It sounds like he’s caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand he has his friends with iOS and importantly iMessage, on the other he’s got a parent

It sounds like he’s caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand he has his friends with iOS and importantly iMessage, on the other he’s got a parent who thinks these things are beneath him and wants him to get a better and more flexible device. It seems like I’m that kind of situation we should probably just go with whatever the person being squeezed feels like and they’ve explicitly stated that they don’t care about sideloading or understand what it is - and there’s no conceivable way that participation in your circle of friends should depend on it or even does depend on it. And that he just wants to do things that iPhones are perfectly well suited for. You can get slight older iPhones that’ll continue getting updates for a while yet for remarkably little these days and iPhones offer, dollar for dollar, better CPU performance than Android devices by some margin. It is no expensive jewellery it is just a tool. The people around him have settled on one kind of tool that works for them so just get him the same tool. You’re the one trying to burden him with expensive jewellery, a device with worse CPU performance per dollar, with features he doesn’t care about but missing features that he needs just to be able to more effectively interact with the people around him. That’s jewellery.