I hear this particular argument quite often. Just to keep this particular reply shorter, I'd say that an ideal free market is what will filter the good software from the bad. Involving restrictions, such as needing to learn objective-c or Swift to write applications native to the iphone environment instead of being able to just use Java, is counter-intuitive wheel re-inventing.
Discussion
Yeah, I think iOS and Android users are already self-sorting. The ones who prize customizability are choosing Android. The ones who are really intolerant of confusion or debugging are choosing iOS.
The argument of Apple having a better UX is also a classic that I've heard a lot.
I'd accept the preference of familiarity, as perhaps iphone users are just used to using iphones for a long time. However, for people who don't program computers or phones and only use either as a Facebook machine, they probably couldn't really point out what the difference is; other than the inconsequential simple things, such as: "on this phone, you go to this menu to change the wallpaper, which is a different menu on the other phone".
Idk about the other thing, I've just plain never heard of people needing to debug their apps on Android during casual use.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply users were opening up Android Studio. Substitute the word “troubleshooting” for “debugging.”
It did turn out that Swift remained an Apple-only language. It’s too bad Google didn’t choose Go for their mobile apps, but if I recall correctly they acquired Android and the Java API cam with it.
Yes, Android has been natively Java since before Google acquired it. The reason they haven't refactored Android to use Go, is because despite Go having a passionate community, Go is only intended to be a language for text-processing, to accelerate the search engine. Nothing more, nothing less, which is also why frameworks based on JavaScript and Python still dominate web app server market shares.
Relating to Go not really intending to be a general-purpose language, look into Carbon-language. It is supposed be their developed general-purpose programming language, as many probably think of Go, to succeed C++ in the future. Not many people know about it, and it will be a bombshell on the whole tech industry when it is finalized.
Anyway, thank fuck that Swift hasn't caught on outside of Apple, because even with Android using Java, Oracle (owner of Java) was up their ass 24/7 with lawsuits. Now, imagine Apple's reaction to someone trying to use Swift as the native language to create some kind of development environment outside of the Apple environment. Come to think of it, their possible reaction is probably why nobody has tried! It would be an all around waste of time.
I didn’t know about Carbon; that’s interesting.
Go is a general-purpose programming language; just ask Rob Pike. I’d summarize it as C-like without C’s quirks, but with garbage collection and better support for concurrency.
As for Swift, it’s been open source since 2015, along with its standard library (the point of contention in Oracle vs. Google). You can get it for Windows and Linux.
I can run Swift compilers on Linux and Windows. But then, when it's time to publish a mobile app to the Apple store, I need to sign the app for the app store. To do that requires Xcode, exclusively available on MacOS.
Theoretically, I can suck it up and set up a virtual machine to run MacOS, just so I can sign my app and get it published. But after that, a year passes, and I have to pay the annual reoccuring developer account fee *again*, just to keep my ad-free, non-profit passion project apps on the store, for the accessibility of phones that I don't even use.