Ask HN: What do you do on an Android phone that cannot be done on an iPhone?

You can't switch owners of shared family purchases on an iPhone. You need to rebuy the apps under a new family owner after dissolving the previously family which is not easy or seamless.

Plex picture uploads don't work in the background on Apple so you constantly have to take the screen to keep it active.

Basically if you like having someone else make all your design decisions for you Apple is actually a great way to go. Defaults are generally sane, but if you run into something that they haven't sorted out yet, it's going to be painful and you won't be able to fix it. My wife and daughter love their iPhones. Apple generally curates their software well and there's a good chunk of great software only available on Apple. I was constantly fighting with mine to get it the way I wanted and in the end I have up and bought a Samsung Galaxy phone. I could do what I wanted almost immediately and have had no issues. I can't remember if Apple has the ability to add a swipe keyboard either. My wife is always jealous of mine.

Also some Android tablets have half decent OLED screens, though stock iPhone OLED will out-perform them.

Android has USB-C support that iOS is only now starting to get with the iPad Pro and iPadOS 13.

Re. Intercepting text messages on Android, theoretically that’s going to be more locked down as the OS gets more privacy-aware, but iOS will likely always take the lead. Certainly it’s impossible to do Content Blocking in Chrome the way one can on iOS.

So... there’s trade offs... my preference is to recommend cheap Android handsets for non-smartphone family members and friends and relatively expensive iPhones for anyone actually checking their email on their devices, etc. due to the superior security & overall fit and finish. The only folks who can have trouble with Apple’s limitations of iMessage on Apple products only, etc., tend to be folks who use both Mac and Windows. If you only use Windows, you don’t know how the clipboard integrates smoothly over iCloud, that you can answer text messages and calls from your computer, and so on. Microsoft plans on making Android as integrated with Windows as an iPhone is with macOS, but they haven’t succeeded yet and it’s been two years since the first announcement in this direction. So... we’ll have to see.

Oh and Apple Watch support is also a vote for iPhone right now. And Bluetooth music has been historically much better on iOS, though I imagine that has improved on Android handsets in recent years. Android devices might still have headphone jacks, of course, but I prefer BT these days anyway.

Grayscale mode came in iOS 8, Night Shift in iOS 9. iOS 10 added a red screen filter. iOS 11 added Smart Invert.

Android didn't get Dark Mode until last year. To imply Apple has been behind in this area is very misleading.