I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).

But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.

But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.

I've had an iPhone since 2009 and feel they have gotten much more confusing over time.

It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).

That’s a good observation, I think you’re right.

Yep, my parents are both Android users and have to ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.