The reason is known as "taste". Other day I was in AT&T store to try out new Android phones thinking it must have gotten better now that its 2014. Store didn't had Nexus so I didn't got chance to see it but, boy, latest LG and Samsung models totally sucked. The UX, the experience was outrageously horrible. The icon colors were repulsive. Animations so overdone that it hurt my eyes. If pricing of this crap wasn't so low and saving grace like Google Now and Maps didn't exist, I can't imagine anyone would really want to buy this horrible piece of shit compared to iPhones. The iOS7 has degraded significantly but it's still miles ahead of crap that is known as Android. Overall, it is this taste that outweights Apple's idiosyncrasies around walled garden for some people - your weights may vary.
Okay I have a fairly old Galaxy Nexus and can only say that I experience it completely different. The stock Android UI is simple, nothing fancy or unexpected going on. iOS 7 is exactly like what you describe Android. Horrible icons, icons and overdone animations(0.5s zoom out from app to homescreen, really?).
I bought the Motorola flagship phone[1] of last year and it's just as bad as he's describing, if not worse.
Unfortunately, it goes way beyond just small UI and physical design issues:
-The "Play Store" is filled with low-brow, tacky crap (above and beyond that of Apple's "App Store").
-Even though my phone has multiple cores, the audio output is seemingly competing for resources with events like changes in network or wifi availability (e.g. riding the subway), which leads to issues like choppy/distorted audio.
-The workflow/UX for common applications and uses was seemingly designed by someone that didn't use the phone for any extended period of time. Want to call someone? Open the 'Phone' application. Don't know the number? Oh, that's a different application -- close 'Phone' and open the 'People' application. What, you'd expect scrolling through contacts to be a common ask for someone about to make a call?
-Bloatware. Remember the days in which you'd buy a Dell and it would come pre-installed with a bunch of crappy applications that you immediately tried to remove? Yeah, it's like that, with the exception that you can't remove the bloatware and you have no control over their use on your data or battery.
-Little weird issues: type a text, hit enter, and start typing again too quickly? Sometimes the final word of your previous line will be entered as input on your current message. Interest-based ads from 3rd parties, hooray (I don't even want to start thinking about which local data sources are scanned)! Volume control is context specific -- there's 4 sliders for the simple intent of "I don't want things louder than X."
-I miss having a physical button to hook into the OS -- when an app is crashing (which is common), you don't have a "oh crap, close-it" toggle. This makes you interact with touchscreen buttons on an interface that's already decided to stop dealing with users.
If you go into something hating it, you're destined to not enjoy it. At any rate, I wouldn't have recommended you buy that phone last year. Stock Android, IMO, is always best. Anyhow. My considerations on your points:
> The "Play Store" is filled with low-brow, tacky crap (above and beyond that of Apple's "App Store").
Low barrier to entry means you get a bit of everything. There are quality apps in there, too.
- Never experienced this. This seems to be a motorola complaint, not an Android complaint.
- No idea what this is about. My phone application has a list of contacts built into it.
- My Nexus 5 (nor my Nexus 4, nor my Nexus S) has had bloatware. Again, a motorola complaint...
- Never experienced these issues. Particularly media--there has always been three volumes for me: Alarms, ringtones/notifications and media (games, music, video).
- The softbuttons on the front of the device work just as well as a physical, tactile button. Just because a button is physical does NOT mean that it gets any special treatment by the OS. In android, if you hit the "Home" softbutton, you go home immediately. The softbuttons work on a plane off of that crashing apps run on ;-)
> Little weird issues: type a text, hit enter, and start typing again too quickly? Sometimes the final word of your previous line will be entered as input on your current message
This has been occuring since my Galaxy S2 was released, so it's not even a new problem. Presumably, Android developers don't use their own phones enough to have fixed it yet... :/
Yeah, I also get the impression that Android devs aren't eating their own dog food. I'm actually surprised at how inferior it is to iOS in almost every way.
Yeah, sure: that's a Google phone made on contract. If you take a look at LG's other (= own) phone designs you will see that they have absolutely no design sense whatsoever in either hardware nor software. Especially the interface on their phones is a hideous and unusable pile of shit.
At least Samsung seems to be making some progress in this department, but I'm not holding my hopes up.
