Meh. Android has come a long way, the Google flavor of it is the most well thought out and put together experience... But all in all, the experience sucks compared to iOS coupled with an iPhone. There are a lot of neat little widgets and gestures that come with Android, but the phones aren't as good. The software is no where near as good. I made the switch, I came crawling back to iOS.

I find that it depends on the person - I loathe Apple's restrictiveness in general, including the sometimes poor UX (no back button on the phone is extremely annoying and I have to make extra taps in out of the way places instead of quickly hitting back, as one example, or the mindboggling restrictiveness to manually created 30 second snippets for ringtones instead of allowing me to just use my mp3s, or the horrific text selection/editing on the phone).

My experience with both has me missing Android overall, the only reasons I am on an iPhone currently is for mobile development and because I am on a legacy family plan on Verizon combined with Verizon Android phones being polluted with garbage software & being more locked down than their counterparts on other providers.

Some prefer Apple's curation of the experience though. Some don't like configuring their devices to their liking and want an out of the box ready experience, even if it means sacrificing on some UX.

> including the sometimes poor UX (no back button on the phone is extremely annoying and I have to make extra taps in out of the way places instead of quickly hitting back

You never tried the swipe from the edge for back ?

Not all apps do that, so it's not reliable.

>I made the switch, I came crawling back to iOS.

My Nexus 4 died and I used iPhone 5 for a month. Couldn't stand it, and bought a Nexus 5. To each his own.

The iOS experience - no matter how "polished" it may look - still ranks way farther than even some absurdity like MS-DOS-on-a-phone for as long as Apple continues to pull these sorts of shenanigans while not providing for any way to sideload an app (and no, jailbreaking doesn't count, especially when Apple actively fights against it).

Of course, that's just, like, my opinion, man, but having used both, the marginal (if any) advantages of the iOS ecosystem come nowhere near balancing out the massive downsides, for me at least.

To each his/her own.

And Google has privacy issues.

I think consumers need more choice!