I laughed when he wrote that Android customization is basically alternate keyboards and widgets. Clearly he's never even held one in his hand. I switched to Android after four iPhones and I'm amazed at how much easier and quicker it is to do things on Android when I have total control over the UI.

That's not what I wrote. I said that iOS8 addresses some of these points, with keyboards as just one example, and that the key difference is now personal taste rather than screen size or availability.

Clearly some people prefer iOS and others Android. But that's not the issue, is it?

>You can get a bigger screen, you can change the keyboard, you can put widgets on the notification panel (if you insist) and so on. Pretty much all the external reasons to choose Android are addressed

It wouldn't be hard to come up with a list of dozens of features that you can customize on Android that you can't on iOS. If you really think you're covered "pretty much all the reasons" to choose Android, you haven't researched the platform very thoroughly.

It is that exact line which broke me out of the "this is an objective analysis" trance. It is clear to me the author tried to impartial For that I have to credit him. Yet afterwards the faux-impartiality became grating. I can only conclude he did his best but just does not fully understand Android.

Leaving out stuff like water proof-ness, wireless charging, and multi-windows. These are features which in five years we'll all take for granted. These are real innovations.

I was honestly expecting more from Apple. Apple has the engineers and the component budget to reach the forefront and push it forward. Yet I'm left wondering what their component budget actually went into and where their engineering time went.

There's a lot of stuff that I wouldn't personally call "customisation" that matters in various markets too, SD cards, TV reception or dual-sim and the like.

Android's famous "fragmentation" allows for this.

Android will almost certainly always be more customisable than iOS, the question for many users though isn't "which is more customisable?", it's "is it customisable enough for what I need/want to do?".

In this regard iOS8 begins to close off some of the more significant constraints iPhones and iPads have. For any given individual it may not go far enough but what's being introduced will almost certainly make it a better option for some people and some of those people may now buy iPhones instead of high end Android.

The point isn't that this brings the two platforms level, it's that iOS now competes for a small piece of the market where it previously didn't.

He's saying that it's not just down to taste. iOS remains fundamentally less capable for many power users who buy high-end phones, and your article didn't touch on that point. Everything from using a decent browser or maps application to using SIP, Google Voice, or a calling card is painfully broken on iOS. Expecting users who rely on those features (a lot for default apps and some of the features the other posters mentioned like waterproofing, admittedly fewer for my other example) to switch to iOS before it has those features would be like expecting music production power users to switch to Android before low latency audio processing is fully baked. Neither of those are matters of taste.

> EDIT: Adjusting newlines, forgot that newfags can't triforce.

Seriously? I get that it's a 4chan reference but really I thought HN was better than using slurs like that even in jest.

ROTFL at mobile sniffing as a premium feature in a consumer product segment selling 400m units a year. Thanks!

>ROTFL at mobile sniffing as a premium feature in a consumer product segment selling 400m units a year. Thanks!

The condescension is palpable.