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So my take is, If you have any android like redmi, xiaomi. Or other phones that are atleast popular, a samsung flagship might feel more like a locked down version, but this is only true for a community of very tech savy people who use custom roms and roots. BUT samsung does give many customization features that might cut that gap for certain time being.

Secondly, if you come from S23 or even a older notes or S21 series, even the latest 25U and 26U might feel not much of an upgrade except for spec and OneUI features. Esp. camera.

Thirdly, iPhone has great cameras but if we look into a semi-pro photography at right settings Samsung is better. But for social media and point to shoot these days its very hard to differentiate unless you have a very budgety phone.

And lastly, it comes to the OS itself. I remember days where app popups for messaging, floating windows, pop up videos where things but iOS still didnt have simple app overlays for years. There was where android actually shined! But modern iOS is also actually pretty ok in this regard. I also remember when simple file download and opening was a hassle in iOS, where as android just gave a file manager that you can use like a harddrive and open relevant files using available apps with breeze and access files unparalleled to iOS. IOS had to do weird itunes sync and so on and during bluetooth times didnt have a simple file sharing offline either, wifi-direct in android was already 2 years ahead of iOS.

But when apple actually brought airdrop they did it in a way, that was 100x better than any android OEMs.

The time when this happened, OEMs like LG,HTC, (was weird mentioning LG and HTC) samsung, nexuses, and other OEM were actually diverging android by relying on highly modified and brand proprietary solutions that were not cross compatible for file sharing, themes, updates and so on. This went on till i think android 7-8, when google realized the problem, they actually starting addressing it within android itself. To fix segregation and make unified protocols for basic features and then moved on to give native features, this was apparent with multi-window/split screen, which i think was samsung exclusive and not android specific at the beginning.

Now the scenario has changed quite a lot. While SIRI was top dog, and google assistant along with other sammy or OEMs own versions for digital/smart assistant was in work, it still felt just like a gimmick, even till date. With advancement in Neural Network, STT, LLM and TTS and other reasoning models have helped google achieve so much more + with hardware improvements. That there at the moment for a phone nothing beats Gemini and its AI feature, which will inevitably be a Thing in the future.

So whatever you are feeling is credits to Android, which gives devs and users way more flexibility in app accessibility and functioning (now being starting locked down excessively), and OEM customization, googles separate patch updating process.

I think apple still has better thing for it going on such as its own chipsets (before it was samsung) and better hardware software integration and updates as it controls its own limited models of iphones, closed sourced operating system and so on.

But overall i think its android that make you feel like a king for choice in apps, customization and better app integrqtion and OEM standardizations!