The Apple iPhone revolutionized the world in 2007 and is the most popular phone in the U.S. today. Despite this popularity, what does the iPhone actually have to offer? Android phones are often cheaper and have more software versatility. What is gained by choosing an iPhone in 2025?
Three primary areas that the iPhone excels in are: privacy, ease of use and aesthetics.
One clear pro of Apple is its sandboxing method for running 3rd party applications. This is a legitimately good security feature and helps to greatly reduce interapp tracking. Apple also allows a user to “request not to be tracked” when using apps that may record information, though this often only affects the aforementioned inter app tracking. In addition to the sandboxing they have encrypted messaging built in via the iMessage protocol.
The second feature that is often brought up when talking about Apple is the ease of use, and it is true that Apple puts a lot of effort into making unified and easy to use user interfaces(UI). Tied closely to the UI is the aesthetics. Apple offers what they believe to be a sleek and modern take on the smartphone.
All of those pro’s seem really good so why do I believe Iphones “suck”? Primarily every single one of those pros comes with many cons that Apple users never knew about because they locked themselves into an ecosystem where the only features are Apple ones.
Inbuilt sandboxing and privacy sounds like a good idea, but all that really counts for nothing when a single email or Google account is used to log in across multiple apps. Google does not need Apple’s permission to track that, allowing them to aggregate info from each individual app. This allows for them to get a similar effect of being able to track activity across apps.
In terms of security, and malware risk, Apple does have a concrete advantage here, but that security comes at the cost of only being able to run Apple approved applications. This is slowly changing due to anti-trust lawsuits in the EU. In contrast, APK system allows easy downloading and installing of all manner of apps. This does increase the risk of malware, but also access a wide variety of non-official software. See the recent Fortnite legal battle.
Now Android is not better on privacy by default. Google loves to sell data, but the options to turn most of the device wide data collection mechanisms off are exposed, and with some tweaking, a user can gain more control over their privacy than Apple allows.
This is where that ease of use becomes a con, not a pro. A stock Android is basically on par with IOS in terms of default usability at this point, but it also exposes the more advanced options that IOS completely removes from the users controls. Though this does make it more idiot proof, it also once again leaves what the user can do with their phone in Apple’s hands, not their own.
Finally aesthetics, Apple no doubt has generally good software aesthetics, but once again the user is limited to what Apple wants to allow. The changes the user can make do not allow complete customization, they are strictly limited to what options Apple exposes to app developers and their users. They also have one singular external design while there is infinite variety in Android based phones, from flips to folds, there are just more internal and external aesthetic options. The user, not Apple’s design team, gets to decide how they want their phone to look.
So in the end, it boils down to who controls how someone uses their phone, the user or the company? Apple’s philosophy is “we know best,” but Android based OSes offer the chance for people to actually decide what they really want on their phone instead of a company deciding for them.
