I don't have a reason for writing this. Usually there's a hook; a launch, a review, something that actually happened. Yet this time there isn't one. The Made by Google event being as bland and lacklustre as it was probably put me in the mood, but I can't honestly claim that's the reason, because Apple are bland and lacklustre plenty of the time too. I just want to get this off my chest, so here it is.
And before anyone decides what kind of post this is: it isn't a post about Apple being brilliant. I have always said (and I will keep saying!) that Android phones have the capacity to be far better than whatever iPhone Apple has just shipped. I'm not being sarcastic, I do believe it.
The people who defend Android to the death will tell you the camera is better, the battery is better, they can sideload whatever they want, they can pirate Spotify easily, they get real customisation, they get form factors Apple won't touch. I mean, when I say form factors I mainly only mean foldables. But every single one of those reasons is a good reason, and I agree with all of them.
The problem is that nobody gives a shit.
Any iPhone you buy is a good phone
If you buy an iPhone, you have a good phone. That's the whole story, that's where it ends.
Apple have never made a bad iPhone. You can bring up the 5c, you can bring up the 6, you can bring up the XR, you can go all the way back to the 3GS if you want - and I'll go through them, because my point survives all of it.
The 3GS wasn't bad. The 6 might have bent but it wasn't a bad phone, it was actually a genuinely great phone for the time. The 5c is interesting, because the 5c didn't fail on quality. The 5c failed because it had no reason to exist. DankPods on YouTube put this brilliantly in his full length retrospective of the device, but to put it briefly: It was an iPhone 5 in plastic for roughly the same money, without the slow-mo camera or Touch ID or any of the things that made the 5s feel like a step forward - and you could still pick up a real iPhone 5 cheap. The 5 was so good that buying it instead was the obvious move, and most people did exactly that: the 5c wasn't a bad phone, just a really badly positioned one.
And the XR? The XR was the best selling iPhone Apple ever made when it launched, that phone changed their entire strategy. The very next generation, the 11, was the follow-up to the XR and the 11 Pro sat above it. The whole "Pro" split we've lived with ever since exists because of how the XR sold. You cannot look at that and call it a bad phone.
So the point isn't "iPhones are the best phones". The point is that the floor is high. There is no version of walking into a shop, buying an iPhone, and coming out with absolute rubbish.
Samsung will absolutely sell you rubbish
Samsung will make a bad phone and sell it to you without a flicker of shame. Other manufacturers obviously do too, but I'm talking about the big dogs here, anybody can make anything but 'anybody' isnt Samsung and Apple.
Everyone talks about the S26 Ultra, the Fold 7, whatever the current flagship is. Great phones. Genuinely. But are you buying one? Because the phones people actually walk around with are the £200 A-series ones, and I couldn't even tell you the model numbers, which tells you everything about how relevant they are. They're slow, they're bloated, they get a couple of updates and then they're done.
And if you go second-hand to get a good one instead, you're buying an old flagship. Which means it's out of support, or nearly, or it could be fragmented and not in any developer's modern ecosystem.
So yes, there will always be an Android phone better than the current iPhone: But I don't care, and most other people don't either. The world isn't built around the best phone: the world is built around the iPhone.
Social factors to iPhone
Nobody has ever said "ugh, you've got an iPhone". People say the other thing constantly.
iMessage. Game Pigeon. The 0.5 lens, which has been on every iPhone since the 11 and is now just how a certain kind of photo is taken. That's not just a spec, that's become an entire culture in my generation. I went to Iceland with friends in 2024 and some people there had android phones without 0.5 lenses, and I felt bad for them! It sometimes felt like they were missing out, atleast to me. And anyway, even just talking about the regular camera: Snapchat looks better on an iPhone, Instagram looks better on an iPhone. Film a TikTok on Android and it looks worse, and it looks worse even when the phone's camera is better, because these third-party apps can't get at it properly.
Then there's all the boring plumbing that turns out to matter more than any spec sheet. AirDrop. Apple Pay. Sending someone a shared album instead of forty images through WhatsApp. Adding someone to a note instead of screenshotting it. Android has versions of most of this - Google has, Samsung has - but "a version of it exists" and "everyone around you already uses it" are completely different things. For my generation, everyone around me is on an iPhone.
I know the reply to this, because I get it every time: yes, Google Photos also has shared albums. It does. But the majority of people you talk to don't have Google Photos. Why limit yourself to only Android users when there are fewer of them than there are iPhone users? It's a real chicken and egg problem. If nobody has an Android, nobody will buy one, which makes the experience even worse for the people who do have them, which makes the next person even less likely to buy one. It's a constant negative cycle, and no amount of "but the feature exists" gets you out of it.
That's the bit that frustrates me most, honestly. None of this is a technical failure. The phones are fine. The software is fine. It's better than fine in places. It just loses to the fact that everyone else already picked the other thing.
And as a developer
I'd much rather build for iOS. Swift and SwiftUI are really lovely to work in. If I'm asked to make an Android app I don't even reach for a native one. I'm not opening Kotlin or Java, I'm most likely going React Native even with my distain for webapps and getting on with my life. That's partly me, but it's also why third-party Android apps so often feel like the port rather than the product. Because they usually are.
Conclusion
So whenever I see someone defending Android to the absolute death, some part of my brain goes: you don't have a social life.
I know that's wrong. I know it's a bad thing to think. And I want to be clear that I don't mean people who own an Android - loads of people own one for perfectly good reasons and never think about it again. I mean the people who defend it, at length, forever. Because to argue that none of this matters, you have to be in a position where you never need iMessage games, or a shared note, or a shared album, or to AirDrop something to the person sat next to you.
And in a world full of iPhone users, in a country where the iPhone is the default, to not care about these things is... weird. You have to be a little bit of a hermit to not care about the fact that your friends are all on iPhones and you can't play Game Pigeon with them, or you have to be a little bit of a hermit to not care about the fact that your friends are all on iPhones and you can't share a photo album with them.
Again, to be as clear as I can be, because this whole post has been negative and I don't want it read as the wrong thing: Android phones can be better than the iPhone. They often are. The best phone released this year probably won't be an iPhone. But the phones people actually have are frequently bad phones, and there is no such thing as a bad iPhone. They've objectively never made one.
That's my position and, unfortunately, I'm comfortable with it.
- Dia