The iPhone isn't spartan, but it does a great job of illustrating how Apple pares away features for a better user experience. Apple is famous for eliminating things that stun hackers: the disk drive, expandable memory, replaceable batteries, audio jacks. Slashdot famously pronounced the iPod "lame" for not having a bunch of things that a cheaper competitor offered, but Apple had zeroed in on exactly the things that people wanted. Their app store is much less open than Android's, but gives most people the things that they want.
Developers in particular seem to have a hard time remembering that most people don't want a product that can do anything. They want a product that does exactly the things that they want it to do and is optimized for those. Finding that sometimes requires a great leap of insight -- or faith.
My digital camera does one thing very well, but cameras are becoming extinct. My old iPod did one thing well and it's gathering dust in a drawer, next to my old cell phone. The argument for single-purpose vs multi-purpose devices is not as simple as the article wants to believe.
You're not thinking about how limited your iphone is.
I know It doesn't seem limited, but Apple abide by the premise of the title by having a closed app store, a really tight SDK and only a few handsets and platforms.
Contrast to Android which runs on everything and doesn't suck but it looks generally generic.
I’ve used both android (2010-2015) and iphone (2015-2019) and I have to say, android has higher quality apps. Apple’s walled garden is not preventing low effort, low quality apps from flooding the store. The more restrictive userspace APIs really hurt a lot of useful functionality and having to pay upfront to develop, let alone distribute apps deters many excellent softwares (talk to someone else about the wonders of FOSS). I would say you have to be more careful with android, but I’m not sure that’s really the case since apple store apps are very often “dangerous”.
It is easier to develop high quality app for iOS than Android.
With iOS, there are only relatively few different devices, they behave almost the same and most of the users are running up to date OS. On the other hand, there are too many Android devices to test your app with, many of them are buggy in unique ways (especially some models from Samsung and Huawei, and you can't ignore those because they have largest market shares), and on top of that manufacturers generally don't port new Android releases to old devices, so you have to support old APIs if you want to reach most Android users.
Sometimes our users complain that we spend all of our resources supporting iOS, Windows and OS X and Android support is just a second thought. In reality we spend most of our time on Android and it's still the worst.
Source: I develop a multiplatform audio app for living.
Developers in particular seem to have a hard time remembering that most people don't want a product that can do anything. They want a product that does exactly the things that they want it to do and is optimized for those. Finding that sometimes requires a great leap of insight -- or faith.