Google has been very aggressive about computational photography as well. No less than Stanford Emeritus Professor Marc LeVoy wrote the real-time HDR support for Google's camera app. I'm also impressed at the Google Photos backend to do all kinds of searches you wouldn't expect. Like, I search for "Tesla" and I get all the photos I've taken of my car, inside and out. Behold the power of machine learning. It's really amazing. The Sony camera module that was standard in the Nexus 5X, 6P, and Pixel is astonishingly high quality, all by itself. I rarely find myself wishing I had my "real" camera long given how good the built-in cameras have gotten these days.

As a security person, I'm fascinated by all the back and forth about which platform is more or less secure. The best conclusion I can reach is that Google Nexus/Pixel devices, at least while they're still being supported by Google, are comparable in some aspects, superior in some, worse in others. If you're running an older device that Google no longer supports (e.g., my wife's Nexus 5) or if you've got a third-party Android phone from any of the millions of OEMs, then security starts falling off a cliff. (Incidentally, I'll be replacing that Nexus 5 shortly, probably with the new Moto X4 "Android One" device once I can get it without having to sign up for Google Fi.)

The only place where Apple seems to be clearly superior is their hardware-assisted "enclave" for storing fingerprint and other vital crypto keys. This helps protect you against your phone being read out if it's confiscated from you while locked. Most Android phones are still relying on the ARM "TrustZone", which turns out to be riddled with holes.

Beyond that, most Android apps and half of the Android system are written in Java, which means no buffer overflows. There's a lot more C and Objective-C floating around the Apple universe, so more opportunities for buffer overflows, both in apps and the system.

App store curation seems to be comparable these days. Google has some really strong static analysis, fuzzing, and machine learning people beating up on their app store. It's still far from perfect, but it's getting much, much better. Apple is relatively quiet about exactly what they're doing in this regard. They might be great, they might be awful. We don't really know.


Beyond that... the main win that Apple seems to have is a giant ecosystem of third-party stuff: chargers, cases, alarm clock docks, etc. Now that the Android universe seems to be standardizing on USB-C for all sorts of things, I expect to see alarm clock docks and other such contrivances become just as available for Android.

I'm less convinced that there are any particular "killer apps" on either platform. For example, people do texting with all kinds of things these days. I have literally six different texting apps on my phone, because there's somebody, somewhere who uses it that I need to interact with. The most common things I do with my phone I could do just as well with virtually any other phone on the market, Apple or Android.