Don’t you love it? One OS that runs on ALL THOSE PLATFORMS! It’s about consumer choice - and the consumer has a massive number of features and options for the consumer.
Removable/expandable memory.
One, two or three screens.
On-screen Qwerty, physical Qwerty, or 10 key (incredibly functional for logogram languages like Japanese).
Single, dual, or even triple SIMs for those who travel.
Stylii or not.
Gotta love the options you can choose. The flexibility, the selection. And we haven’t even begun to talk about the ability for the user to change the UI to what they want. You aren’t forced into a single “opinion” about what’s best.
What’s not to love?
Apparently just Apple.
Obviously you are not a Hardware Engineer. Consider for a moment the variety of screen sizes. Now let's mix in the variety of DDR configurations, modems, coprocessors, bus controllers, LTE modems, WiFi Modems and General Purpose Processors, cameras, video codecs, storage memory units - all low price contenders bought in bulk. All running an OS built, designed and sourced by a dis-interested 3rd party.
How efficient do you suppose this is? How secure do you think it is? Anyone, at any time, can write any chunk of code and access any part of your phone and do anything they want. Perhaps that photo editing software is also hacking your bank? Perhaps every personal contact is now being used as an identity theft hack?
Your personal information is now far more personal than ever. Where you walked, what your pulse rate was, how fast you climbed those hills. When you stopped to rest. How long. Perhaps your employer is looking to do a layoff; and you just are not as healthy as he wants. Now he knows your heart rates, your rest pulse rate, how fast you walk etc. he can find your Dr visits from your calendar and your meds from your phone. If you log your blood pressure and glucose, he can get that too.
That doesn't begin to cover your texts, social media, phone calls or email. All that is wide open in Andeoid. Google makes no secret that they monitor this. When a product or service is free; the product is YOU
“Don’t you love it? One OS that runs on ALL THOSE PLATFORMS!”
I’m an app developer (some Android, mostly iOS).
Calling it “one OS” is irritating, because there are significant differences between each major version of that OS, differences that make it difficult to write apps that support more than 1-2 versions. People see new OS features, and expect those capabilities be supported in our app, but if they’re not running that latest version then we either have to write those capabilities ourselves for prior OS versions or tell users “TS, upgrade already”. Android suffers severe platform fragmentation, with _lots_ of people running old OS versions, and surprisingly few running the latest version (can’t or won’t upgrade) - Android may “run on all those platforms”, but our apps can only run on a smallish subset thereof, ticking off a very large segment of Android users. (And that’s not addressing all the hardware variations that the software may have a tough time either knowing about or keeping up with.) iOS on the other hand, has a small & highly-predictable hardware base, and _huge_ adoption of the latest OS version (usually >90% within a few weeks, IIRC) - this makes it easy for us developers to deliver new features fast & reliably.
Now, you might understandably express disinterest in developers’ problems. Well, there’s only so much we can do to get the app & updates out the door, and supporting increasingly aged & obsolete/fringe platforms is a matter of diminishing returns (more work for less payoff). And on top of special-case support among for “all those platforms” for “one OS” (overlooking dozens of versions & forks), working under the hood is just plain less pleasant for Android than iOS. You may like the idea of “one OS to rule them all”, but making it happen may or may not be worth it.
More: “all those platforms” don’t pay nearly as much. Android may be on an overwhelming number of platforms, but we have way more (3:1 at least) actual _users_ on iOS. As the food on my table is paid for mostly by iOS users, they’re going to get the priority development - so those on a few platforms are going to get better apps sooner than “all those platforms”.
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Seems a good point for a tangent Swordmaker & a few others might appreciate:
The iOS toolset (OS library calls, IDE, etc) seems robustly built to implement given features.
The Android toolset seems very much a “me too” follow-up, trying to implement those same features BUT (important part here!) is trying to do it differently just to do it differently.
This is significant to a developer because there is a natural way which some processes flow, which iOS seems to follow ... but Android is trying to reverse those processes just so it doesn’t end up too much like iOS, making it harder & counter-intuitive to develop apps.
Example: if you want to put a marker on a map...
- with iOS, you have the map own the marker (map contains a list of markers)
- with Android, you have the marker own the map (marker contains a list of maps)
This may seem a pointless distinction to most users, but to developers is the difference between a natural vs counter-intuitive flow of information & handling.
So far, I have yet to find a developer who actually prefers Android over iOS.