Top10 Awesome Android Features That The iPhone Doesn’t Have
We love both Android and iOS, but the open nature of Android just means it can do things others just can't. Here are our favorite Android apps and features that you won't find on its Apple-clad brethren.
10. Alternate keyboardsAndroid provides so many options to make it as painless for people as possible, and super easy to install. The iPhone has other keyboards, but they're usually separate apps that require you to import text to another program.9. AutomationOne of the most powerful, useful Android apps around is Tasker, the automation program that lets you turn your phone into a superphone. You can turn settings on and off for certain applications, by location, time of day, and pretty much any other condition you can think of.8 Custom home launchersWhile iPhone users can customize their home screen quite a bit if they've jailbroken, they don't allow the kind of customization that you can get on Android with custom home launchers. Third party launchers can add all sorts of extra features to the home screens of your device, like gestures, different kinds of shortucts, and even low-level settings that can help speed up an older phone.7 WidgetsSure, they take up a bit of space, but there's no substitute for the convenience of having a big weather widget right on your home screen, or a music widget to show you the currently playing track.
you can get widget-like apps for the iPhone, but you can only put them on your lock screen—not the actual home screens that you're always swiping through.
6 Removable storage and batteryIt isn't part of the Android software, necessarily, but Android's open nature allows for quite a few hardware advantages too—namely the ability to take out, swap, and upgrade your battery and SD card. If you find that you've maxed out the storage on your iPhone, you're pretty much out of luck,5 Wireless app installationThe App Store and Cydia App Store aren't exactly fun to browse on your phone, but you either have to download apps on your phone or plug it into iTunes to sync them all over. With the new Android Market, or with third-party sites like AppBrain, you can find a cool app, hit the install button, and it'll be on your phone the next time you pick it up.4 Custom ROMsWhile there are a lot of third-party apps that give you advanced features on Android, one of the coolest parts about the entire OS being open source is that people can take it, tweak it all over, and install their version instead of the one that comes with your phone.3 Controlling your phone from your computerThis one's a little more out there, but we've featured quite a few apps that let you actually control your Android phone from your PC—whether you just want to send texts from Chrome or access any of its other functions right from a web browser. Yes, you can VNC into your iPhone, but it's not the same as using a separate app that accesses its baser functions.2 FlashSay what you want about Flash, but it's everywhere you go, and when you're forced to view the web without it, you realize how much you actually rely on it day-to-day. We may grimace when we hear its name, but it's too prevalent to go without. It just feels like you don't have the whole web at your fingertips.1 True app integrationGoogle Voice may finally be available for the iPhone, but the experience will never be the same as it is on Android. Other iPhone apps always direct you to the default dialer and visual voicemail apps, so even if you want to use Google Voice full time, you have to manually navigate it to yourself. On Android, apps like Google Voice integrate directly with the operating system—if you want to make calls with Google Voice, every call you make from the phone's dialer goes through Google Voice. When you click on a phone number in your browser or in Google Maps, it goes through Google Voice instead of sending you to the wrong dialer. True app integration like this makes using custom phone, SMS, voicemail, and even browser apps absolutely seamless on Android, which is something you won't find on the more locked-down iPhone platform.
