Android and iOS — the two leading operating systems in the smartphone market — devices under their control, took 99.6% of the market in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to Gartner. While Apple often is suing the producers for copying their technology, design and functionality of mobile platforms differ. MacDigger offers seven major arguments in favor of buying an iPhone or iPad running iOS.
1. Continuity
Ecosystem, which is based on iCloud, is one of the key benefits of the “Apple” platform. But important steps in this direction were made not at once. With the release of iOS 5 in 2011, users got access to a new cloud service. And here changed once more. First, iCloud has become a base for single sign-on in any products – the Apple ID. Secondly, there was the ability to store data in the cloud, access them from any device.
This is not just convenient in the daily work – for example, create a document on your Mac to upload to iCloud, and later opened on the iPhone. It also dramatically simplifies the transition from one Apple device to another. You bought a new iPhone? Not require virtually no action, all your contacts, settings, data and content will be migrated from the “cloud”.
And then was a function of Continuity: AirDrop technology, without allowing presets to transfer files, mode Handoff, which you can use to start an activity on one device and continue on another, Instant Hotspot for transparent Internet connection with iPhone, stream cell calls and SMS on your Mac, avtorazborka, universal clipboard, sync your desktop, and much more.
2. Joining the “club”
iPhone and iPad serve as a starting point in the design, the owners of “Apple” devices feel belonging to a club. Creative users, technological innovation, the most interesting games and software — these and other signs strongly related with the halo of the club of Apple fans. Representatives of other platforms is not yet possible to put together a single community, which may challenge the elitism of Apple.
3. iMessage
One of the unique features of iOS — support for message transfer Protocol iMessage. For user messages look like normal SMS messages, but they pass by the cellular network operator, traveling through Internet channels. You do not need to install additional messengers, everything works out of the box. When you send an ordinary text message and the recipient also iPhone, the phone will automatically try to send it via the Internet. In the event of failure — repeat sending the SMS.
iMessage works on all Apple devices — smartphones, tablets, computers and even iPods iPod Touch. At the same time in iOS 10 messenger has turned into a complete framework with support for third-party applications. Now iMessage is not just a service to exchange messages with stickers and emojis, it’s also a handy tool to transfer money via Apple Pay, call a taxi, work with multimedia content.
In Apple devices has also proprietary video FaceTime. Everything works about the same as in the case of iMessage. For those who have iPhone, iPad, Apple laptop or iPod touch, you can “call”, bypassing the usual cellular communication through Wi-Fi. Available as a regular voice and video call. The Protocol is completely integrated into the OS and to make calls via FaceTime install additional software is not required.
4. A high degree of security
PC sales are going down and mobile devices are growing. After the change of devices, customers often transfer their data to smartphones and tablets or make them the key to their data in online services. This “key” can open access to information about the customer’s personal data, commercial secrets, and even directly to Bank accounts, therefore increasing the value of the security of the smartphone.
Reports of threats to data of iPhone owners are rare, because Apple will not let deep into the operating system, neither users nor developers. And those and others, there is simply no opportunity to get deep into the “guts” of the operating system, and there is something to change (or break). The list of benefits of iOS experts mention the presence of complex technologies encrypt user data and permanently remove them, a strict policy of Apple, which scrutinizes each app before publishing to the App Store. And although there is no guarantee that a skilled hacker can bypass the check, in most cases, this security measure is sufficient to repel attacks, leading to contamination of the device with malware and loss of personal data of the user.
Android security situation tense: regular reports of fake applications that is its functions are sending from a smartphone owner paid SMS or give access to its management from the outside. Google has implemented the Google Play app store, own system check application is malicious or not, but it does not allow to completely get rid of dangerous programs.
5. Regular applications
Many built-in apps in the iPhone are made so that most users will not have to look for a replacement. For example, a program for working with photos allows you to conveniently see all that was captured by telephone, edit photos: crop, rotate, overlay filters, remove “red eye”.
This rather standard set of features added “chips” that even cameras are not usually available, for example, automatic grouping photos by face and scene, live photos and panoramic shots.
We believe that you will not need to be replaced and the built-in player, calendar, notes, app, mail client, which originally provided the opportunity to receive messages from the mailbox third-party services — Gmail, Outlook, etc.
6. Multimedia and office software from Apple
It’s nice when apps cost free, but more importantly that they work. Apple made two packages that cover the needs of most users. Application Suite iLife, which consists of products such as iMovie, iPhoto and GarageBand (they all have versions for Mac), allows you to easily handle and organize photos with a camera phone (iPhoto), mount video (iMovie) and even write music (GarageBand). When buying new gadgets the app is free to download. Users of Android devices will have to dig around in Google Play to find anything remotely resembling an Apple product.
Office Suite iWork allows you to work with text documents (Pages), spreadsheets (Numbers) and presentations (Keynote). To access the file not only from iPhone, iPad and Mac, but also from any computer via the browser.
7. Support obsolete hardware and the lack of fragmentation
Long Apple supports their mobile devices — which debuted last fall, iOS 10 became available for the iPhone 5, released in 2012.
For Android platform, in turn, there is the concept of fragmentation: different smartphones have different versions of the Android OS that have to be considered application developers. In addition, even when working in the environment of the same OS on different devices, the program should consider their characteristics — CPU, screen resolution, etc. Otherwise the application may not work correctly.
With the transition to Android OS versions 7.x problems became less, and that will run whether or not an application that you have to worry only on low-cost models that use “exotic” processors. However, completely avoiding them is impossible.
