I tried an iPhone 6, moving away from a Nexus 5 and then a Moto X. I enjoyed many parts of it--Touch ID is cool, Apple Pay is cool--but I took it back two days later because the operating system expects you to have a thumb the size of Montana to do something as simple as going back a screen in the mail app and I found dealing with applications and getting the phone the way I wanted it (and I'm no iOS newbie, I had an iPhone 4 and have multiple iPads) was at best interminable, at worst impossible. I bought a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. It's the first cell phone I've loved since the iPhone 4--unsurprising, as it borrows a lot from its design while being pretty unique and pleasant on its own. (The waterproofing is great, hiding the connectors during regular use is nice, having a real focus-stop camera button is brilliant. Also, it's bright orange. My Nexus 5 was bright red. This is kind of my thing.)

As far as your argumentum ad turtleneckum, I wouldn't give ninety percent of the people I know in Silicon Valley the time of day. Their choice of phone doesn't reflect on me or the world at large.

Most of my iOS complaints were fixed in 8 and phone size was finally remedied.

Admittedly, if Google had released an update Nexus5+ for $350 I likely would have just stayed with Android for the cost alone.

There are lots of shovelware applications on Android (lots on iOS too, though), but I don't really live on my phone so I think it's just much less of a thing for me.

That wasn't the main reason I took it back, though if they had an iPhone 5-sized upgraded iPhone 6 I'd probably have kept it longer. (I probably wouldn't have kept it, there were enough other frustrations that not paying $900 for a phone and being able to get a better phone for my use case for $375 was appealing, but it might have lasted longer than a snowy weekend.)

It's a status signaller. It's like the Macbook Pro. From your reasoning, OSX must be the best OS out there given its popularity in SV, yet the grunt work for the vast majority of SV companies is done by linux - the stuff on the servers, making their money. Horses for courses, there is no One True OS.

It's also a massive overgeneralisation to say that the population of SV are essentially experts in phone design and UX. And if you think that the SV engineer is immune to fashion trends by dint of 'being professional', you'd be wrong. Witness the current fad of flat design, for example.

Then there's people like me, who see the 'better experience' as including things outside the phone. Supporting Apple supports their business model which suffocates open source and prevents tinkering. That's a worse experience for me.

Apple makes the only usable laptop OS these days (now that Windows 7 gave way to iOWondows)

Edit: I also disagree with the comment that OSX is the only usable laptop OS. Linux does require more maintenance overhead, but it's perfectly usable. At my last workplace there were plenty of people complaining about their OSX laptops, both in terms of various problems, and also that their older machines were slowing to the point of uselessness.

Like I said, horses for courses.

Also, Linus Torvalds uses OS X on his macbook air.

It's almost like OSX isn't the One True OS, and that different people have different preferences.