iPhone vs Android (The Real Winner)!

Ultimate iPhone vs Android showdown! In this comprehensive comparison, we’ll dissect both ecosystems, taking a deep dive into seven critical categories that will help you determine which smartphone platform suits you best. Whether you’re a seasoned tech enthusiast or a casual user, our analysis will guide you through the maze of customization, features, ease of use, updates, apps, excitement, and ecosystems. By the end, you’ll have the tools to make an informed decision on the age-old debate: iPhone or Android? Let’s jump right in!

Introduction iPhone vs Android

All right, welcome to the definitive iPhone vs Android Blog. It’s the impossible debate, right? In a lot of ways, people just get so entrenched on one side that they never wanna flip to the other side. To each their own. You hear that all the time, but I have a solution. So here’s how we’re gonna do this. So I’m gonna break this down into seven actually meaningful categories, so it’s an odd number, so there has to be a winner, no tie, but since we’re not psychos and we know that one winner doesn’t automatically apply to every human on earth, I’m actually gonna give you a system, a rubric to help figure out the real winner for yourself. You’ll see what I mean. Let’s get into it. So, all right.

Customization

Customization in iPhone vs Android. Basically, if you see this icon and you get excited, then you probably love customization too. So, digging into the settings and messing around with the home screen and the lock screen and tweaking things and behaviors to make the device absolutely perfect for you, I mean, it’s a hobby all on its own.

Now, at first in 2023, it might actually seem like iOS 17 (Top 5 iOS 17 features) and Android 14 are pretty close, right? I mean, let’s be real. iOS just added a bunch of really good features that are very well done. The new lock screen update gives you the ability to change all these clock fonts and colors and put various super useful widgets on your lock screen and then save a bunch of different lock screen setups for different situations and different focus modes, and then widgets were also added to the home screen less than two years ago as well, so that unlocked a ton of customization of home screen setups displaying glanceable information, but the more you look into it, the more you realize it’s not actually that close.

A lot of this really just comes down to the fact that Apple, they do keep adding all these abilities, but you’re always restricted to doing it the Apple way, the correct way, and so that’s why a lot of iPhone setups still just kind of look the same. Like, even if you just take stock Android 14 from the Google Pixel, which isn’t even the most customizable version of Android, there’s still way more that you can change, from the colors of the theme of the OS matching the color of your wallpaper thanks to Material You to icon packs, custom widget sizes.

I mean, Android will just kind of let you do whatever you want. On the iPhone, you can’t expand a widget to any size you want. You can’t put an app just on the right side of your home screen for reachability. You literally can’t even place an app wherever you want on the home screen. It must be the next up in the grid of Apple’s choosing. You can’t change the grid’s size. You can’t change the icon sizes. I mean, it just takes a whole bunch of extra work and a Siri Shortcuts hack just to use a custom icon. Just basic stuff. Now, I think the other side of that coin is you can make a truly ugly, horrible Android setup, where you can’t really mess up an iPhone home screen that much.

So, while you can definitely argue that iOS does it prettier, the winner for most customization, that would be Android.

Features

So, then category number two, features in iPhone vs Android, all right? Just straight up which one can do more stuff. This has been one of the hottest debates at the forefront of iPhone vs Android conversations you always hear, mostly because both platforms, at some level, launched missing features, but especially the iPhone. Like, you’d always hear, “Wow, can you believe the iPhone can’t even set wallpapers?” And then it was, “Can you believe the iPhone is just now getting copy and paste, seriously?” And then it’s, “Wow, it’s crazy that iOS is just getting widgets now a decade later.” But, hey, now, it’s 2023 and they’re both very complete, and even in the ways that they’re not, they’re copying each other all the time.

You always see a new keynote with new stuff on Android, and you’re like, that came from iOS, and then you’ll see stuff from the iPhone keynote and be like, that came from Android, but there’s even some new stuff now that the iPhone has that Android doesn’t.

A pretty good one recently is focus modes, which gives you super high control over notifications in various different situations with your apps and your contacts. There are also a lot of privacy features, things like Hide My Email with iCloud Plus and iCloud Private Relay.

You could even argue that Dynamic Island on the Pro iPhone is a feature if you want to, but, I mean, I just couldn’t because only a small handful of apps support it, but it’s something pretty cool and unique, which is more and more rare than ever in the smartphone world. At this point, though, neither OS is really missing any gigantic features anymore. They’ve both matured up to this level where they’re their own character. They both do a lot of stuff, but I still am gonna have to give the edge to Android in this one just because there are so many little, like, tweaky, like little OS-level features, just little things that you can tweak and change on Android that still just are not on the iPhone. So I’m talking like battery management features to customized charging speeds or set manual charge limits to preserve battery life.

There’s also an actual file management system so you can drag and drop things onto your phone into certain folders if you want to. There’s gaming-specific (Checkout: 8 Best OLED Gaming Monitor) features like game modes, the ability to dial up and down your screen’s refresh rate whenever you want to. Independent volume controls for phone calls and ringtones and alarms. Also, reverse wireless charging comes up a lot for charging wireless earbuds without breaking out a separate cable.

Really, just, it comes down to the benefit of Android is having so much feature choice. That’s kind of the point, and this also bleeds into hardware too. So, even if the feature you want is a huge camera with no notch, then you have to get an Android phone, right? So, if the feature is a super fast charging or a 10x camera or USB Type-C, as of right now, it’s gotta be an Android phone.

So, even though they both offer all of the basic features and they appear to copy each other all the time on little added stuff, the winner here, again, is definitely Android.

Ease of Use

Now, number three is ease of use in our iPhone vs Android blog. Now, ease of use is very valuable to a lot of people, like a lot of people, and the thing about ease of use is it often basically has an inverse relationship with customization and a ton of features, ’cause there’s this delicate balancing act you have to do of having flexibility, giving flexibility to the user, but not overwhelming them with a ton of buttons and settings, and this is really where the iPhone excels and has excelled for years as a high priority for sure, even in the most fundamental ways.

The home screen on the iPhone has had up to four icons in the dock on every iPhone since the beginning, and the phone icon has always been green and always been on the left every single time for 17 years. The iPhone’s camera app, we’ve all seen that stay fundamentally the same with the viewfinder and the sliding modes. It’s been like that for years, and that kind of tucks away a lot of the settings into a separate settings app and it can feel like it’s missing features, but, honestly, it’s still the easiest and most straightforward for most people to use. It’s like they hate changing things for no good reason.

The calculator has basically been unchanged for years. Now, there’s also downsides to that, like Siri has basically been ignored since it was introduced, but, still, like, Apple moves the call end button by like 200 pixels to the middle of the screen and people freak out about it. Sometimes, it feels like Android versions will just move stuff around just kind of to try it and for the sake of changing things, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

They’ll move it back, and that’s interesting and exciting sometimes, but that does hurt just user continuity and ease of use. Maybe not for you watching this video, but just think for the average person, like for your five closest friends. Think about how they use their phone. Yeah, then throw on top of that, there’s basically never any bloatware loaded onto the iPhone ever, and then customer service is basically always better for an iPhone because Apple stores are everywhere and Apple controls that entire experience, for better or for worse, so they get to do great work with customers. So it’s just for people who are not enthusiasts who just wanna get the thing and not think about it anymore, they pretty much always go with the iPhone.

So ease of use is a checkbox for the iPhone.

Support and Updates

All right, so we gotta talk about updates. So number four is support. So this is something that I would classify as kind of underrated, just because I don’t think enough people buy their new phone that they plan on having for years with this in mind. I think having the latest and greatest updates, software, and security patches as quick as possible and as long as possible should be a priority, but it usually isn’t for people.

Either way, it’s kind of a mixed bag across the board. In Android world, some companies make no promises or they kind of break their promises. Some have short promises and some will actually extend out to promising three to four years of software updates. Weirdly, Samsung right now is the undisputed king of Android software updates, with some rumors of maybe Google catching back up, but Samsung announced in 2019 that all devices in 2019 or later will get four years of security updates and some flagships will even get five, but none of them really come close to the iPhone.

When iOS 17 comes out this fall, every iPhone back to the iPhone 10R from 2018 is officially supported and gonna get the latest version. That’s five major software version updates. I don’t think there are any Android phones from 2018 that are gonna get the latest version of Android 14 when it comes out.

So this one easily goes to the vertically-integrated Apple phone with the Apple software all day.

Apps

So, now, my number five category is apps. This one is actually kind of fascinating. So, obviously, we have our standard, like our apps that we all use every single day on our phones that we’re used to, but then sometimes it’s fun just sort of popping around in the respective app stores, discovering new things, finding fun apps, and, at this point, they are both flourishing. There’s millions of apps now. There’s over three and a half million apps in the Google Play Store, and over a million and a half in Apple’s App Store, which if you just stop there, looks like a win for Android, but quality over quantity, my friends.

Basically, every major app is available for both platforms, which means there are many more, you know, niche apps or relatively unknown possible diamonds in the rough on the Google Play Store, sure, but the difference is when you actually talk to these developers and observe the cycle of, like, how they get made and how these apps get updated, the truth is so many of them are prioritizing iOS, and, really, it’s purely for efficiency. Think about it.

If you just have to update one version of your app and it works with all the newest iPhones instantly and works perfectly for millions of people who all have basically the same aspect ratio, of course you’d do it, flip that switch, but, with Android, there are naturally many more complexities. There are a bunch of different devices that all have different aspect ratios and different pixel densities and different feature support and even foldables, and it’s like it’s a lot more work to get all of those users up to date with the same level of optimization. It’s a lot of different switches to flip, so a lot of ’em just don’t go through all of that or they take way longer to.

So the number of titles is one thing, but is it the same Instagram app on both iPhone and Android? Is it the same Threads app on each one? As someone who’s been carrying and using both phones and often using the same app on both phones, I have a firsthand experience of knowing that, often, even with some of Google’s own apps, the updates are prioritized on the iPhone.

They come first to the iPhone before they come to Android. I wish that wasn’t true. I wish they were just as easy to do one or the other, but that’s just the truth of it.

So the slight app advantage is gonna go to the iPhone here, and interestingly enough, this also applies generally to accessories. Again, same reason, same efficiency, but that’s a win for the iPhone.

Excitement

So then, category number six, I’m gonna go a little more subjective with this one, but I still think it matters, which is excitement. Which one is more interesting or exciting in the moment to you?

Now, honestly, I get pretty excited for a lot of different new tech these days, and, actually, because there’s only like one or two new iPhone drops every year, it’s actually very easy to get hype built up for the new iPhone, but it’s definitely a different type of excitement with the massive variety of new innovations and things that come to Android phones all the time.

Like, if you just are interested in folding phones, well, there’s more Android releases than ever for that. Want a gaming phone? There’s gonna be an Android for that. Do you want a headphone jack? Do you want a compact phone? Do you want the world’s fastest charging? Do you want some interesting new unique designs or materials or textures or experimental features? Like, that is the world of Android, and if you think about it, seriously think about this, most of the interesting excitement around every new iPhone launch, the question really is, is this new iPhone going to get a new feature that’s been in Android phones for years?

Like, are we finally gonna get USB-C on an iPhone? Are we finally gonna get fast charging on an iPhone? Are we finally gonna get a 5x camera?

And so just for that novelty reason alone, the excitement category, that’s definitely gotta go to Android.

Ecosystem

So that brings us to my last category, number seven, ecosystem. We’ve heard this word before, ecosystem.

So, okay, say what you want, but there are a lot of people who will not buy a phone if it doesn’t have iMessage or FaceTime, whatever it is, and Apple has weaponized this and built walls around this and closed it off as much as possible. Technically, you can join a FaceTime from an Android phone, but you can’t start one. So I made an entire video just about Apple’s ecosystem. Hate it or love it, it is important to some people.

Now, the thing is Apple is not the only one with an ecosystem. Like, look at Samsung for example. Apple happens to build bigger walls around keeping people into their ecosystem, but Samsung has a lot of equivalents to all the same pieces. Like, you could get a Samsung Galaxy S flagship and you could quickly and easily connect your Galaxy Buds just like AirPods.

You put on your Galaxy watch with a lot of the same features as the Apple watch. You tether to a Samsung Tab just for entertainment purposes, like an iPad, but then you get a Galaxy Book Pro with cellular internet sharing and wireless Quick Share, just like a MacBook Pro with AirDrop.

You see where I’m going? It just keeps going and going. I’m sure Samsung is eventually gonna come out with their smart speaker (Bose Portable Home Speaker Review) to match the home pod. It’s totally, totally coming, but on paper, the idea is they are surprisingly congruent. So, the way I see it, at the time of this recording, ’cause this could change very soon in the next couple weeks, but the main advantages of Samsung’s ecosystem would be things like one USB-C across literally everything, so you can use one charging cable for all of your stuff.

Two, they make more different versions of devices that fit into the ecosystem. Like, there are a ton of different phones and a bunch of different watches and different headphones and laptops, et cetera, so there’s more flexibility and hardware choice.

Classic Android, plus Samsung also makes other stuff that connects, like dishwashers and refrigerators, but then the advantages of Apple’s ecosystem, not just in the US, but especially here, are, first of all, ease of use and seamlessness. Like, it is genuinely crazy how good some of the continuity stuff is in Apple’s ecosystem. Like, something like Continuity Camera is so sick every time. You just push one button to use a super high quality iPhone camera as your webcam. It works very, very well, but then the popularity factor, especially in the US, makes things like FaceTime and iMessage and the Find My Network super strong.

So I can make a whole video on this. I could put up the strengths and weaknesses and put up just these two ecosystems up against each other, but, as of right now, they’re both very strong, and I’m gonna give the slight edge to Apple’s, just because, one, I’m in the US and that advantage is strong, but, two, just because of the seamlessness and how well things are integrated and the continuity features are unreal.

So, if we tally these all up here, you can see that the objective winner, in four out of the seven categories that I made up, is the iPhone, but put your pitchforks down.

Picking an Actual Winner

Guess what? As you’ve probably picked up from the beginning of this blog, there is no objective winner to a decision as personal as this one and when the options are this close. You probably already know, if you’ve been reading my blogs, you know I main an Android phone most of the time alongside an iPhone, but my main phone and my main customized setups are on the Android phone, so what gives? Like, picking one de facto winner kind of suggests that the one winner is best for everyone, but we already know that there’s some people who literally don’t care about some features that some others would say they can’t live without. So I’ve devised a very basic system to help you pick your winner for yourself, and it’s really quite simple. All you have to do is put these seven categories in order of importance to you and then rate each one of them let’s say on a scale from one to five. So give them a one to five point rating based on how much you care about it. So, here, for me, I care the most about customization and features. Then I care a lot about apps, and excitement and updates are decently important, but then in my daily driver, ease of use and ecosystem aren’t that big of a deal. I’ve got a mixed bag.

So then I just give the amount of points earned to each winner of that category. So the winner for me is clearly Android, but, hey, for you, maybe you care a lot about ecosystem and maybe nothing else. I’m sure you know someone like this. Then the iPhone will clearly be calling your name, or if you’re the type who wants all the features and excitement in the world, well, then Android probably is what’s in your pocket.

You might even have your own category you could add in that’s heavily weighted. I kind of see it like buying a car. Like maybe Cool Factor is in there. Have at it. It turns out buying a phone is one of the most personal decisions you make. I’ve said this before, but, like, it’s the thing you spent your money on and you carry everywhere you go, and so that’s why people get so worked up about this side versus that side, but, at the end of the day, the winner, not to be cheesy, is us, because they’re competing against each other to get better to hopefully win you over, and that’s the way it should be. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one. Peace.

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