Man, this is only tangentially related, but I’ve slowly drifted away from the garbage app economy over the years, huh? That paragraph literally had me going “Oh, right, people use Instagram on their phones and stuff”, for different things like three or four times. No bearing to your point, but I will give myself some props.

Anyway, yeah, I’m not gonna stand here and say that iOS doesn’t make more sense as a starting point, both due to their hardware and software consolidation AND their US-centric nature that tends to make it a more profitable first stop (although that margin has narrowed) or that full legacy Android support isn’t more technically challenging. I think you’re overrepresenting the memory issue, though. You’d be hard pressed to find a dirt cheap Android phone with less than what? 4/6 Gigs of RAM? For mobile apps that will condition how fast things load and how many background apps get held before being flushed, but it’s not gonna be a massive challenge to make something run. And if it is, you should get that under control regardless.

About the rest of that list, I do think it’s interesting how half-remembered it is. For a while Instagram photos “just looked better” to the point of it becoming a meme, but that hasn’t been a thing on major Android phones for a couple of iterations, so it shouldn’t matter to anybody buying a new phone today even if you’re on Instagram (don’t be on Instagram). I don’t know about the “chatGPT” or “chatGPT competitors”. Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity have all been on Android for a while, not sure if it was all day one, but it was all certainly timely and available when I wanted to check it out. As for the LTT thing, I’m guessing from a google search, but was that about pop-up video being free on iPhone but part of the subscription on Android? Wasn’t that a regional thing? In any case it wasn’t a lack of support, it seems it was a guideline compliance thing. Not that I use the default Youtube app, but I’m guessing the Youtube guy wouldn’t point that out.

All of the minutia aside, I will say that as an Android user it’s been a long time since I went “wow, I wish that very useful app/feature/implementation” was available on my phone. I think the only things that came close to that were a couple of Apple Arcade exclusives I wish I could have purchased outright. It’s no question that there is an extra demand for coverage and support on Android, but at this point the market is large enough and the processes well understood enough that this is a development issue, not an end user issue. By and large, mobile apps you want and hear about are available right away and work just fine across devices.