Android vs iOS — Part I: iOS

Ever since both major mobile operating systems we know today were on the market in 2008, there have been countless fights over the question which OS is better. There is the Android camp, and there is the Apple camp. The answer is: one’s not better than the other, their different.

iOS is a closed system. That means no user can change anything that Apple doesn’t want you to change, you can’t install Apps from untrusted sources and functionality is too limited for many. Their are benefits to this strict control:

SECURITY iOS is arguable the most secure mobile operating system on the market, at least the ones we know of. Of course, there is the “Blackphone”, which promised absolute security when it launched in 2014, but security researchers quickly found back doors due to the Android base. IOS has been tried to be cracked by the CIA for over 10 years, but the agency didn’t have success. Think about that: 10 years.

RESPONSIVENESS IOS is amazingly responsive, and always has been. This is due to Apple’s excellent software optimization. As the company only has very few models of their phones on the market, the software does not have to be as extensive as Google’s OS, because Android needs to run on hundreds of different systems. On ARM-based chips, Intel based chips, different motherboards and so on. You get the point. This is the also the reason why specs do not matter in real world performance: There are Android devices with octa-core processors and 3 gb of ram. Apple devices have 1 Gb of ram and a dual core processor for the most part, but when it comes to user experience, iOS is still more consistent and fluid.

RECOGNIZABILITY What I mean by recognizability: iOS looks exactly the same on any Apple device. As the company offers a design framework built into XCode, the programming environment for building Mac and iOS apps, developers can only make apps that people instantly feel familiar with. You can see the confusion caused by the fragmentation of Android just by thinking about people you know owning an Android device: a Samsung device in their hands, non-techies think it is a different OS. Google is slowly trying to offer a uniform design language across devices with Material Design, which is beautiful. But again, as Google gave manufactures the control over Android, it is not visible on most Android devices. There are exceptions, like Motorola, which leaves the design almost untouched, but as long as Google allows modifications, we will not see a uniform experience.

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Originally published at techsational.com on March 19, 2015.