Going back to my reliability comment, I rated them about a wash, but my experience with them has really flipped. I had a real tough time with Android in the "early" days, when 2.1 Eclair was common and 2.2 Froyo just came out. It could have been hardware, it could have been Motorola's Motoblur skin, or it could have been Android itself. I don't know...but it was pretty bad for us. My HTC Incredible 2 was a ton better. HTC Sense was, back then, pretty good in my opinion. My wife's then-new iPhone 4s, however, just blew the Androids out of the water for us, in terms of solid reliability. It just didn't crash--ever. The lack of a battery door on the back wasn't an issue--we never had to restart the phone. I'd have to do battery pulls on our Droid 2s all the time. Even my HTC needed it some.
But that was "back then". iOS 6 seemed to be incredibly reliable. Then I moved to iOS 7. It nearly broke my phone. Battery life was horrible. Lots of software bugs. Lots of them. My wife's iPhone 4s took to iOS 7 better than my phone did. Which was odd, because that unit-to-unit variability isn't supposed to happen with that closed architecture--that's what a closed system is supposed to prevent. Then iOS 8...maybe slightly less buggy than iOS 7, but not by a whole lot. Here's an example of a pervasive software bug in the Messages app:
I could rotate the phone to landscape mode, and the keyboard would rotate, but the app behind it wouldn't. So you couldn't see what you were typing. I had to force-close the app and open it back up, thinking to myself, "gee, this is the kind of stuff I had to deal with on our old Droids..."
So far, Android 4.4.4 KitKat has been great on my phone. I haven't experienced a single bug/failure/crash/reason to force-close an app. The comment that Android is not very well integrated with the hardware and can vary with manufacturer can be true, and it does vary greatly with manufacturer. That's one of the big reasons I bought a Motorola phone; Google used to own Motorola until very recently (sold to Lenovo I think), and the Motorola Droids use what is a nearly-pure version of Android, without much of a skin at all. There are some Motorola-specific apps that come pre-loaded, but the user interface is pretty much stock Android. And KitKat looks pretty nice. I do allow that iOS has a very polished look-and-feel to it...but it's not the reliable system anymore that I knew from the iOS 6 days...at least not on my particular 4s. My wife's 5s has taken iOS 8 pretty well. Our iPad 4 has iOS 8 as well, and it seems to work well on that.
I look at it much like the quality/reliability of import vs. domestic cars, Apple being the "import" and Android being the "domestic" marques. It could be said years ago that the "import" marques held a certain advantage in the quality department (especially in interior quality), but I think it's generally true that any historical difference is pretty much gone today. It now boils down more to user preference than an objective difference one way or the other.
