To me it's the fact that it just works and I use it as a smart phone and not as a General Purpose Computer. There is a lot of ecosystem stuff on iOS that are just missing from Android. Plus the skinning of each manufacturer is/was terrible. Samsung's early TouchWiz was incredibly terrible...

I also use Android when I need more access to different things e.g. portable pocket pc that runs Linux.

> While the meme of "iPhone is better than Android because iPhone can do X" while Android has been able to do X for over 2 years no longer applies

It applied as recently as 2020 with iOS 14 releasing picture in picture video, which Android has had since 8 in 2017.

Don't have to go back that far. iPhone 14 Pro is the first iPhone with always on display. Although I guess Android wasn't first with that either.

Ah true, I remember colleagues being in awe of it, me checking what the hell they're talking about, and being surprised this is a new feature.

Similarly to that, I saw people in awe that when you receive a token via SMS on iPhone it allows you to copy it without opening the message. Something that Android also already had since before. In Android's case it even writes it on the app automatically without the need to do anything at all

The dichotomy to me is in the hardware vs software divide.

Apple mobile devices are absolutely luxury hardware.

Apple mobile OS/software is... functional to a most generous description.

AirDrop? Handoff? Fully encrypted iCloud storage, a first-of-its-kind offering that no other mass market OEM has been able to match? Apple pay leading the market and getting mobile vendors to literally adopt contactless payments for the first time? Mobile video chat that took Google years to replicate? The list goes on. I don't know how one could say their software isn't powerful. It is.

Shipping features that only work in a first party hardware ecosystem simplifies development a lot.

Of those, only Apple Pay has a touch point with non-Apple products, no? And enabling it was more business bludgeon than software feature.

I've launched Android based hardware products, I should be as Android deep as anyone can be and I use an iPhone.

"iPhone is better than Android because iPhone can do X" was never why anyone used iPhones. iPhones generally did things years later than Android but did them significantly better.

And Apple didn't need to convince people, they straight up were luxury devices compared to decay prone Android devices. Android lagged in locking down background services so battery would worsen over time as random apps did random garbage in the background. Lots of devices had weird eMMC and virtual FS bugs that'd also slow them down over time. And for a truly embarrassing length of history, top apps for things like flashlights would install lock screen ads on your device.

I agree it's more personal preference these days, but that's mostly because Google went and copied Apple's walled garden approach. Things power users loved got gutted, more and more core functionality became part of Google Play Services that vendors aren't allowed to modify. Because of Project Mainline even the Android runtime is about to start getting updated via Google Play.

I remember tapping to pay with my Nexus 4 in 2013.