No Stupid Questions

Not an American but to be honest, both Google and Apple are appalling. Google openly steal all your data and sell it. Apple do similar but on a smaller scale but also claim they're all about privacy. Both make it difficult to use alternative app stores but with Apple its actually impossible. Phone vendors can and do install their own awful bloat on Android phones. Apple force you to use webkit for any browsing you might want to do, Android's native GUI is a mess. Nothing Apple put on their devices is open source so all their claims of privacy can never be verified. Both companies constantly try and impose proprietary standards or charge you a bajillion pounds for a fucking pen or some such bullshit.

The key difference for me is I can put something like Calyx or Graphene on an Android device and use a whole open source ecosystem of alternative apps which vastly improves the privacy of my device.

Not an American, but as an iPhone user who has had Android phones since cupcake before: iPhones „just work“, they are a lot less janky than Android, the ecosystem is smooth (although admittedly and intentionally less so when leaving it), they get updated for longer (and at the same time!) and apple has a much better privacy track record than the competition (a low bar).

Yes, I would prefer to install my apps from anywhere I want on the device I should own. An open source phone from top to bottom would be my dream, but Android is about as far removed from that as an iphone. Google took Linux and made it into a Frankenstein nightmare that is wholly dependent on them.

Just try to stick to open source and make your phone respect your privacy and see how far you get. Start at the usually locked bootloader, install a rom without google and see how few apps are left that do not require google services. And even then you are most likely dependent on binary blobs for the drivers, meaning the manufacturers can (and will) pull the rug from under your efforts as soon as they no longer feel like updating their shitty built of Android for the device in time.

I do not have time for that. What I have is enough money to buy a phone that comes as close as possible to my idea of safety, freedom and privacy without constantly jumping through burning hoops. If I am to be in a cage, it better be golden.

Not an iphone user, but am intrigued by all the ads the apple people say are on androids. Literally have never seen one, and I've had adjusted androids since the og htcs.

Conspicuous consumption.

Americans have been propagandized by Apple advertising into thinking Apple products are "high class."

Ask yourself: Why does anyone wear a Rolex?

It boils down to the same thing, showing people your wealth and thus "social value" (barf) via conspicuous consumption.

If it wasn't conspicuous consumption, why would US people literally judge potential dating partners on what kind of phone they use?

Example: https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/technology-blog/story/2008-08-07/apple-removes-1-000-featureless-iphone-application

Its function is exactly what the name implies: to alert people that you have money in the bank. I Am Rich was available for purchase from the phone’s App Store for, get this, $999.99 -- the highest amount a developer can charge through the digital retailer, said Armin Heinrich, the program’s developer. Once downloaded, it doesn’t do much -- a red icon sits on the iPhone home screen like any other application, with the subtext ‘I Am Rich.’ Once activated, it treats the user to a large, glowing gem (pictured above). That’s about it. For a thousand dollars.

This was barely a year after the original iPhone's release. The attitude toward Apple products has persisted ever since.

I want my phone to be like a gaming console.

I turn it on, it works. I install curated stuff from a store.

The hardware is stable and predictable and thus software is of better quality when the developer doesn’t need to test 420 different hardware variants.

I do not want it to be a Linux PC I need to tinker with every day. I specifically want it to prevent me from fucking with it.

EDIT: I also have “adult money” so I can get any phone I want, I don’t need to get the cheapest.

The average American is a fucking idiot and half of them are dumber than that

Not an American, but I ended up with an iPhone simply because the cost difference between it and an Android device via my carrier wasn't that big. It was also a previous generation model at a steep discount which helped a lot.

I am not a fan of Apple but if a company is going to screw me then at least Apple isn't so in-my-face about it like Google is. Google's data harvesting and ads are absolutely atrocious.

I used Blackberry right up until they ditched BB10. Sometimes I wonder if I should just get a feature phone because modern smartphones are awful things.

Honestly, if you can tolerate the Apple ecosystem it works really well, with adequate privacy. My wife and my mother both use them and I recommend it for anyone who isn't a privacy nerd.

If the user isn't willing to jump through hoops to lock shit down, Apple offers a better suite across platforms for privacy and security.

Honestly I didn’t get an iPhone until 2021 or so and all of my android phones before then ran slow in a year or so. That never happened with my iPhones. Having recently gotten into privacy and selfhosting I have considered a pixel with graphene but don’t wanna waste money.

Worth noting I don’t use iCloud or any of those Apple related services.

I know my partner thinks the same way. My family all has them recently too. Idk why though. We mostly had Samsung before then LG earlier.

I’m a professional C# developer, and I switched to iPhone in 2020. Mostly I wanted a more controlled, curated App Store for increased confidence in a safe execution environment. I’ll pay the $100/yr for a developer account if I really need to build and run my own code.

The lack of ad block options bugs me. I also don’t use iCloud.

I have doubts about whether this question is asking or proselytizing.

Through the release of the first iPhone to the mid 2010s I'd wager that most consumers agreed that iPhones were superior to Android by most metrics: they featured more support across the board, had more apps, looked nicer, and were considered the premium. Apple pioneered the modern smartphone and had a headstart in getting users hooked into their ecosystem. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in the wealthiest country in the world (and Apple's home country).

That's a huge generalization but I think it resonates true to a degree. Also, anecdotally, I remember that all my school computers were Macs when growing up. I'm sure Apple seeped its tendrils into people's lives a variety of ways. It's not a cake walk for most people to switch ecosystems. As a lifelong Windows user I'll have a panic attack if you asked me to print a document on a Mac; I'm sure its the same vice versa lol

Honestly, at this point, the only reason to go with either ecosystem is that Android, for now, allows you to escape Google, to some degree depending on how much work you're willing to put in. IOS/apple doesn't allow that

But, Google is trying hard to get to the same place.

But, ignoring that, apple got there first. That's what it amounts to. The first real smart phone was by Apple, and that gave them a leg up

android user now but basically... it might be that most of us Americans try to take the path of least resistance or whatever doesn't give us headaches. I mean like, almost everything we do (except taxes) are pretty simplified. And even for taxes, we can LITERALLY pay for services to simplify or do it for us ( like wtf, this is kinda stupid). Apple does a good job of making it an easy experience.

1. easy to use - like an automatic car vs manual car.

2. popular apps just work - I don't think its a problem now but I remember when some social media apps were just broken on android vs iphone.

3. a lot of the software looks pretty clean and fancy. Gives it a polished experience.

4. HARD TO LEAVE - Apple products work better with other apple products. Once you leave, you basically lose out on all the purchases you've made over the years.

5. Apple store support - life saver for most people

6. Security updates more consistent.

Hell, trying to adjust from typing with iphone keyboard to android keyboard took longer than expected.

Also our government issues out iphones for fed employees.

unless you're going to crack your android and install a custom rom (which, with limited exceptions, is extremely risky to do,) your choice is to either use an apple product, or a google-based OS.

Apple has a slick design, and while android (and many of he devices it runs on) aren't awful, it's hard to change. and virtually every mainstream mobile device manufacturer is using some some form of android os with a custom UI, including Huawei (which no officially a fork, because of sanctions.)

everything that's not android or apple is pretty much going to have to be installed custom. (there's a few linux-based things that aren't android, mobian, for example is a mobile-version of debian.)

I'll leave it to the other to rant about why apple might be better than android for privacy and useability, given the caveat of not hacking a custom rom.

Usamericans usually like to look for "the best", whatever that means, and never accept "second". I assume that they need that to feed their pride.

Apple has managed to make them believe that iPhone products were the best smartphones, and all of Apple's marketing is focused on maintaining that belief.

I like the user experience. I like the quality of the third party apps available. I like Apple's stated commitment to privacy. I don't trust Google.

I personally do not trust Google at all. Their entire business model is ads and tracking.

I would never use an iPhone if my phone were my primary computing device. But I just make occasional calls and texts, and use a handful of apps (for instance, Nextcloud and Home Assistant connected directly to my home server, bypassing most of Apple’s ecosystem).

For a secondary device, I just want something simple and sturdy that I have to think about as little as possible—and for that specific use case the limitations are a plus.

Why do most [insert country here] people use [insert brand from their country here]???

My reasons:

1. Because it just works.
2. I can uninstall the trash apps that apple includes and use my own preferences.
3. Don’t have to deal with bloatware from two vendors (Google and Samsung for example)
4. Vendor lock-in. I started on iOS (iPod touch) and so I have a certain amount of app purchases that are iOS-only. This is the only one that galls me.
5. longevity / platform support. I’ve had this thing for close to five years, and the battery is only starting to fail in the last few months.
6. decent display. Samsung galaxy’s PCM brightness control gives me horrible eye strain.

Maybe it’s just Samsung that’s trash, I dunno. I tried hard to like android and in principle I should prefer Google’s more open ecosystem. But it just seems to enable every manufacturer of android phones to try to outcompete each other in how awful they can make the experience of owning their products, all in the name of trying to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

I think you vastly overestimate the "freedom" people need with their phone, you are doing the same thing Linux evangelists do, why would anyone use Windows when with just a phew workarounds everything works on Linux too, completely forgetting that average joe doesn't give a fuck about any of that, they want something that just works and Apple is still the best at that.

Personally I am a tinkerer and I still switched to an iPhone, because I need a phone that just works, with android there was always something randomly breaking, and most phones I had to set up to restart every evening otherwise it would just have random glitches in a few days.

I have owned my iphone for close to 2 years now and I can count on one hand how many times I had to restart it, hell I remember having and issue restarting it because I forgot how to do it.