Comment by ksec
4 hours ago
It was even better before 2017.
I used to describe iPhone being an Appliance, with some smart function added to it. Android was a PC trying to made into a Phone form factor and act like an appliance.
It was that simplicity of iPhone that was great.
And you are right now iPhone and Android have converge in many ways it has added complexity. And no one seems to be doing anything about it. And somehow after 15 years of UX Craig Federighi is still popular and gets no blame for it.
It was a weal-and-woe situation. The lockdown was tolerable with such a weak device, but portended a lot of the App Store issues that Apple grapples with today.
Back then, the coolest way to use an iPhone or iPod was to put Cydia on it. You could run emulators, live wallpapers, sideloaded apps, pretty much anything that Android had was at the tip of your fingers. Once Apple pushed for a return to the locked-down software distribution philosophy, I gave up on iOS and started dailying Android instead.