iPhone has always been a superior experience to me. While it may not have that tinkering ability like an Android, on the whole Apps are much higher quality, more paying customers as a dev, lots of things that just work between devices.
I have both types of phones, an Android one privately and an iPhone for work, and in direct comparison I honestly prefer the Android user experience. It's not that I love Android, but the iPhone feels so often clunky to me.
- There's a greater reliance on gesture-based tricks, which I find unintuitive and undiscoverable
- I often feel stressed when using the iPhone because I can't figure out how to do basic things while under time duress. This is as simple as hanging up on a call I had on speaker and left to navigate to other apps: There's the green bar at the top indicating I'm still in the call, but I cannot figure out how to get back to it. If I swiped it out it's gone from the multi-tasking overview (without ending it), and unlike in Android you can't drag down the notification tray and access the call via a notification bubble
- There's reproducable little bugs that annoy me. For example when I initially boot up the phone, I can't tap the password field to open the on-screen keyboard. It doesn't work. I have to turn the screen off and turn it back on, and then I can open the keyboard
- There's flows that admittedly are used rarely but that are enormously clunky. If you open a certificate file to import, you get a frigging dialog box telling you to manually go to the Settings app and approve it in some well hidden sub-section. Why doesn't the dialog offer you a jump straight into there? These kinds of flows of composing screen pages from different apps into sequences is something Android does extremely well with the Activities concept
If I were in the situation the guy described I definitely would have tried swiping down and then got confused when that didn't work. I guess I'd eventually try tapping it.
I haven't used iOS in years though, maybe if I was used to it then tapping would have been my first impulse. Do you often have to tap on the top/bottom of the screen to do things?
You aren't really tapping on the top/bottom of the screen in an arbitrary way. There's a green oval indicator that you're on a call (or a blue oval if you have map navigation as I mentioned in my sibling post to yours). You tap on that indicator. It's been that way for years now. Perhaps it's not the most intuitive, but it's not totally unintuitive and it makes a lot more sense to tap an indicator object than to try swiping randomly.
On some older phones it's just a horizontal bar at the top of the screen. But it also says "touch to return to call" on it, so that should be fairly self-explanatory. :)
Or any other “thing” that uses your camera/mic. You will get a clear indicator that it is being used, and touching it brings you to the app in question.
I just swapped to a Pixel Fold from an iPhone 14 myself. Some of the issues you talk about are present on both, but are issues in different ways imo.
> - There's reproducable little bugs that annoy me. For example when I initially boot up the phone, I can't tap the password field to open the on-screen keyboard. It doesn't work. I have to turn the screen off and turn it back on, and then I can open the keyboard
I've also noticed bugs with the PIN input, where it just won't register touches at first when the screen turns on, leading to a missed digit at the start.
> If you open a certificate file to import, you get a frigging dialog box telling you to manually go to the Settings app and approve it in some well hidden sub-section. Why doesn't the dialog offer you a jump straight into there?
This is 100% an issue on Android now too. Not sure when they made the change, but certs result in a dialog essentially saying "go to settings."
No doubt iOS has great exclusive apps, however, Android has some gems as well.
Newpipe, Buzzkill, the ability to have any browser engine you want, 3rd party app stores, 3rd party launchers, I'm sure I'm forgetting some other perks.
Both platforms have their strengths.
I think it’s deserved in that sense.