“Team Apple!”
“Team Android!”
“Team WinPhone!”
“Team BlackBerry!” (Is that even a thing? ... Just kidding. Sort of.)
We’ve all seen the platform wars before, where people proudly claim which “team” they are a part of and could never, ever switch over to anything else because they love said platform so much. Or perhaps it’s because they hate other platforms even more. Sometimes these “wars” even get to the point of making personal attacks on another person simply for liking another platform - which is a topic for another day, but it’s still worth mentioning that it’s completely ridiculous to loathe somebody based on their mobile OS of choice. There are bigger fish to fry, right?
Sometimes I’m envious of the loyalists though, whether they’re ones that you find boasting on forums or the ones that never let you know they exist. For them, choosing a new device is simplified. If you’re an Apple fan, your choice is really easy - one (or, as it seems now, two) new phones are all you have to choose from every year. Even if you upgrade your phone every other year, you still only have four new phones max to choose between. BlackBerry is similar because they also don’t release a lot of phones. Windows Phone and Android are probably a little trickier, but at the end of the day you at least know you’ll be happy with the platform.
I can’t ever whittle my choices down that small, because I personally can never be a platform loyalist. I used to be a huge fan of BlackBerry - my review on BlackBerry these days aren’t as endearing. Sometimes I prefer Windows Phone over Android or iOS. The app ecosystem is lacking, but the very design of Windows Phone combined with Nokia/Microsoft’s dedication to the smartphone camera keeps me coming back. I like Android for the customization. I like iOS for the stability and, probably more importantly, how much money I managed to spend on apps while using it.
And no, I don’t like each platform equally; in fact, my platform preference changes quite often. If you asked me what I thought of Android just a mere 4 years ago I’d tell you that I liked the idea behind it, but it had poor execution. That’s a completely different story today. I also thought BlackBerry was still pretty awesome 4 years ago. Again, completely different story today.
I guess I’ve just come to realize that platforms change (or sometimes don’t) and when they change my preferences generally change along with them. When I ditched Android 3 years ago to get the iPhone 4S, I had never been more impressed with how smoothly a mobile OS could operate. After all, all I knew up until that point was force close, bad battery life, and a lifetime supply of sketchy applications, and while iOS didn’t come without cons of its own it was still worlds better than Android... at the time.
Now, in my opinion, iOS is kind of boring, kind of ugly, and although I still appreciate the stability I also think that Android has come a long, long way from a few years ago and has, in many ways, surpassed iOS. But who knows how long it will last? Apple’s clearly not opposed to change too much given the most recent design changes made to the iPhone 6, so there’s still hope that one day Apple could win my heart over again. Or Windows Phone. Or even BlackBerry.
That’s why I’m not, and never will be, a platform loyalist. Too many changes are made within short periods of time in order for me to be certain that I won’t prefer something else later.
But what about you, readers? When it comes to the mobile platforms you use, have you always been partial to one over the others? Let us know why or why not in the comments below!
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