It is amazing how each new version of Android has a complete new UX and none of them are actually good. Google is basically a back-end company incapable of doing good UX (if it is more than a search bar).
I have a more negative view. The entire Android development experience is substandard from front to back. The entire framework feels over engineered and bloated no matter which system or API it is.
This. I am a React Native developer, while working on a lot of backend things, bridging native API's to JS, I must say the developer experience on iOS is absolutely fantastic. Made me switch from Pixel to iPhone X, I've had android since the Google Nexus One, so yeah longtime Android user.
I would certainly not call the iOS developer experience fantastic. Xcode lacks basic IDE code editing features. Compiling Swift is slow and still somewhat buggy. Interface builder is next to useless for building complex apps decomposed into reusable components. Provisioning and signing is not as bad as it used to be but you can still get off in the weeds for an hour fixing issues there.
It might be a better developer experience than Android overall but there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I would agree with you, but after spending the last two years using an Android phone after almost a decade using iOS, I feel that Google has made some fundamentally bad decisions below the UI layer as well. Despite using a phone that is newer and more powerful, my Android phone is slower, less responsive and runs out of battery much faster than any of my iPhones.
I wholeheartedly disagree. I tried using both the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X and none of them came close to the Pixel 2, UX and feature wise. I couldn't download files, couldn't even change my ringtone to a custom melody, couldn't attach files coorectly, the integration with their Maps app was awful, the battery life drained faster after one update... I just felt so limited!
iPhone X seems like a bunch of clever but costly gimmicks to fix a self inflicted problem. Instead of just moving the fingerprint sensor to the back of the phone they got rid of it entirely and replaced it with FaceID and this new gesture based interface. It's an impressive piece of technology but a step backward in UX overall.
I find my Pixel 2 XL more usable and reliable than my iPhone X and Project Fi has saved me countless hours sitting in phone shop offices waiting for SIM cards in every new country I visit. The UI may not be quite as snappy as my iPhone but I don't feel it really holds back my use of the device at all and battery life is actually better and it recharges faster.
I do think this new gesture stuff they added to Android P is kind of dumb though and seems like a cheap and failed effort to copy some buzz from Apple.