I thought I'd jot down some notes as I go through this journey with the iphone.
The overall experience is good mainly as the battery life is pretty good. Car navigation journeys that would have caused my android phones to overhead and battery go down from 100 to 30, only causes the iPhone 5 to go down to 70. Immediately this helps me as I am not always worried about getting the phone to a charge port immediately. Its a solid performer, reliable and does what it does.
There are some differences however in usablility.
Touch
Touches seem to need to register a bit lower than what you are trying to hit i.e. it seems that sometimes the hitbox is lower than the actual text or icon. I'm not at all used to the keyboard at all and constantly making mistakes and hitting backspace instead of enter too much.
Gestures
There is no gesture discoverability and im sure most users dont even know about it. For e.g. hitting the top status bar scrolls all the way to the top, this is important for pull-to-refresh based feeds. Also, im not even sure what swiping does yet. Sometimes it works to go back, sometimes it doesnt. I'm not sure if its a universal gesture or not. The 'Tips' app doesnt help here either, i went through the whole thing withuot learning about gestures. No onboarding at all.
Icons
Apples own built-in app icons look too dated. They have annoying gradients on the backgrounds, and are a bit complex. In comparison Google's icons on iOS look great, they are flat and clean.
Appstore discoverability
I'm not quite sure whether this is better or worse than the Play Store yet. I'm trying to discover apps in featured or top lists, it is very similar to the Play Store, except that the "Similar Apps" or "Other user installed" sections contain less apps.
Also I havent seen the Appstore recommending me any apps yet, possibly i need to really dig more.
Appstore selection
The Play Store has probably grown much bigger than the Appstore, but its hard to tell. On Android there are a massive amount of homebrew and independent developers, and a huge selection of upcoming material design apps. I am not sure the same is true for the Appstore. The Appstore seems to be more dominated by games so far from what I can see.
App Prices
The apps on the iOS Appstore are definitely more expensive than on Android. On the Play Store you rarely ever see apps costing mor than $10 and the majority is i the $2 region. On the Appstore its more in the $4 region and there are many apps charging over $10. It seems they get along okay.
App Review views
In the beginning I was quite surprised to see such less reviews on certain apps until I realized it only displays the reviews for the current version. It is possible to select "All versions" in order to see the total reviews for the app.