Guess its a matter of perspective.

As an Android user having to help family members with their i devices from time to time, iOS devices frustrate me to no end.

iOS might have a good user experience if you're already used to it. But as someone who is not familiar with it, but uses it from time to time, I find it an horrible experience.

It looks good tho, gotta give it that.

Interesting. My whole family is on iPhone and I remember that my mother had an Android phones years ago (Samsung), and she never fully understood it. Nowadays I have no "support cases".

We originally chose iPhone for my grandparents because they were intuitive and easy to use. I have to help her more than before. It does seem that either iOS is sending her more notifications about various things which she is scared to touch.

Im not entirely sure what triggers it, but I think the fact that she doesn't get the "toolbox" view you can swipe up. I've had to help her with turning wifi back on, or screen becoming to dim.

I wouldnt be surpised if it is the swipe gestures that she randomly engages and all of the sudden the phone is doing something she didnt intend that makes her afraid of "breaking it".

Though, I havent actually tried to observe her usage.

All my main devices are Apple, but I also have a cheap Android phone, which I bought because I needed to use an app to read my passport chip at a time when Apple hadn't yet opened NFC to third party apps.

Android came with some positive usability surprises as well. For instance, the back button does something far more consistent than iOS's completely disjointed ways of going back. Also, iOS's separation of settings from the rest of the app never made any sense to me. That's fixed in Android.

But I don't think usability is what really matters. A far more important issue is ecosystem tie-in. A lot of great functionality the Apple ecosystem offers is exclusionary. Many Apple services are either unavailable or crippled on other platforms. If your friends, family and coworkers are not all Apple users you lose a lot of the benefits.

I can't even share iCloud photos with my wife or use FaceTime and Messages (beyond basic SMS). Her mp3 player supports Spotify but not Apple Music. She could easily afford any phone she likes, but she uses a 7 year old Nexus 5 because she just doesn't care. The only thing she might care about once the pandemic is over is battery life. But iPhones are nothing special at all in terms of battery life. And on the desktop she uses Linux because contrary to my Mac it supports running PyTorch and TensorFlow on the Nvidia GPU.

So we always look for cross platform options and some of the more popular ones are better integrated in Android than in iOS (such as Google, obviously, but also to a lesser degree Microsoft). I'm not subscribing to any Apple services for fear of not being able to share them with others.

Oh god, the Android back button. You just triggered my PTSD. You got all of the iOS “back” variations plus an extra “surprise me” hardware button that would sometimes even exit the app.

Hopefully that’s changed in the 5 years since I’ve tried android.

I am Swiss and for many countrymen the wallet is big enough, that we're even called an iPhone nation. But I moved to Android after iPhone 2, because I was fed up with the funny limitations Apple imposed on me, for "consistency" and "security", like:

- forcing me to sync music in iTunes, with my 500GB personal music library crashing iTunes

- no mms support, back when this was still a thing

- no video recording

- no file access

- no copy/paste functionality

later, owning a MacBook Pro in 2016, reminded me of those funny decisions Apple made for me, like no CMD+X for cutting files, no real full-screen button and regular kernel panics when connecting/disconnecting my multiple screens and MIDI devices for music production.

I since completely turned away from Apple and I am happy. Not because of my wallet, but because of the freedom of choice I gained. As a plus, yes my wallet has more left for other stuff now.

I understand and appreciate your argument, but I would like to point out that those limitations are no longer an issue. I find it more annoying to help someone in the Android world to so basic things like finding an app or changing settings, because the UI is so bizarrely inconsistent across versions of Android and models and makes. To give a recent example, a friend could not figure out to toggle WiFi on/off on his Lenovo, because when swiping the screen from above, only other things appear. One has to swipe twice, then the status bar grows and shows the WiFi symbol.

Yes, those of us who choose Android to gain some control over our tracking devices are likely to carry more cash for the privacy and autonomy benefits it brings.