You're getting to a core difference between Android and iPhone:

iPhone users seem to always want to convince everyone to move to iPhone. Always feels like SPS lurking in the background.

Android users seem to "live and let live."

That�s not been my experience with Android fan boys who are as obnoxious as iPhone boys. I currently have a Samsung & iPhone.

I moved from iOS to Android in about 2012 after I became disillusioned with how locked down iOS was. Back then, you could Jailbreak to get some of the functionality, but it was all a bit of a faff. Things like grouping apps together in groups, home screen widgets, VPN clients were just not possible. Going to Android was like a breath of fresh air. I'll arrange the home screen how *I* like it thank you very much. I'll have a nice weather app, and I'll have small app icons so I can see more on the main home screen without having to swipe.

I also had a Samsung tablet for years. However, last year they lost me when they moved the fingerprint reader from under the screen to the thin power button on the edge. So, I had a look at an iPad Pro (I knew I could return if I didn't like it). I was won over in about an hour. Most of my gripes from 2012 had gone away, and I could live with the gripes that were still there.

Within a couple of months I'd got the Apple Watch and the iPhone 12. I still can't customise the home screen as much as I'd like, but I can live with it. FaceId is great, and the implementation of Wallet / ApplePay is better than the slightly clunky Android versions (IMO).

Same with Apple, just that they let App developers bear the brunt of these decisions. Example: The have just announced - with next to zero lead time - that they'll be removing third-party app access to Siri. from IOS 15 on. All developers who have spent considerable resources on the SiriKit interface are now left with nothing ,and customers will not be happy.

A very large number of people especially in Asia/China do not own desktop computers anymore. Especially small business owners use their phones and Dex for just about everything. Considering the cost and available computing power of premium smartphones these days, that even makes a lot of sense.

or people just buy whatever works for them

I am kinda with LordHamster. My work phone is iphone X. My travel phone is Pixel 3xl on google fi. I use an ipad mini. I have airpods. On our international trip last week the hotel wifi didnt let my wife log in. I could get on wifi with my Pixel, and then do the hotspot and share the hotel wifi, super easy. Nothing that apple has that I have found lets you share a wifi connection as a hotspot. I have 3 other ear buds that beat the crap out of the apple airpods. That was a waste of money to get those. They are incredibly uncomfortable and have terrible audio compared to their competitors, for instance Amazon earbuds, my workout go to, or Anker liberty sound core 2, among others. So I am device agnostic and laugh at people (to my self) who are all in on one or the other.

Thanks for answering. Yeah that is better.

Liking an Apple product does not mean a person is hypnotized by their marketing.

The sharing of Wifi is one thing that I'd forgotten about since my move from Android to iOS. I used that a lot in those hotels that limit you to a certain number of devices. Having hardly stayed in a hotel for the last 18 months...

Regarding the AirPods - I've got the AirPods Pro. I've tried all sorts of earbuds - and I find these to be the best for my ears (I'm not an audiophile - but they sound good to me). The only ones that seemed better were the B&O BeoPlay... until I actually moved from my desk. They then cut out every 30 seconds so they were returned for a refund (it seems to be a common issue with Beoplay's).

To follow up on Android shaming, the proposed photo surveillance that Apple will be implementing may drive some people away from their ecosystem. So in one regard this is Apple shaming. Putting on my expert witness hat, everyone I work with takes care of abused children. They also all have iphones. Everyone I work with takes pictures of abused children to share with law enforcement. Everyone I work with also sees children with medical and surgical problems of sensitive body parts. Everyone takes pictures to get second opinions or to facilitate handover and document improvement or worsening. Also, the patient's parents take pictures of sensitive anatomy to send to our team for telemedicine diagnosis. I don't see any names of the people they are supposed to be working with to make sure things are appropriate. If I didn't know them personally I could research their expertise to see if they were legit. If this turns out like I think it will, Apple will be reporting 1000s of health care providers and parents to law enforcement for completely innocent/appropriate photos. Plaintiff attorneys will have a field day.

And regulators. I sincerely doubt that this will fly in the EU (likely the reason why this 'feature' will be implemented only in the US for now).

I wouldn’t be so sure about this iCloud and iMessage surveillance-facilitation approach not also flying in the EU if it ends up flying in the US. For going on decades now, EU-area countries’ law enforcement personnel and others in government in the area have been complaining about how encryption use was getting in the way of their crime-fighting investigations and security operations of various sorts. And it has been such that rather commonly their governments would de facto enable backdoors around their own laws by having the USG run operations — even “on the ground” … but not just physically ‘the ground’ — under cover of foreign sovereign immunity.

This is not about iCloud and iMessage scanning (which would happens on Apples' servers on content stored there), these new CSAM scans are triggered directly on the device. And that is what under GDPR rules would not be legal in the EU.
BTW, iMessage content and iCloud photos are not end-to-end encrypted There's voices who surmise the introduction of on-device scanning might be a precursor to Apple offering end-to-end encryption on iCloud in the future, but that hasn't been confirmed.
I`ve found this article a very good, overview about all this: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/apple-csam-intro/. It's not too technical, but very thorough.

and here is Apple's response after I sent something in with details of how they could fail. The leadership of NCMEC Looks great except there is not a singled medical expert on child abuse in the leadership. It is all lawyers and LEOs and software people. There are training programs for pediatricians who are experts in Child maltreatment. And of course Apple is ignoring them.

Dear Mr boerne,

Thank you for contacting Apple’s privacy team.

At Apple, our goal is to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives — while helping them stay safe. We want to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).

Apple is introducing new child safety features in three areas, developed in collaboration with child safety experts. These features are coming later this year in updates to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey for users in the US.

Information on the expanded protections for children is available here:

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

This document serves to address questions and provide more clarity and transparency on the process:

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/p..._Questions.pdf

Apple’s method of detecting known CSAM is designed with user privacy in mind. The new technology used allows Apple to provide valuable and actionable information to NCMEC and law enforcement regarding the proliferation of known CSAM. And it does so while providing significant privacy benefits over existing techniques since Apple only learns about users’ photos if they have a collection of known CSAM in their iCloud Photos account. Even in these cases, Apple only learns about images that match known CSAM.

For further information, please see the technology summary available at the following link:

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/p...gy_Summary.pdf

In addition, Apple has produced a technical summary on CSAM Detection, which is available here:

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/p...al_Summary.pdf

Kind regards,

Fiona Nolan
Apple Privacy

Information in this email including any attachments may be privileged, confidential and is intended exclusively for the addressee. The views expressed may not be official policy, but the personal views of the originator. If you have received it in error, please notify the sender by return e-mail and delete it from your system. You should not reproduce, distribute, store, retransmit, use or disclose its contents to anyone. Please note we reserve the right to monitor all e-mail communication through our internal and external networks. Apple and the Apple logo are trade marks of Apple Inc registered in the US and other countries.

Having worked in software development and other tech-related roles for the past 25 years, I've seen a lot of banter back and forth between devotees of various ecosystems. People still mock Apple cultists, particularly the ones willing to wait in line to get into an Apple store, although I think there's general acceptance at this point that both Apple and Android are mature and technically sound ecosystems. The only difference is that I don't know many Android users who proselytize about it the way Apple users do. It's just, y'know, a phone... I'm not going to convert from one to another based on impassioned witness from a friend or colleague.

I have an iPhone X for work and a Pixel 3 as my personal phone. My kids are on iPhones - they'd probably fall into the "hypnotized by the marketing" crowd. They don't know or care what tech is inside the phone, and either platform is good enough to run the things they care about like texting and Instagram. I'll have to remember to ask them about green texts...that's kind of funny.

The main thing I want in my next personal phone is a great camera, so it's possible that I'll pick an iPhone depending on what's out there and what promotions are available when I upgrade. But I'm most familiar with Android, so if it's close to a dead heat in terms of overall capability and value, I'll probably default to what I know and get another Pixel (or similar).