It's actually quite remarkable to me that I can have such a different experience as a longtime Android device user and both of these experiences can coexist. I could never go back to the iPhone interface, and every time I have to use someone else's phone I'm always astounded at how hidden away the (few) options still available to me seem.

Discoverability of UI features is atrocious on iOS.

It really is. I don't know where anything is in the settings submenus anymore.

You find the iPhone easy to use because the iPhone is easy to use and more or less consistent in every iPhone device you’ve used. A five year old can use an iPhone.

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.

When I had my six month affair with an Iphone 6 it took me a month (I don't get many calls) to finally get frustrated enough to google "How to reject calls" because I was so used to Android giving me a big red X that I never even considered pushing the power button to reject a call (I think that even just mutes incoming calls on Android, I forget), that X let me mute or reject based on the direction I swiped it. I could only figure out how to mute the rings which means my car radio would just be silent until the caller finally gave up.

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.

Really? In my view it's just a phone, just use whatever you prefer but I can't relate to getting used to an interface as per se

It’s muscle memory. Imagine how inefficient you’d be if someone moved the vowels to a different spot on your keyboard.

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

Is it though? Ignoring the fun stuff, I just email, read (datasheets and text)books (i.e. PDFs and phone people on my phone - how much muscle memory is there in the first place?

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