I think that puts the question wrong, the question is actually 'what's the actual downside to the normal person of the walled garden?'
Mobile Safari and the App Store are still gold standards from everything I've seen. Go look at any browser benchmark you want -- Anandtech has a bunch of them in any review article -- and the iPhone running Mobile Safari runs circles around flagship Androids running Chrome (this includes Google's own Octane benchmark). Part of that is the hardware but (1) the magnitude of many benchmarks is larger than the single threaded advantage the hardware gets in say Geekbench and (2) hardware is another walled garden(!!); if the unwalled garden is so much better in theory, why in practice isn't there a single Android phone that can match the iphone in single threaded performance?
I think that puts the question wrong, the question is actually 'what's the actual downside to the normal person of the walled garden?'
Mobile Safari and the App Store are still gold standards from everything I've seen. Go look at any browser benchmark you want -- Anandtech has a bunch of them in any review article -- and the iPhone running Mobile Safari runs circles around flagship Androids running Chrome (this includes Google's own Octane benchmark). Part of that is the hardware but (1) the magnitude of many benchmarks is larger than the single threaded advantage the hardware gets in say Geekbench and (2) hardware is another walled garden(!!); if the unwalled garden is so much better in theory, why in practice isn't there a single Android phone that can match the iphone in single threaded performance?