Mobile OS Showdown: Android, iOS, and Windows Phone Compared

Not so long ago, the software powering a cell phone had very little to do with which one we purchased. BlackBerry, Palm, and Windows Mobile enthusiasts aside, shoppers based such decisions primarily on what the hardware looked like, giving little thought given to the operating system. After all, what else did one need to make phone calls and send the occasional SMS?

What a difference a few years make: Since around the arrival of Apple’s iPhone in 2007, smartphones have done an about-face. Sure, attractive hardware is still essential, but these rectangular slabs of metal, plastic, and glass are now windows into a far richer mobile experience.

Journey with us as we compare the three dominant mobile operating systems — Google’s Android 5.0 Lollipop, Apple’s iOS 8.2, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8.1 — in an effort to learn about their similarities, individual strengths, and maybe a few weaknesses as well. We’ll update this guide as the inevitable tweaks and changes to all three arrive, but for now, let’s take a step back and run through the basics.

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I'm confused as to why the "user interface" made no mention of Android's homescreen widgets. Instead, it stated that both iOS and Android have homescreens of simply "icons and folders." The only mention of widgets is in the discussion of the notification shade on all three platforms (which is where iOS widgets reside, but not Android widgets), and the photo of the Android 5.0 homescreen was just a iOS-like grid of icons--an approach that almost no Android users take in my experience (I use the top half of every homescreen for widgets, and I think a similar approach is pretty common).

 

Android (stock, mind you) wins this round by default because iOS 8 is the buggiest, laggiest, most crash-prone POS Apple has ever released and nobody uses WP 8.1 so it has the worst ecosystem

 

I've got a second-hand iPad 3 running iOS 8. I haven't run into any crashes, but it's got as many lags and stutters in the UI as my Touchwiz-ified Galaxy S3 had. Surprising as UI stutters have been a popular criticism of Android by iOS enthusiasts for years. Mind you, those stutters don't prevent me from using the iPad effectively (just as they didn't prevent me from using the GS3 effectively), but it's definitely not the night-and-day difference in smoothness that some people talk about.

 

My iPhone 4 with iOS 7 is 1000% smoother than my iPad 3 running iOS 8. That's how bad it is. Even my dad's iPhone 6+ is affected. Android is like butter in comparison. Apple really dun goofed on this one.