hole and backdoors for scams to enter.

These arguments don't really seem to fit together or make sense.

Happy to get some links to read more about all of the statements.

There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Google is doing this to protect users from scams. It is purely driven by their desire to control the platform and eliminate things like ad-blocking youtube apps. You're far too credulous of evil corporations' stated motives.

Scams are the justification, F-Droid hasn't had any scam apps throughout it's existence, and it's not clear every functionality it currently has will be preserved with this change like auto-updating apps and easy installation of the store itself.

Google could let users add their own signing keys (like browsers allow), and it might be they will let students or power users do this, or they could do what F-Droid does in packaging FOSS apps without developers having to provide extra PII information. If they do neither of these things, it de facto means they're only after control at the expense of normal users.

For example:

  To resolve the problem, scammers would deceive the victims into downloading a malicious app, in an Android Package Kit (APK) file format, sent through WhatsApp.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/android-users-lose-2-...

On the topic of looser app reviews on the Play store vs the App store. I can give you a long list of fake iOS apps where you enter a 4 digit code to watch free movies. People who think Apple is manually reviewing apps are delusional.

And yet the times that I have dealt with Android phone issues (2 times in the last year), it has been an app that was popping up full screen ads.

Both phone users have no idea how to sideload, everything was installed from the Play store.

The killer apps that gave Android an advantage on TV are now mostly available on tvOS. To me, these were VLC and RetroArch.

Apple was among the first to implement USB-C in early 2015. A whole year before Samsung and the likes.

Why not limit these restrictions to these specific locations? Surely there's already lots of location-specific and carrier-specific customizations like shutter sound in Japan, different radio frequencies and many more. It still sucks for those who live in these countries, but at least they know who to point their finger at.

>Apple has never had better hardware (on mobile).

This is just straight up false. Qualcomm's current top of the line processors are about 3 years behind what you can get in Apple's cheapest product (that being the 16e), and the budget phones (and by "budget" I mean "the 600 dollar ones") are another 3 years behind that.

iPhones don't generally become too slow to realistically use until their support lifetime expires. Androids are like that out of the box unless you spend over a thousand dollars, and those only last for about half the time (a combination of inferior hardware and inferior software). It doesn't matter if you have a 120Hz screen if the UI only updates at 20.

This is why the only killer feature for Android (outside the cameras) is adblocking- which, of course, is what Google wants to prevent. They don't want you to run real Firefox (with the only effective adblock remaining), and they want you to pay for YouTube Premium rather than using NewPipe (or some other ReVanced successor) so you can't get out of paying 10 bucks to listen to a video with the screen off.

NewPipe (FOSS available on F-Droid) is nice alternative to ads-infested YouTube. I disabled YouTube and YouTube Music apps on my mobile, and I use NewPipe instead. You can even download YT videos or audio from YT videos using it.

If google push too hard, someone will make a "youtube mirror" - ie. a complete copy of youtube at a different domain.

The actual data could be hosted p2p across all the users devices, and any missing data retrieved one-time-only from real youtube servers.

The iPhone 16e (came out less than 6 months ago) starts at $600 without carrier subsidy. That’s about half of what you claimed.

Secure boot prohibits custom ROMs on most android devices

Well you misunderstand enshittification. It will never get better again. Both Google and Apple have enshittified their phones. You can verify this on the App Store, on the Play Store, both of which have now more than 50% of search result screen space dedicated to ads, more when it comes to scams [1]. AND you can verify this in the financial statements of Apple and Google, where you see what we've always seen in Google: steadily increasing at a fixed rate profits from ads on the play store in Google's case, and steadily increasing at a fixed rate profits from "Services", which is App Store ads.

In Apple's case this has been the only Apple business to grow at all in several of the recent years. In fact there's quite a few Apple businesses that look like they are "revenue neutral", most famously iPads. Google is better, but not by much. Cloud is growing fast ("but why?" is a question that's unanswered. I mean, "because of AI", of course, but ... seriously?)

So not only are they enshittified, and you see them getting worse and worse over time, but the financial statements show: if you're expecting this to get any better either in the Apple or Google case, you're insane. Because clearly ads for scams are worth it for advertisers, and most other types of ads are not worth it. The situation evolves more and more towards the cable channel situation of 20 years back.

You could also reverse the view. The simple question: "are people willing to compromise on hardware quality to get less ads?" has a very clear NO answer. "Are governments/institutions that are totally dependent on these systems willing to pay to either improve phones or make an alternative available?", again has boatloads of evidence that the answer is NO, in all caps.

[1] Search for "credit card" or "lose weight" and judge for yourself. Top results are promoting Apple or Google themselves, everything else are ads, and very bad deals that trivially will neither accomplish the promised financial independence nor weight loss. Or should I put it like this: the credit card deals advertised are so bad they might achieve weight loss. By the way ads designed to mislead, which the top ads for either search obviously are, are what both Google and Apple promised time and again never to do.

I don't know how it works at Google, but unless they're giving away Pixel phones for free to their employees (or at a very, very strong discount), they have no business forcing their employees to use their products.

Here is how a job works: worker works, company gives money. Workers do whatever the fuck they want with the money they earn.

I think an edit is in order, as your post, in the current form, doesn't make any sense.

> [Google's] strategy is growing markets, especially in india, and africa, and of course China.

Really? China? Where Google services are banned and Android phones come with local OS versions that cut them out? "High-friction sideloading" won't affect anyone in China. It won't be part of their experience at all.

The whole software world is shit now. The foundations were stable decades ago. Like Windows kernel, WinAPI, .NET, WPF, Linux kernel. But end user software is so terrible. Windows 11 with ads and unhelpful AI. macOS which is a bit less terrible, but still too bloated. Linux with its eternal changes between X, Wayland, Alsa, Pipewire, Pulseaudio, sysvinit, systemd, and endless choices. Both iOS and Android are terrible. iOS was perfect 10 years ago, it's absolute clownfest now. I would blame AI vibe coders, but it started before. I don't know who to blame. Why can't we just build solid minimal non-bloated OS that will last for decades without major rewrites. We've got so good foundations but so terrible end product.

How are they on par SoC-wise? Last time I checked, Qualcomm was still trying to catch up to Apple.

> they pay to put Gemini on iOS. Google has a real competitive advantage with IA and they just gave it to Apple.

What Google loses by pushing iOS AI customers to ChatGPT outweighs what they gain by trying to convince people to switch phones for access to Gemini.

Chinese phones have great hardware at great prices, unfortunately they suck at software.

So unless you want to spend the time and effort to switch to and work with the quirks of LineageOS or similar, you get an overall worse experience.

This is the real threat. Brand loyalty is a distraction.

While I agree with the principle, and we as tech professionals and enthusiasts should be lobbying hard for law makers and regulators to open iOS up to allow for different browsers, there’s a couple flaws here without these precedents or activism.

The alternative here is not Firefox gaining more market share, it’s further encroachment of Chrome and derivatives. You’re not getting this big win for browser diversity. I’m not sure what you really gain here as Safari works fine for near most everything most people do.

Also I don’t think PWA’s have proliferated on desktop or Android despite Google’s efforts in raising awareness for them. It seems to me like consumers largely aren’t into web app shells. They either visit a web app in their browsers or use the App Store apps, by a large margin

Mobile providers usually offer loans ("service contracts") where people get phones outside their financial standing (I regularly see high end iPhones and foldable phones of €1-2k run by people in a country where average monthly salary is less than €1k): if a highly visible device like your phone can be had for 10% of your monthly salary, people will, unfortunately, opt for it.

I tend to not use Apple not due to cost (I honestly believe it's OK to pay a premium for quality; I might disagree they offer it today though, as I do use a couple of their devices at work), but because of how closed their ecosystem is (and yes, all my personal devices are running some sort of Linux, and Android phones are rooted and with bootloader unlocked).

This is one of Apple's marketing strategy.

Faux luxury.

Totally works in the US too on teens, moms, and lower middle class people.

"Slow phone with slow animations" is a crazy assessment, I switched from Galaxy S7 to iPhone XR in 2018 because the Galaxy was (like every other Android I had) slow to do everything, applications would crash randomly and my phone would just give up and reboot without warning. Not to mention all of the killer Android features that Google had gotten rid of up to that point (RIP notification ticker, I miss you so much). What's the point of being able to sideload and customize when none of it works on a day to day basis? And when Google/other Android phone manufacturers insist on their phones being more and more similar to iPhone/iOS, the reasons to stay on Android go away too.

Most Android devices also don't have aux ports. iPhones have USB now too.

Losing the ability to easily sideload apps is what we're talking about.

How do iPhones have worse security than Android???

> No Aux port, no usb. Slow phone with slow animations. But maybe this is fixed, its been 10 years.

It has been 10 years and none of this is true today, also the average person doesn’t care about an aux port.

> Solid no here. Being able to install stuff from fdroid is amazing.

Not sure if you’re serious here, the app selection is far better on the App Store (and also Google Play Store) due to the nature of not being restricted to purely FOSS apps.

> You forgot to mention how poor iPhone security is.

Citation needed, iOS has the second best mobile security and is at worst equivalent to stock Android. The only OS that surpasses iOS by a large amount is GrapheneOS.

> People have died due to Apple's poor security.

This could also be said for any other OS/maker? Nothing is 100% secure/private.

Yeah, at no point has Apple ever had meaningfully better hardware than the competition. They have always been a more expensive version of the same hardware you can get from their competitors, just this one has an apple logo. But a lot of people, even smart people, are fooled by the marketing.

> Last time I checked, it's apple paying Google, billions of dollars a year?

You checked wrong. Google pays Apple on the order of $20 billion to be the default search on iOS - this is so significant it accounts for ~5% of Apple's annual revenue

  > Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now.

If any of these manufacturers decide to include an EMR pen in the body of the phone, like Samsung's S-Pen, they'll have me as a customer. The S-Pen so completely changes the experience that I am unwilling to go back.

> Look at the latest Xiaomi, Oppo and other Chinese manufacturers, Apple would love to have the hardware they are shipping right now.

This is true, but their phones don't ship with Google services out of box (at least the last time I checked). So in reality, "Google's Android" is really mostly Samsungs and Pixels.