Yesterday I switched back from my Nexus 4 running Android 4.3 to a brand new (pink!) iPhone 5C.
This is a compilation of reasons, prompted partly by people telling me that "Apple is just now catching up to companies like Samsung".
To uninformed people reading this - short clarification, the 5C is not Apple's top-of-the-line phone. That would be the 5S.
- Specs: I haven't got much to say about this point. The phone feels subjectively faster, but I'll get to that in more detail later. The battery life is about double what I had on Android (and that's with LTE, Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS on - which I never did on Android (partly because it didn't support LTE here)). In terms of "catching up to Samsung" I believe that Apple, with their 5S, actually leads at the moment (does Samsung have 64Bit ARM CPUs in consumer products?)
- Materials: The phone is made out of plastic, but it's a stark difference to older phones like the 3G / 3Gs and certainly an even more noticeable difference to current Samsung phones. I remember holding some Samsung phone (Galaxy Something Something) that let you bend the back cover by slightly pressing it with your finger. Apple's plastic phone feels very sturdy (sturdier even than my Nexus 4, which has the mysterious spiderweb issue), partly because it's reinforced with the metal frame that serves as the antenna and partly because the plastic seems to be thicker than what was on the 3G / 3Gs etc. It's probably also not the same material (doesn't feel like it, we have a 3Gs here so I held both of them and compared)
- Camera: The iPhone 5/5C cameras are much better than what I've seen from my Nexus which was often disappointingly bad (if you read the /r/nexus4 subreddit you'll often see people posting the one good shot they made in a kind of apologetic way). The 5S is another league entirely. I'm not in a nice environment for comparison shots right now, but I've made these two images so you can compare (5C vs. Nexus 4). Will update later with a better motive. http://klaud.tazj.in/RqLB & http://klaud.tazj.in/RqSv
- Battery: See above, battery time is about doubled from my Nexus.
- Display: Looking at my Nexus 4 now makes it seem like it has a yellow tinting issue going on, I believe it didn't have this when I first got this so it could be something that gradually happens?
- Sound: No scientific information on this, but sound sounds subjectively better on the 5C than on the Nexus 4. It also sounds better than on the iPhone 5 and I'm not the only person saying this so Apple seems to have done something.
- Lightning port: This needs to be mentioned because I'm very opposed to Mini-USB (or is it Micro? Or something else? It's easy to get confused). It's a small flimsy connector that can only be inserted one way and every time you do it it feels like you're going to break it, this is not just a problem with the Nexus 4. Apple's lightning port has none of these problems, the cable goes in both ways (so amazing), it's easy to plug in (even in the dark) etc. etc.
- Headphone port: I have volume buttons again. It's liberating.
Is there anything I miss from the Nexus 4, hardware wise? Hm. Many would probably expect me to say "display size!!!" but actually no, I don't miss that. Back when I got the Nexus 4 I chose it even though already back then I felt like it was too large. Maybe NFC, but I haven't actually used it that often and AirDrop seems to work well from my (very limited) testing.
I don't even know where to start. Some of these things are only meant to be understood by people who already know them because I've realized that it's futile to explain to people who don't grasp UX why good UX is important.
Better on iOS:
- App quality: Almost every single app I've used on my Nexus 4 did some function of an app that I used to have on my iPhones before it, I can't remember any specific outstanding app (the Android Spotify client used to be better than the iOS one - used to!). In the contrary I have quite a long list of outstanding apps, most of which - if they have an Android version - have degraded functinonality and usability over there. Some examples of apps that are better on iOS include, but aren't limited to: Alien Blue, Twitterific, Spotify, GMail (ha!), 1Password and Instacast. In fact I have now remembered a single app that was better on Android: The HackerNews client I used. I probably haven't searched enough yet on iOS.
- UX: iOS 7 changed a lot about how iOS works. Most apps have adapted to that really quickly and with a few exceptions everything on my phone already feels like it's at home on iOS 7. This includes changing to new navigation paradigms, button layouts, visual cues etc - Apple is very good at getting developers to follow it's UI guidelines (and they make it very easy) whereas on Android every single app seems to implement it's own UI framework (again with a few notable exceptions, mostly by Google).
- Smoothness: iOS is more fluid. Period. My Nexus 4 felt a bit like a Windows computer, gradually getting slower and slower before it eventually got to a point where dragging down notification center took up to 5 seconds. I guess Apple has an advantage of not having to run everything in a VM, but Google could've thought about that before they settled on Java. Also I do believe that Apple is much better at optimizing their low-level software for the hardware they run on, not only because they don't frantically try to release 200 billion phones every year.
- Apps sticking to API guidelines: I wasn't sure how to summarize this. On Android apps have no obligation to use the correct API for whatever they're doing, this leads to situations (which I've encountered frequently) like two apps competing over the pause button because one of them does not use the correct audio playback API. I'd frequently use my headphones (the one button that worked) on the Nexus to pause an audio book in Storytel (very good service btw, Spotify for audio books!) which would pause the audio book ... and then start playing music or podcasts again.
- Mute behaviour: Android has (by default) three options - sound on, vibration or mute. You enable those by going down with your volume below zero which first switches to vibration and then to mute, once your phone reaches mute it does absolutely nothing when you get a text/call/mail/whatever - unless you directly look at it ofcourse. This makes it very easy to accidentally disable all vibration as well which made me miss dozens of calls on Android, on iOS this isn't easily possible. Sane defaults!
Better on Android (gasp):
- Keyboards: Android has Swype which is awesome. But I'm only talking about Swype, which is third party. The native keyboard swiping and SwiftKey Flow never worked as well for me.
- Notifications: Android is better at notifications. Interactive notifications, syncing of notifications and all of that works much better. I trust in Apple to fix this at some point though.
This is revision 3 of this document, if I think of more things I'll update it (at the same location). Ping me on Twitter for questions, but if you want to get angry and tell me that Apple is the evil Antichrist ruining the world and only out to get your money (lol) please contact me by opening a shell and typing cat > /dev/null. Type your message and press CTRL+D when you're done, your message will be transferred to me immediately.