> Android hardware and software feels cheap, chintzy, and, I hate to use this Jobs-ism, it just lacks good taste.

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.

Don't really agree. I've had a Nexus 5 for years and it's been great. I think the old Google phones were the best kept secret (not really secret) out there. They came packaged with vanilla Android which is perfectly usable and the designs were usually very reserved and tasteful in my opinion.

Even though you can't get the simple Google phones any more, any Android device still has the "feature" that you can use it as a general purpose computer and not something that you are only permitted to use insofar as the manufacturer approves.

Definitely fragmentation: every vendor wants to pretend they’re Apple but they aren’t willing to invest in a serious team, plus the fact that nobody makes money after the initial sale means there’s no effort to ship improvements. Any iPhone will get half a decade of UI improvements but with Android you have to hope you get a model which sells well enough that the vendor & carrier actually ship anything more than critical security updates. The recent releases from Google aren’t bad but only a fraction of the market will see them without buying a new phone and then only if they buy the right phone.

Windows has the same shitty tastes. Graphic design is very poor on many versions of Windows, namely those accessible to students and others not running the latest version on the latest hardware. Mac has had beautiful design that is visually clean for years, but windows has been cluttered and frustrating.

I agree Windows desktop isn't much better visually but Windows Phone was very orderly, clean, fast even on potato phones, and had an astounding idle battery life.

It's an OS ruined by lack of developer interest which was caused by no small amount of mistakes from Microsoft. But it has (had) a very solid foundation.

Lol Which versions of Android are you using? The last couple of generations of stock Android have been quite polished.

Regarding software, it's the iPhone that looks like a phone from last decade. Bezelless screens are the future, and they appeared on Android devices much before the iPhone X

This might be the most elitist thing I've read all day.

Seriously.