I've been on Android for 3 years. Before, I was using WindowsMobile 6, and version 5 before that, until Microsoft stupidly killed that incredibly diverse ecosystem and made me and millions of others jump to Android. I had a clamshell Razr V3i before that that was an astonishingly good and beautifully hackable phone for the time - it was a great web browser with opera mini and I could email from it too, fantastic voice quality that could be tuned with a hex editor, and excellent radio/reception. It took a microSD so I used it as an MP3 player too. Moto typically has great build quality and radios though they definitely have released some total junk phones along the way too, I think I had a V551(??) that was dog poop, and several moto phones the camera broke on for no reason, usually a hardware failure like one of the internal lenses becoming dislodged, even if the phone was never dropped.
My *personal opinion* is that Android was most stable, useful and hackable at version 2.3 and has had been becoming progressively less stable and ever more locked down since. I have a Nexus 7 that I just leave stock and let it autoupdate whenever it feels like it to see what the latest edition of Android and latest versions of all my apps always look like; I've watched in horror as android and the Android app ecosystem has become a bug ridden laggy crashy malware adware spyware filled unholy mess over the last 12 months, as bad as Windows 98/XP ever was. Previously, as an android user I had always felt a little bit... i don't know... "more savvy" than iPhone users because Android was (supposedly) less expensive and I could make it do anything I wanted. But with the update to 4.1 on my RAZR i, I could no longer WIFI tether (it could tether with 4.0 but then Moto locked out tethering HARD and no one has figured a way around it) and that just made me really POed.
Then I also thought about it and realized I had EIGHT android devices and I was spending a ton of money always buying new android phones because that was usually the only way I could run the latest OS. I've for three years always been waiting/hoping that I'll get the next version of android when it is released, and usually all my hopes were dashed. Yes I did all the cyanagenmod/etc reflashing stuff for a while but that's always a little risky and after 10 or so flashes constantly trying out roll your own OS turns into a real time consumer, often gives me new bugs when I was trying eliminate other old bugs, and for some devices, namely the RAZRi, sometimes just not an option. My original Moto RAZR has a locked bootloader that was never really worked around. I was getting so sick of waiting around all of the time.
And I was noticing that there were people with iPhones many years old still using them, still happy with them. I played with a friends iPhone 3GS a year ago and was impressed with how smooth it was even then with supposedly far less hardware than my RAZR, and how happy she still was with it - and I noticed how aggravated I was with my RAZR.
So WTF, two months ago I bought a new iPhone 5s 64gb. It was Very
Expensive... but not really compared to the highest end Moto X, which was the other phone I was considering.
At first it was super annoying, not intuitive at all coming from android, lots of the design decisions seemed stupid. But I stuck with it, finally got used to everything about 3 weeks ago, and now two months after purchase I can say from my heart, and my head, it just blows Android out of the water right at this time. It is ROCK SOLID in hardware build and software stability, an order of magnitude above any android devices. I just can't stress enough how stable ios is compared to android. It took me many weeks to figure out all the workarounds I needed to do stuff like tethering, swype, etc, but now it does everything I can do on android.
I have two phones (work/personal), and this week I needed a second phone to replace my Razr i (which now has a new issue of blurry focus camera that I fix by banging it with my hand... i never dropped it... sigh), so I I just bought a used perfect condition 64gb Iphone 5 for $400. Goodbye Android for now.
There are hundreds of teensy little software and hardware design decisions in the iPhone that just make it so *pleasant* to use all the time. It makes all versions of android seem so rough and unpolished when I use my other android devices.
In the long run I think the iPhones will be either a wash cost wise, or maybe a little cheaper because now I can instead of buying a new Android phone every few months in hopes of finally having one that is solid and stable, I'll likely keep these iPhones for 2-3+ years and I'm guaranteed years of the most recent OS, available as soon as announced. But cost aside, ios is just a completely stress free experience that lets me get on with life.
Oh one last thing, the responsiveness of the iPhone is *phenomenal* I read a few months ago this is because the electronic hardware itself for the touchscreen has about 1/3rd the lag time between touching the screen, and the OS getting the signal. It makes the display feel really really good all the time. Now when I use any android touch screen it just feels so slow and annoying. Battery life is at least double the RAZR i in my experience so far, mostly because there is never any crap running in the background that I can't turn off, like is always happening in android as soon as I add more than three apps.
I'm not an apple aficionado at all; as soon as I find something better than iPhone I'll jump ship immediately, but as far as I can tell iPhone 5s is the best there is right now.
tl;dr: the iPhone 5 and 5s are mindblowingly good compared to the hell and heartbreak that android has turned onto. YMMV
