Are you an Android or an iOS?

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When it comes to mobile devices, are you an Android or an iOS?

I'm both. I've got a Samsung smartphone and an iPod.

I use Android, but I hate it. I'm also not a fan of iOS, as I find it too be too limiting. In a way, Android's the lesser of two evils in that it at least allows for some customization, and that it has more free apps.

Android isn't as good as it used to be. When Honeycomb came out, they blocked installing apps to SD card (not even the obb files, they used to go to SD by default). When Kitkat came out, they blocked third party apps from writing the SD card. Now you can't even save to SD. They've rendered the SD card slot virtually useless. Yet even most of the high end Androids still have only 16GB of internal memory. The manufacturers want to save $10 by not doubling the internal memory than they say "it's OK, the user will just store everything to SD". No we can't anymore. And why did they drop those four buttons they used to have below the screen? So they can save a few cents?

On the other hand, Apple is the worst thing of any sort. I hear they don't even have a widget to turn wifi on and off without going into the settings and when a developer tried to make one, Apple blocked it. I guess Apple's ease of use is based on simplicity, not convenience. I find their minimalism philosophy actually makes their stuff harder to use. And the iPhone screen is only four inches, smaller than most Android phones. Soon Apple will make a 4.7 inch phone. The Apple [s]airheads[/s] fanboys will say it's "revolutionary" and then Apple will sue Samsung, claiming they stole the big screen phone idea. Also iOS 7 is too colourful.

Yes I would definitely say that Apple allows users much less freedom to customize their phone to how they want it. I currently have an iphone 4 but when my contract expires I will be getting a samsung galaxy.

I own a Samsung Galaxy S3 and an iPad. I chose the latter over it's competitors because of the superior screen, not because of the OS.

I am a homo sapien sapien, actually.

Android is much better rooted than unrooted, but I will say that I liked Jelly Bean better than ICS. ICS is far too bloated, and not a whole lot more functional or secure.

I'll admit though, I am sometimes jealous of how easy iOS users have it, but then I remember that they can't sideload apps, install custom launchers, muck around with system settings, or even browse the filesystems on their devices without using hacks of questionable legality.

Not so fast. If you want the freedom customize your phone how you want it, don't get a Samsung phone. I know a guy who recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. He says it's the most restrictive Android phone he's ever used. He said its customization was severely limited compared to other Android phones.

The trouble with companies like Apple and Samsung is that in their arrogance they think their interface is so perfect they can't understand why anyone would ever want to change it.

You can always root it, but this voids the warranty.

I used to use a Samsung Galaxy Ace, and it was awesome for customization. Then again, it had a fairly decent userbase compared to my current phone, and as such there were a lot of good custom roms available for it. When it comes to Android devices, rooting isn't even a question, it's just something I do as soon as I figure out how to do it.

Being under contract with T-mobile, which didn't initially have an iPhone option (to my knowledge), I jumped from my Blackberry Pearl back in 2010 into the Android OS and haven't left yet for my mobile device. I've mostly bought Google phones (Nexus S, Galaxy, and now the Nexus 4, I believe), and they work fine. I'm comfortable using the Android OS, although I definitely think it could be better.

I use iOS on my iPad Mini though, and I think that's fine as well. I probably wouldn't switch to using an iPhone ever because I prefer larger screens on my actual mobile device.

If I root my Xperia phone it would be much better but if that voids the warranty that might lock me out of trade in and I'll have to use the same model phone for two years instead of one (because they wouldn't let me change phone halfway through my contract). Maybe if I just hand it over after a year they won't notice it's rooted.

I always just buy my phones outright instead of getting them on a contract. I don't like being tied down.

I used to buy them on ebay but my phone died and I didn't have much money. I realized that the net monthly cost of the phone on contract was only slightly greater than the BYO cost so I reasoned it wouldn't hurt to get a phone on contract. Also I was mad that my last ebay phone died after a few months but if the contract phone dies they have to give me a new one.

I used jailbroken iPhones for years until the iPhone 4, which pretty much had feature parity with current day Android with app sideloading, widgets, proper multitasking, notification drawers, torrent clients, file management, wireless file transfers and UI modification. However none of these things came out of the box and came with significant drawbacks such as lengthy periods between being able to get OS software updates, having to spend hours setting it up and circumventing Apple's signature servers. It was worth it to me to do this because despite how locked down the vanilla OS was, Android didn't seem to be popular (so had few apps), was incredibly ugly, had sluggish responsiveness and was less intuitive to use.

I switched to the Samsung Note series after using a Nexus 7 and being really impressed with Android 4.0. It had all the things I'd had on my iPhone for a while but out of the box, without tinkering and without fear of messing up my device. I would not go back now to iOS unless they implemented the more open design philosophy of Android. I don't see it as likely, though they have implemented a ton of stuff that originally came from the jailbreak scene that they prior said they never would.

That said, there are some things I don't like about Android. I feel that there should be more parity with what a modern PC can do. Root access should come out of the box, with more control of permissions each application has. Samsung has had multiwindow support for a while, but this is something that should come with the vanilla OS so that each manufacturer doesn't have their own version of it. SD card support should remain in vanilla Android. Also it's totally bizarre to me how there isn't already a standard for quick wireless file sharing between devices and how in 2014 I'm still doing things such as taking photos of another person's phone screen with my phone camera (happens at work when sharing photos of motor accident scenes).

At the moment I'm using a custom ROM (X-Note, a modified version of Touchwiz) that includes a lot of functionality I wish were in the default OS. I still like Android very much and there isn't any alternative mobile OS I can see myself using anytime soon (Ubuntu looks a while off).

I have a Nokia Lumia 620 with Windows Phone 8. I am happy with it.