I’ve used both Android and iOS (Android: Nexus 5, OnePlus One; iPhone: iPhone 6S, most recently iPhone XS). I use Android devices for my work on occasion as wel

I’ve used both Android and iOS (Android: Nexus 5, OnePlus One; iPhone: iPhone 6S, most recently iPhone XS). I use Android devices for my work on occasion as well. Try both - if you find that you like the iOS UI and experience, I’d say use an iPhone; otherwise, get an Android and customize it to your liking. - Basic stuff works equally well on both. You can reply to notifications now on iOS (since a few versions back), you can have a global content blocker (I use 1Blocker, which works great). Sure, all browsers embed the same WebKit engine, but that’s not the same as all browsers being literally Safari. Firefox works fine and I sync most of my stuff there. - If you’re a dev, side loading is equally easy on both platforms, but being a dev on iOS requires a Mac. (And money; IIRC apps sideloaded from free dev accounts only work for 7 days before requiring a reinstall?) - Get an iPhone if you want something to use for a long time; iPhone 6 (2014) is still perfectly viable for most things and runs the latest iOS 12. (Custom ROMs exist for old Androids too but those can be iffy sometimes) - For customizability, I run Pythonista on iOS, a paid (but worthwhile!) app that puts a full Python interpreter on your phone. You can install a shell environment (I use Stash) and interact with all the iOS APIs. You can sideload whatever custom code you want and run it. Heck, it even supports CoreML and NumPy, so I even used it to train and test ML models right on the phone recently. - The hackability of Android is nice; some of my work involves replacing kernels to get at low-level hardware, and that’s absolutely impossible on iOS.