I was an android hold out for a good while because I didn't like the lack of control iphones had. At some point it flipped and I got sick of how much fiddling I constantly had to do with my phone to get it to work the way I wanted. And even then by the time I got it working well, it wouldn't get updates anymore. I switched to iphone, and while once in a while I'll miss being able to tweak everything, I'm much less frustrated at my phone than before.

This has been my experience. I bought the original iPhone and thought it was cool but extremely limited. I recognize the huge impact it had on the industry, though. As much as I loved fiddling with my Nexus, at some point I realized that I was fiddling too much with it and would get frustrated that basic functions wouldn't work without issue. Android has changed a bit since then but I'm still on an iPhone now. I'm less frustrated and can count on my phone reliably doing what I need it to do even though sometimes I can't do what I might want to do. Who cares if I can install video wallpaper functionality and tweak the icon spacing/grid if I have to wait 30 seconds to answer the phone because it's freezing up?

I agree, but iPhone hardware is a lot more expensive than the Android phones I buy. Be on the Moto x4 for a couple of years. Messaging is a mess (Hangouts, Messages, etc) and yeah, there are things which are just buggy.

I've been thinking of jumping to iPhone for the watch and privacy features. It really grinds my gears how much Google has sold out its users.

>And the non-iOS phone users that are married to “how much control they have” have touched an iphone since 2014.

I don't even tinker that much and my foray into iOS lasted only 1 year with the 10S Max. The inability to arrange items freely on the desktop (leave a blank space) was frustrating. The lack of control over default apps was occasionally problematic. The inability to natively link to a Windows computer and transfer files is also something I use.

That said, there are a ton of benefits of iOS over Android that I recognize (iMessage, Apple Wallet, the screen responsiveness, etc).

Sorry to burst your bubble, I'm a long-time Android user who switched to the iPhone 6S for about a year and a half, then back to a Pixel 2. Following its release, I bought the iPhone XS expecting to love it and be done with Android.

Oh, how wrong I was. Siri is still garbage, CarPlay is terrible compared to Android Auto. And there's nothing even similar to Google Home. Apple's hands-free story is completely nonexistent which is fine if you've never used a decent hands-free ecosystem, but it's very hard to switch back to.

Interesting use cases, the Google variant is still a good choice but a sliver of the android market that I cant really consider it meaningful

Its one vs many variants

You get that on any modern Android phone, not sure when the cutoff is but my Oneplus from years ago still gets the modern crap.

Can Android today handle voice dialing non-English names in the address book? If not, their hands-free story leaves a lot to be desired as well.

Yes, with phonetic names, an optional field like the pronunciation name in iOS.