Um, no? Apple Music wasn't even a thing in the iPhone 4S timeframe. You used to buy music in the iTunes Store, and play it in the music player app.
It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately.
Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you had to click the "Update" tab.
Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so you have to find this little corner thing and scroll down, wading through all the ads for the new apps you haven't installed.
Books always had a store, but your library was primary. You managed it; it had books that you'd bought, not empty placeholders for books you hadn't bought. There was a store, but it was the second tab.
Now the store is the main tab, and your library is the second tab.
And, as I said, they've now started reorganizing my library, adding "empty placeholder" books in. I don't see Enders Game in my library any more; I see the Ender Series, and if I click on that, I see all five titles, the first of which I can actually read (since that's the only one I bought).
If I honestly thought Android would be any different, I might consider jumping ship.
The thing about Android is that it lets you install apps (for now). In my opinion, that's the killer feature (for now). If you don't like how Google's music app works... install something else. If you want something Google won't allow in their play store... download it somewhere else and install it.
Yes, it still has a billion things wrong with it, including not being able to uninstall the shovelware, and not being able to modify the OS, and I'd rather have a third choice better than both these two.
> If I honestly thought Android would be any different
I haven't used an iOS device for over a decade so I'm not familiar with exactly how it may be different now - but it sounds quite different. Here's how I use media on Android. All files are DRM-free generic formats (MP3, FLAC, EPUB) organized in folders on a removable 512GB micro SD card which auto-syncs between my desktop, laptop, Android tablet, phone and a generic cloud backup folder with SyncThing. I don't subscribe to any media service (and never have).
My music library/player is PowerAmp, my ebook reader is the open source KOReader and my podcast app is Podcast Addict. None of them has a store and they are all free (although I did upgrade to the plus version of PowerAmp to support the developer). They all get regular updates, are highly customizable and have every feature I want or can imagine wanting. My browser is Android Firefox with uBlock Origin so I don't see any ads and for YouTube I side-loaded Revanced Extended from the open F-Droid store, which is a clone of the YouTube app with no ads and all dark patterns removed. I also run a side-loaded open-source DNS-level ad blocker for the occasional social media app.
My phone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 20 that still works great (I did replace the original battery last year which took ~20 mins). I'm using a five year old phone not because I'm cost conscious, I'd happily pay >$1,500 for a new phone and I keep looking at new models every year but never see anything that would be a noticeable improvement for my usage. Really... I swear I'm NOT trying to be @SimpleLife or minimalist/retro, I have a significant yearly budget for discretionary toys, but some years I struggle to spend it all because I'm also allergic to things that are constantly low-grade annoying or that I can't customize to my prefs. I just refuse to adopt anything that wants to own me instead of me owning it.
I haven’t used an android device in 2 years, but I was just like you for almost a decade. At some point I got tired of all the micro-annoyances that I had with android and my oneplus phones (my last one was the oneplus 7T), such as awful brightness sensor, terrible compass, suboptimal gps, and low quality vibration engine. All stuff that you’ll never hear about in an actual review, for some reason.
My music player is an app called “Music”, and my ebook reader is an app called “Books”. I have spent exactly zero seconds looking for these apps since they’re already included with the phone, and are not developed by an unknown hero that could be hit by a bus at any moment. On books I read books that I bought from the iTunes Store, and epubs or pdfs that I downloaded online. I can access the epub files of both my own and the store-bought stuff from my mac’s filesystem. Everything is fully synced to all of my other devices through iCloud, a service which I’ve spent zero minutes setting up and zero minutes maintaining. These apps have all features I need, since all I want them to do is open my files and keep track of progress. They’re not customizable and I don’t care about it. I could download open source apps from the App Store or alt-store if I wanted to.
I pay 3 euros/month for my cloud storage. It works and I haven’t had problems with it. I share it with some family members. My browser is safari with uBlock origin lite. Admittedly I had to spend some time looking for a decent ad blocker, it’s not as easy as android.
I’m also not trying to live a minimalist or retro life, although I appreciate the ideology. My main philosophy right now is just that my phone is a tool through which I read books and listen to music (among other things). It has some limitations, but they’re not important. I don’t want to have to think about setting up a media server to listen to music, or figuring out syncthing settings once again because it’s been 3 years since I last set it up and it now broke all of a sudden. I just want to not have to think about this and get on to more important aspects of life.
I do it similar to you, except that I use PlexAmp for my music.
But I have to note that you and I are the exception. The VAST majority of users are, I think, doing it through, if not the Play Store itself, then some other service (e.g., Spotify).
That said, though, at least we have this option. But is there any reason that an iPhone user can't just use PlexAmp like I do? I'm pretty sure that Firefox is available to them as well.
My understanding is that Firefox on iOS is substantially limited from Windows and Android. Like they can only run uBlock Origin Lite and many add-ons aren't available. Something about Apple policy blocking browser extensions that can run scripts/code, as it might compete with Apple's app store. But that's just what I've read online from other people. It also might be somewhat different recently in the EU, at least about the installing alt app stores. As I said, I haven't used an iOS device in over a decade, so have no first hand knowledge.
I'm sure the SD thing works for you but some people need music discovery and open source options are lacking there. When you can set up a radio station backed by RED/Lidarr and not have your account go on ratio watch in hours, then we'll talk..
I'm pretty sure that PlexAmp, backed by Plex Media Server, is the pinnacle of music discovery, within whatever you've got in your library. I've got that serving an enormous library that I've compiled through my whole life, but there's no reason (well, other than legalities) you couldn't feed this through the *arrs.
The discovery algorithm works based on fundamental metadata, additional data pulled from Last.fm (e.g., "related artists" and "popular tracks"), as well as its own acoustic matching algorithm.
This arrangement obviates the SD card, and also any other external syncing (PlexAmp plays live from the server, or has its own scheme for downloading to a local cache).
I guess that gets to what each of us means by "discovery". I think you're talking about the existence of a given artist/track. But for me, with a sufficiently large library, it can be difficult to remember what you have, and what would go well in a given context. So PlexAmp's "discovery" helps me to navigate through that large library to find and re-experience stuff I'd forgotten about or overlooked.
On my case that is achieved by getting down to the local record store, radio, whatever comes up in YouTube algorithms, somehow I get more music than I can manage to listen to.
It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately.
Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you had to click the "Update" tab.
Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so you have to find this little corner thing and scroll down, wading through all the ads for the new apps you haven't installed.
Books always had a store, but your library was primary. You managed it; it had books that you'd bought, not empty placeholders for books you hadn't bought. There was a store, but it was the second tab.
Now the store is the main tab, and your library is the second tab.
And, as I said, they've now started reorganizing my library, adding "empty placeholder" books in. I don't see Enders Game in my library any more; I see the Ender Series, and if I click on that, I see all five titles, the first of which I can actually read (since that's the only one I bought).
If I honestly thought Android would be any different, I might consider jumping ship.