A more stable, frequently updated platform with decent hardware offerings and the fastest chips on the market does not amount to inferior phones.

I'm not sure about any of that. Android phones are ridiculously diverse, from overpowered "gaming" behemoths to tiny ones like Unihertz Jelly.

But in the end I guess what matters more is whether you want a single person to control what you view or not, like when they banned James Joyce because of an illustration of a man skinny dipping.

Your comment doesn't really disagree with theirs. One major reason Android feels so fragmented is all the different devices. My last Android phone was an LG G3 (yeah I know I'm out of date nowadays). It had a really good camera (for the time) with a fast laser autofocus. Turns out no app used the proper APIs to take advantage of laser autofocus. If I wanted to take a picture with an app, I would have to take a picture with the camera app, and then upload it. Except certain apps like Instagram didn't allow you to upload photos from your camera roll, so any instagram photo I took was not in focus.

In my opinion iOS was far better when there were fewer different devices released every year, but it's still better today than Android.

Android phones don't suffer from this as much, though weird rejections from the Play Store do happen not infrequently, if HN front page can be trusted, and getting non-technical people to be comfortable with sideloading must be a huge security liability. Getting updates for the lifetime of my device and especially security patches, finding a phone with a decent user experience not marred by badly implemented manufacturer shells, that's still really hard though. Those have been significant problems for me with my Android phones, much more significant than not being able to sideload. I'd say it's not so black and white, both platforms have grave problems, with no immediate fix in sight.

Well, could it possibly be that people really don’t care about side loading apps?