That’s competitive differentiation, which is very much part of marketing. An iPhone isn’t easy to use in the same way that git is easier to use than svn for someone who has been using git for a decade.

I know a lot of iphone users think it's the most intuitive machine in the world and a 5 year old can get it, and I'm obviously heavily swayed by my decade or whatever with Android but the amount of hidden/unintuitive-to-me/impossible-to-do things I found was what moved me back to Android after that trial.

I spent a LOT of time searching on Google for how to do things with that phone.

While both keyboards are nearly the same, everything you type would be wrong for quite a while.

Unless you mean the wider ecosystem, in which case I agree.

I had a big performance problem on my s7 way after putting in a high speed SDcard that apparently was corrupted or damaged. I was only, as far as I know, who knows what Android was storing on it, putting podcasts/images on it and it still brought my entire OS to its knees until I removed it. That was a huge trial in my Android loyalty because I went months with this incredibly slow phone until I finally was packing it up to sell, remembered "oh I don't want the buyer to have my SDcard!" pulled it out and it felt like a new phone again, I got another 2-3 years out of it. Eventually tossed it at the ground on accident thus the s8..

Why is this an issue? Do you need dedicated back and forward buttons to browse through your pictures? Of course not, you just swipe left and right. That’s how the iPhone handles the “back” movement.

I just clicked on an album in "Photos", I could scroll through them swiping left and right to go through the photos but now I have to rely on the arrow at the top left of the screen to go back to view all albums. I like having a back button always present on the buttom of my screen in Android for this.

So if you've selected a photo, a swipe down dismisses the photo. From there, a swipe in from the very edge of the screen brings you out of the current album and back to viewing all albums.

I will make a video demonstrating it if you would like.

Initially, this behavior may seem weird to some from outside the iOS ecosystem? But dismissing photos by pulling down seems to be common UX with modern apps. And swiping from the side feels so natural, that apps that don't implement it (10%?) are jarring. It could be said that a weakness here is that Apple does not enforce universal usage, but most apps have implemented it well. When it does work (90%?), my thumb appreciates not having to reach the bottom left of the phone.

Sorry if it sounded sarcastic, this was a sincere question.

This is largely not true anymore. (In fact, in certain areas it would be appropriate to say that it's iPhone doing the "crushing".)

The answer is monopoly pricing vs competition. Apple is the only iOS manufacturer, just like they were the only MacOS Manufacturer (excepting the brief period of Mac clones)

That means all Android manufacturers compete and split their market driving down prices and margins and divvying up market share.

You saw the same thing in PCs when they were almost sold at cost or razor thin margins because they were commodified: a pc from dell vs hp vs compaq vs gazillion other vendors was basically the same experience.

I don’t disagree with this, but it only matters at all because iOS (and access to its user interface, Safari, lock in on iMessages) is a distinct value add. BlackBerry also had a monopoly on their OS as did Palm as did Nokia. None of them exist anymore.