I don't think that's a fair comparison. It's more like Windows (a thousand vendors, each with their own config) vs Mac (one vendor, a small handful of configs).
Except it's even worse than that in the Android world because different vendors produce not just their own drivers, but their own UIs and apps that override the defaults. There's not just one Android but one for every major vendor, and thing like calendars, photos, messages, voice assistants, files, accounts, etc. can't easily be shared between them. I have a Pixel and my partner a Samsung, and we can never figure out how to share things with each other because every vendor's Android is so different.
That is a direct result of Google releasing Android under a certain model of openness, trying to catch up with iOS when it was first released and needing to give phone vendors a reason to adopt it. It got really bad for a while and they tried to rein it in with Play phones and the Google One phones and the Pixel line, but the market is still incredibly fragmented, especially between the Samsung, HTC, Google, and other major vendor variants.
Meanwhile on my iPad and Mac, everything is just seamless. After a decade of Pixels, I'm gonna switch to an iPhone soon, just because iMessage is still so much better and the carriers don't really seem to care about RCS. Android has like two dozen chat and messaging programs, all of which suck in various ways, while iOS has had one superior one all these years. Centralized control can make your platform a lot cleaner.
The fragmentation does nothing to impair your own ability to use app permissions in Android 13. You only need Android 13 on your phone. No network effect.
As for communication apps, there is exactly one great app for both Android and iPhone. It's the same app: Signal.
Except it's even worse than that in the Android world because different vendors produce not just their own drivers, but their own UIs and apps that override the defaults. There's not just one Android but one for every major vendor, and thing like calendars, photos, messages, voice assistants, files, accounts, etc. can't easily be shared between them. I have a Pixel and my partner a Samsung, and we can never figure out how to share things with each other because every vendor's Android is so different.
That is a direct result of Google releasing Android under a certain model of openness, trying to catch up with iOS when it was first released and needing to give phone vendors a reason to adopt it. It got really bad for a while and they tried to rein it in with Play phones and the Google One phones and the Pixel line, but the market is still incredibly fragmented, especially between the Samsung, HTC, Google, and other major vendor variants.
Meanwhile on my iPad and Mac, everything is just seamless. After a decade of Pixels, I'm gonna switch to an iPhone soon, just because iMessage is still so much better and the carriers don't really seem to care about RCS. Android has like two dozen chat and messaging programs, all of which suck in various ways, while iOS has had one superior one all these years. Centralized control can make your platform a lot cleaner.