Battle Of The Mobile OS - Android Vs IOS

It used to be that if you wanted a polished mobile OS, you’d look no further than iOS. That’s not true anymore, since Android has gotten their rocks in order. Since Ice Cream Sandwich, Android has had a much more unified user interface, and its app ecosystem is now just as strong as Apple’s.

5 Ways the Android Mobile OS is Better than iOS

1. Customization – Whether it is a new launcher, a new lock screen or different LED colors, Android has an app for it. There’s very little you can’t do, even without rooting your device. With iOS if you want even a shred of customization, you have to jailbreak your phone.
2. App-to-App communication – With Android apps can tie into the system at a very deep level. For example a Twitter app like Plume can be used as the default tweeting app throughout the phone. If you want to share something from Flipboard, you hit the share button and select Plume, and it shares from there. There are many more examples of places where this deep integration by third party apps is extremely useful. iOS has none of this.
3. Keyboards – With Android you can get apps from Google play to replace your keyboard. This means you can get something like Swift Key Flow, which is the best mobile keyboard solution on the market. On the iPhone you’re stuck with the stock keyboard that doesn’t have the awesome flow or swipe gestures that make typing so easy on Android.
4. Notifications – With Android 4.1 Jellybean, Android now has expandable notifications. This is great because you get a glimpse of the info right in the notification bar. You get this on iOS too, but the notification actions in the notification bar on Android make it a ton more useful.
5. Auto-Updates – Android apps can update themselves automatically. iOS apps have to be updated manually.

5 Ways the iOS Mobile OS is better than Android

1. Way better apps – The apps on Android have gotten way better than they used to be, but iOS just has better apps. The design and functionality is just superior in almost everyway. Example: Tweetbot and Mailbox.
2. Music Controls on the lockscreen – Can’t even begin to tell you how important these are for someone who spends a lot of time listening to music.
3. Easier to make purchases – I know it doesn’t sound like a big thing, but the fact that on Android it takes like 4 steps to purchase something each and every time, seriously becomes annoying after a while. On iOS it is two steps, press buy and enter password. It could be more me than Android, but having to select the correct credit card each time is very annoying.
4. Consistency – On iOS almost all the apps work in similar ways. On Android some apps do things one way and others do the same thing another way. This has gotten better on Android in the last few versions, but is still a problem in some cases.
5. Games – There are more awesome games that are better designed and perform better on iOS than there are on Android.

Conclusions

The one thing I’d like to stress is that there is no winner here. There used to be, for sure. iOS would have kicked Android’s butt a couple of years ago. Now these two mobile OS platforms are incredibly awesome, and are very similar in many ways. You can’t go wrong no matter which way you choose.

Author: Darren wall aka Prepay writes about mobile apps, Smartphones and new mobile technologies for the The Pre Pay As You Go Blog.