Apple

Well iOS has a shift key.

I bought the iPhone 14 plus and iPad 10 out of curiosity. Compared to the android devices they replaced? The Apple devices were not intuitive and had no instructions for starting. A trip to the store where I bought them and the salesperson showed me how to start and stop the devices, sold me a power block Apple didn’t include, and them Chrome searches on my old Android device helped me set up what I actually use. I’m sure there are features and abilities on the Apple toys that I will never know about or use. The iPhone and iPad are very smooth and slippery glass so a bulky protective case hide anything design wise. My iPad never leaves the house so it didn’t need Apple Care. My 2017 Samsung tablet is working fine, so I take care of my toys.

I do infosec for a living and I’ll say security.

iOS is far from perfect but it’s a clear difference between the operating systems.

App Store is more tightly controlled which helps.

Hardware and Secure Enclave in Apple are just designed more security first.

Once again not saying it is foolproof or even awesome but there is a clear leader in the space.

Some of that has to do with the one vs many relationship of Apple vs android producers too.

I've been down the same rabbit hole you are looking into. I've been a long time android user, and I switched to the first gen SE and then switched back to android.

The thing about iphone is that, its more akin to a switch phone. If all you are doing is making calls and browsing some social media its good enough. For everything else you will need an android. For me I can live with an android plus an iphone or an android alone. But never an iphone alone.

The smoothness in the os is great and you dont have to brace yourself during every update if it will make you device laggy like what happens in android.

The built is good but nowadays there are androids that go even beyond.

Multitasking and the files app are a joke. How iphone works is that it freezes the state of the app in place when you exit. This has its benefits and cons. Benefits being better battery life and malware won't run in the background. Con being that almost anything that involves background processes works like crap. Downloads pause, apps reload etc.

Suppose you want to share a hi res pic you took via whatsapp as a file. First you have to go to photos ans save the file to files app. Then go into files and share that file to whatsapp. Something that can be done in 1 step in android.

battery life. no Android flagship (with us availability) can compete.

I have both phones. What I do miss on an iPhone is the complete lack of split screen, multitasking so I can have a tiny window of YouTube open and DEX to use a phone as a computer when connected to a monitor.

Besides what you said, smoother animations on iOS, face id (compared to fingerprint) and camera I like better, but that’s subjective.

Other than that, android is a far superior operating system. Besides things it simply does better like notifications and device input (keyboard, cursor management, copy&paste) android simply has more features available.

If you will notice people who say iOS is better, other than what I mentioned they can’t have concrete examples, they say passwords, “it just feels better”, “it just works”, “its more polished”. But it’s easy to give concrete examples of the advantages of android:

Just a few examples of features android has and iOS doesn’t: true caller id support, notification history, separate alarm and call volume, control over messaging app which gives abilities such as automatic spam filtering, notification history view, infinite call history log, can sort camera images automatically into a dedicated folder/album (this one is a mess in iOS), controlling different types of notifications per app, consistent back gesture, and the list goes on…

Also most things you want to do can simply be done with less steps and friction on android. There are many examples but one example is if you get a notification from an app, you can get from this notification straight into the notification configuration of this app.