I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again. I was an iOS user from day 1. Switched to Android when Apple refused to release a large screen device. I used multiple Androids over 2 years (HTCs, Nexus devices), and while I could do some geeky things with them they all had issues. Battery life was terrible. My Nexus 5 would randomly have a Google process spin out of control and kill the batter in 5 minutes. Updates tended to make the device not work as well (my Nexus 7 sits in a drawer after becoming unusable from updates).

I finally switched back to an iPhone, and realized how silly I was trying to convince my iPhone using friends to switch to Android. It just works. My friends don't care about kernels or custom ROMs. They want an OS that works, is secure, and stays updated. iOS does that. Apple will have to really mess things up for me to leave iOS at this point. For something I interact with on a daily basis, I don't have the time or the patience to deal with Android.

I like iOS itself (I have an iPhone 6 through work). I'd feel smothered using it as a personal device, though. Off the top of my head: it doesn't give me direct access to my on-device files, allow external storage, provide a relatively-unrestricted MTP share when plugged in, allow external app stores, or let me run a server (I sometimes run sshd for wireless file transfers, or an SMS proxy to send and receive SMS from my PC).

The things that iOS does, it arguably does better than Android. The things it doesn't do are what have kept me away.

I will admit that the lack of file system access was a bit difficult to get over when coming from Android - but it comes up rarely and is easy to work around (store the files on something else icloud dropbox etc..).

External storage seems to be pretty rare on Android though?

My #1 complaint about iOS is that they don't really allow other browsers.

> External storage seems to be pretty rare on Android though?

Not too rare. Google doesn't like it, so their stuff usually doesn't have it, but Samsung, HTC, and LG seem to have it in most of their flagships, anyhow. Maybe a generation skipped, here or there. It's not guaranteed, but not rare. I checked some budget phones from Blu, for the other end of the price spectrum. Some of those have microSD slots, too.