I'll honour your long, proper reply with what I hope is an equally proper one. I'll just quote your first question, but hopefully that touches within enough of the subjects you mentioned.

I wonder if you ever even touched an iPhone or iOS device? You certainly never used one.

I was stuck with one for over two years. An iPhone 3G.

It was my replacement phone for my old Windows Mobile phone (some HTC S730 or something) and the level of polish on that iPhone was amazing. It blew me away.

For a while it made me accept its locked down nature, all the things my old phone could do, but this one could not. I even accepted fucking iTunes. The polish made it all OK.

But as I used it more and more, added more apps, I saw how none of them played together. I noticed every single time that how no matter what you wanted to do, the only way to do that was go back to the homescreen, locate another app, then re-locate your data, then continue working on what you wanted to do.

Want to shoot a picture, modify the colours and then upload that modified picture to facebook? Well start the camera app. Close. Go back to home, and find and open your picture editor app. Then navigate and relocate your picture. Edit. Save. Then go back to the homescreen, open the facebook app and the click post and then try to relocate your now modified image and I'm sure you get my idea.

This OS has absolutely no flow. There is polish, but there is no true elegance to anything on that platform.

Every minor little thing involves hastles, indirection. Because the OS was designed to do simple things and simple things only. The OS itself smears its own inelegance onto everything it runs.

My example was only for a picture. For other file-types iOS doesn't even allow inter-app interaction because as we all know, "iOS devices has no files".

In Android? Shoot, send to editor, edit, send to Facebook. Done. How simple is that? And I've never even touched a file. But I can if I want to. And this is very important.

Eventually iOS drove me crazy. It was artificailly limited, crippled, had a too simple design and everything it did was flawed somehow, just to accommodate that sense of polish.

I see Apple are doing desperate catching up these days to try to get on level with Android in terms of sophistication, but iOS is simply at its core too simple to allow that. The additions to bring it up Androids levels feels tacked on, not designed and as a part of the experience.

So trust me: I've certainly used an iOS device, for long periods of time. For a while I even thought I liked it. But I am very certain that I will never, ever set my foot in iOS country again. It just feels wrong, locked down and artificial. And every tiny action you do creates squeaky noises. Squeaky noises saying "you need to go back to the homescreen and start all over again. Again".

Thanks but no thanks.

It is my humble opinion that iOS has been a stale OS for a very long time now, and the only innovation happening on iOS is as a result of direct copying from Android. As this (now censored) article so very clearly highlights. But try to start a discussion about such a topic on HN, and you will get labeled troll and censored or driven off site.

You get censored because you say Apple is not an innovator. Why? I don't know. I could guess weird conspiracy theories. Or I could just assume that there are enough Apple fanatics on this site which instantly doesn't like what they see and clicks "flag".

I honestly don't know, but anything critical against Apple gets shot down dead on this site like no other place on the internet. And if I know that level of censoring is happening on one subject which I pay attention to, what about those other topics?

Are they being censored as well? What are being censored here on HN? Currently I find the uncertainty about that somewhat startling and I have considered stopping going here for that reason.