>You can get a bigger screen, you can change the keyboard, you can put widgets on the notification panel (if you insist) and so on. Pretty much all the external reasons to choose Android are addressed
It wouldn't be hard to come up with a list of dozens of features that you can customize on Android that you can't on iOS. If you really think you're covered "pretty much all the reasons" to choose Android, you haven't researched the platform very thoroughly.
It is that exact line which broke me out of the "this is an objective analysis" trance. It is clear to me the author tried to impartial For that I have to credit him. Yet afterwards the faux-impartiality became grating. I can only conclude he did his best but just does not fully understand Android.
Leaving out stuff like water proof-ness, wireless charging, and multi-windows. These are features which in five years we'll all take for granted. These are real innovations.
I was honestly expecting more from Apple. Apple has the engineers and the component budget to reach the forefront and push it forward. Yet I'm left wondering what their component budget actually went into and where their engineering time went.
There's a lot of stuff that I wouldn't personally call "customisation" that matters in various markets too, SD cards, TV reception or dual-sim and the like.
Android will almost certainly always be more customisable than iOS, the question for many users though isn't "which is more customisable?", it's "is it customisable enough for what I need/want to do?".
In this regard iOS8 begins to close off some of the more significant constraints iPhones and iPads have. For any given individual it may not go far enough but what's being introduced will almost certainly make it a better option for some people and some of those people may now buy iPhones instead of high end Android.
The point isn't that this brings the two platforms level, it's that iOS now competes for a small piece of the market where it previously didn't.
It wouldn't be hard to come up with a list of dozens of features that you can customize on Android that you can't on iOS. If you really think you're covered "pretty much all the reasons" to choose Android, you haven't researched the platform very thoroughly.