I have an iPhone 4, I've had iPhones for 4 years. I love the iPhone.

I tried a Nexus S with the newest Android recently. Using it, I learned that Android is, frankly, today, ahead of iOS on the phone side.

Android's notification system is better. It's so much better, that Apple directly copied it. Android's hardware back button works, it works well, and it frees up more screen real estate for useful content. Android's home button is more consistent. Its apps are more powerful, google talk video works great. Its wireless seamless binary-only updates are revolutionary.

Apple has fallen behind, and will only catch up with iOS 5 in the Fall. Of course, I fully expect Google to innovate further and be even farther ahead in 2012.

The coolest thing by far, and this is something that Apple won't have in the foreseeable near future, is voice recognition. Google's voice commands work suspiciously well. I find it far easier to press a button and say "text John Appleseed: Hey, let's go to the movies tomorrow at 3" than to navigate menus and type it in. Google's tech recognizes words and phrases I wouldn't expect it to.

Apple still has more apps, but that won't last for too much longer.

I have an iPad 2, and I love it, but my next phone will be a Droid.

A friend of mine designs phones for Motorola. He's angry as hell about the Android ecosystem b/c he knows there is some great hardware being built, but it's compromised by greedy companies that ship the phone with a 2 hour battery, etc. Android is full of this sort of short-term thinking.

These are all more salient features than the few areas where Android is actually better (google apps integration, turn by turn navigation).

The notification feature isn't all that necessary. I turned off all notifications on my iPhone and haven't missed anything. Most of the notifications generated by Android apps are equally useless. It's as if we're arguing about the color of Microsoft Bob's glasses.

In terms of the overall customer experience, usability, and app ecosystem, IOS is several years ahead of Android. I say this as someone who got two Android phones free at Google IO last year and still switched to an iPhone 4. It's not about checking off a box on a feature checklist, it's about the quality of the experience of using the features.

I get an entire day's battery life out of my Nexus S, and I listen to Pandora and podcasts my entire 8 hour shift every single day, as well as play games, surf the net, and use it heavily for on-the-go text communications.

> Android is OK if you like trusting Samsung with your phone's UI design.

I have a Samsung phone and don't have any of their customized phone UI. My wife has an HTC phone (Nexus One) that also doesn't have any customized UI. Buying a phone with a customized UI is yet another choice that the consumer can make, but it's not even close to being the only way.

> Android is fine if you want to choose from 1% of the number of apps available for iPhone.

It looks a bit closer to 50%, and growing fast...

http://samsungdigital.co.cc/android-market-surpassed-the-app...

Please stop spreading obvious FUD.

Regardless of which number is correct, the phone never should have shipped.

Also, due to the various HTC provided customizations, users of the phone get locked into outdated versions of Android long after newer features have been added. This is the worst form of lock-in b/c it's so clearly designed to get people to buy a new phone even though their current phone is upgradeable. The Nexus One is a pure Google phone so it's upgradeable, but most are not. This means app developers have to target lots of old OS versions if they want a large install base.

Not sure if you've compared the quality of apps on either platform lately. But most of the apps on Android are gimmick apps such as "Free Nelly Ringtones" and other garbageware. The creator of that app released several hundred nearly identical apps, each with a different song.

Look at the top 100 free and paid iPhone apps. At best 10 in each category have an app of similar quality available on Android. Most that do are from major firms, not from indie developers or small studios.

Edit: I'm actually rooting for Android but let's not pretend that the race is close at this point. This is mostly due to Google letting the phone companies' perverse incentives get in the way of a top quality product.

  -Applications synced across multiple devices
  -music, photos, calendars, apps in iCloud (including your ripped content)
  -Integration with iTouch/iPad/iPhone docks and accessories
  -iMessage/Facetime lock in for user accounts
  -Gamecenter achievements
  -OSX integration and "feel" 
  -Reduce the need for a PC with wireless updates and sync (probably 75% of iOS users are on Windows)

- centralized notification tray - OTA activation - OTA synching - OTA updates - optimized updates - reminders that sync with your calendar - hardware camera buttons - data sych to the cloud (though iCloud is much more complete than Google account sync) - iMessage is being compared to BBM

This is a great for iOS and quite overdue. But at the risk of offending the Apple fans, am I the only one who feels that this update to iOS contains a lot of things that are just to maintain feature parity with other systems vs. outright innovation? Just seemed that much of the features list for iOS this year had a different feel from years past. Maybe it's just me.

It certainly has been working for them, and generally, isn't that the type of product development advice anyone in HN would give you? Start simple, polish and iterate.

Apple innovates very well. The iPhone won not because it had an abstract "pristine sheen", it was just a better phone that innovated in the right ways:

Maps worked great, Safari was a full browser in the phone, and other features. It's software keyboard worked well and enabled a large screen for capacitive touch and multimedia. iPhone 1 had a plentitude of new features.

iOS 5 isn't innovating. iOS 5 is copying. I wouldn't be surprised if iPhone 6 has a hardware back button like android.

The iPad still innovates, and hopefully Apple has a cool new product around the corner.

I agree that a lot of Apple's advantage came from innovating. But a lot of the advantage also comes from taking features that other devices have done and doing them better. For example, Android does not show collated notifications on the home screen by default, and you can't interact with notifications without unlocking the screen and pulling down. iPhone's proposed implementation looks a lot better than what Android has. This happened with copy and paste too, and Android still has not caught up (no universal method for copy-and-paste).

I don't care if Apple copies or innovates. What I care about is that iPhone is still (and after this next release, will to an even greater extent be) the best phone money can buy. How it got that way is immaterial to most of their potential customers.

Generally, if I come to an activity from another app, it's to do one specific thing and then I want to go back to the original app. There are certainly cases when I want to stay in the app I got sent to and then hit back and find myself in the original app. The path then to the app I want is the same as always: home button, app shortcut.

Conversely, on iOS, what happens when I get sent to a different app and then want to go back to the original app? Home button, app shortcut. In my experience, the android way addresses the more common scenario.

Also, there are builds of android (HTC's Sense UI, I believe) that do have notifications on the lock screen. Not only that, but the lock screen is configurable, so you can add shortcuts that, when you drag them to the unlock field, take you directly to the app. This is a neat feature that I hope eventually makes it into android proper.

EDIT: Hm, this is factual and fairly uncontroversial. I suppose getting downvoted sometimes is just an inevitable consequence of participating in any dicussion involving iOS and Android? Oh well.

The answer is that this (switching apps) happens far less frequently on iOS compared with Android. In Android, the intent system (and back button) make it very easy to switch between apps. On iOS, apps use APIs instead. Integrated Web views rather than opening a browser. Mail API rather than switching to the mail client. This keynote we just saw that Apple has done this again, adding a Twitter API to iOS 5.

It's quite an interesting and significant difference between the two mobile operating systems. Android's approach encourages openness, Apple's approach gives them complete control over the UX. Neither is inherently bad.

It is an interesting and significant difference, and I think the flexibility of Android's system is one of its great strengths. It's always been able to do what the Tweet API does, more flexibly, because app developers can just send focus to the user's preferred twitter client instead of having to write in the twitter functions they want, and don't need new functionality built in to the OS.

Certainly it requires a bit more sophisticated user (not that iOS users are dumb, just that you have to understand what's happening, and it could very easily be confusing to a naive (non-pejorative sense) user), but it's really a joy to use.

EDIT: I know I shouldn't care, but the systematic downvoting is really starting to get to me.

But you're right, there isn't a good way to go to an app's home screen if you enter from a specific activity. That's something that needs to be looked at, but not at the expense of changing the excellent back button functionality.

Coincidentally, a friend was showing me his jailbroken iPhone this weekend with an Android-like notification bar and other Android-like features (he's never owned an Android phone before; he just happens to like features like that). It was nearly enough to convince me to jailbreak my phone too.

I don't feel like these are outright innovations either, but that's okay. I'll still take 'em.

It seems kind of shady for Apple to say Tap Tap Tap's Camera+ couldn't have volume button as a shutter (because it was a UX rule violation), then six months later implement that feature right into iOS.

Either ideas are something that an individual can own and control and others are forbidden to use without permission, or everybody is free to implement them and innovate around them.

Is Marco going to have to do some work now to differentiate himself from Reading List? Totally. But is that a bad thing? He was no more entitled to a competition-free perpetual business model than the Record Labels or Movie Studios or Banking Industry or any other perennial target around here.

Marco is a smart and skilled guy and there's no way this is going to kill him off unless he willingly lets it.

However, the point in the OP about Camera+ seems a bit more legit. Rejecting an app for doing X and then doing X yourself in the next release seems like a huge double-standard, and where there are double standards there is foothold for allegations of anti-competitive behavior.

That said, however, the difference between me (sitting in a cubicle typing this) and the creative forces behind Instapaper and Camera+ is (hopefully) that where I see small developers being turned into digital sharecroppers by a dictatorial corporation, they see an opportunity to differentiate themselves from the stock offering by excelling in the very specific area they're focusing on.

So I imagine they're pretty happy with this development.

Well, here Apple is saying "Screw the developers".

Sure, they have a right to do this, and perhaps an obligations, but the developers put out business without warning probably won't keep developing for Apple. Over time that will work to reduce developer uptake, and thus app selection on iOS, which is why they perhaps should have chosen to somehow lessen the blow to unlucky developers.

What's "shady" about Apple listening to criticism and allowing the hardware shutter button? Would you rather that they stuck to their original position?

Glad I've invested in social and editorial features. Not dead yet!

I think Instapaper will still be very successful. He may need to raise the price & focus on a smaller "Pro" user-base, though.

This wasn't some random feature that Apple capriciously decided wasn't allowed. It's not like they told Marco, "you're not allowed to make, save, and sync readable versions of web articles". The application you're talking about changed the behavior of the hardware buttons on the phone. Nobody was really surprised that Apple objected to that.

The lesson is about hitching your wagon to one platform. Marco has been an outspoken "iOS only" developer and part of me wants to see him eat crow for taking that position. But that's not fair, at the end of the day he's a smart guy and he'll either adjust or come up with another killer idea. He made the smart play at the right time, but all good things come to an end.

They also have a very good iPhone and iPad app that some iOS-only users will have a less of an interest in. But for others they can sell on larger availability than what Apple offers.

I don't think iP is doomed, for what it's worth; I just don't think this is the answer.

http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/gallery.html#video-ios

How apple gets away with this is beyond me. There is no technical reason that I can imagine why allowing photo uploads from mobile safari should be disabled.

If your customers don't get it, getting them to signup is very costly.

To put it another way, if they didn't do this release at all and just continued to sell iPhones with iOS 4.x on it for the next 12 months, I don't think we'd see a difference in their sales numbers.

I think this is a testament to the current quality of their devices and OS. But it does feel like we've entered Mac circa 1991. It's getting long in the tooth and the improvements are really small, while a competitor with a late start is showing signs of accelerating.

http://gigaom.com/apple/iphone-flat-in-u-s-as-android-takes-...

Apple has great margins, so they'll do fine, even if they stay at 25% marketshare forever. But it seems to be clearer that Android is going to run away with this.

The only real question is, who takes the #3 spot. RIM, MS, or HP? I think there will be 3 players in this space. Two are locked in. The last has yet to be decided.