Brand loyalty isn't much of a motivator for me.  I don't owe product companies anything beyond the sale price of their wares.  Sure, particularly dickish companies can make me brand disloyal, but the only way to earn my dollars is by producing something I like or want or need.

In this post I want to discuss a particularly polarizing topic.  iOS vs Android.  These are the two gorillas in the smartphone and tablet market space.  As soon as someone identifies what type of device they have, they are immediately dismissed as having a bias towards their device.  Well, I have both Android tablets and Apple tablets.  Yes, plural, for both.

A common pitfall in any discussion is to play the "spec" war.  Every month there's a new better device with better specifications announced.  Somehow the mere announcement invalidates any argument against that particular line, so I'm throwing specs out the window.  They're a red herring.  More storage / resolution / ram / Ghz / mWh doesn't make one device better than another, unless you specifically need that attribute to be happy.  In which case, this post isn't for you.

I'm going to talk about what a mobile device needs to make me happy, beyond just being useful.  It's only 2 things, and only one vendor (to my limited experience) gets them both right.  I welcome counter-arguments on these points.

1) Battery Life
I like my mobile devices to be able to hold a charge for a long time.  Ideally, I'd like to measure that in weeks, but will settle for days.  Definitely not hours.  If I can't put your device to sleep and a week later pick it up and use it, you lose.  Note that I specify "sleep", not "power off".  Mobile devices need to be instantly ready to use, not two minutes after it boots.

2) Software shouldn't dictate model
This is essentially an argument against "fragmentation".  If I buy a modern device, I want to know I can run anything from the software store on that device.  The device is useless without software, and it just sucks to discover incompatibilities with something you really wanted to use.

2b) Jailbreaking / Rooting does not excuse 2)
Not all devices. from either line, can be Jailbroken or Rooted.  Even if it can be hacked in such a manner, it means sacrificing the continued support from the manufacturer.  And even then, it still doesn't guarantee you'll be able to run the desired software.

Fragmentation was actually the motivation for this post.  I found this excellent analysis of Android fragmentation and discovered it was even worse than I thought.  http://opensignal.com/reports/fragmentation-2013/

In the following images, taken from that article, you can see just how many different makes and models of android devices there are in use today.  In fact, there are more than 11,000.  Every piece of software in the Google store runs on some subset of those devices.  The odds of a device you purchased being able to run a given app decreases with every segmentation between your device, and the device is was written for.  As you can see, there's a lot of divisions.

Even if you take the hardware out of the equation and just look at the operating system version, there is still a lot more incompatibility with Android.  The pie chart shows the predominance of different versions in the wild.

Because of these two factors, I currently choose iOS as my mobile platform of choice.  This could change if something comes along and does a better job with either of my two points while still being useful.