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Army Special Operations Command Ditching Android For iPhone, Says Report (gizmodo.com)
The United States Army's Special Operations Command is ditching its Android phones for the "faster" iPhone, according to a report. The source cited in the story says that Android phones were freezing unexpectedly, which was one of the reasons they decided to give the iPhone 6s a spin. Gizmodo adds: The smartphones allow members of the Special Operations Command to access rich information about the battlefield. There's also quickly accessible information, like a weapons and ammunitions guide. Other apps can help with high altitude jumps; another can detect radiation. While DARPA helped develop the program on Android due to the operating system's open platform, Apple's hardware is apparently superior enough to warrant the switch.
Apple has had an enterprise mechanism for installing custom apps for years now, completely bypassing the store. This has been the case almost as long as there's been an a store.
With the right management software, the apps can even be loaded and updated automatically. All without Apple ever seeing them.
I deal with the DoD phones every day and it's not that the Android hardware or OS is slower or inferior, it's that the DoD's implementation is. I personally don't like iOS and find my Samsung phones far superior for personal use, but once the security software is installed the Galaxy phones are virtually useless (and this includes all the way up through the S6, not just completely outdated models). They completely missed the point on how Knox is supposed to work and try to secure both the regular partition and the Knox partition which just screws up both of them. They constantly lose connection to the server and have to be reset or just freeze entirely. Despite my vehement dislike of iOS I advise people to only get iPhones now for the office. It's just not worth fighting with what they've done to Android. So when SOCOM says their Android phones are slow and freezing and the iPhone is much faster it's completely true in the context of government secured versions (in the context of personal phones that don't have everything useful disabled in the name of security, I'll stick with my S7 Edge).
It does seem like we're missing part of the story here. The hardware isn't the core difference between Apple and the various Android phones, most of them are as capable as any other if you picked up a reasonably recent model. If anything, there are Android phones sporting more memory or faster processors.
Except that that's not completely true, and even in the true half, there are mitigating factors.
The iPhone's CPU is typically much faster than Android processors where it matters, but slower where it doesn't. That is, the iPhone's CPU is extremely fast at single threaded or dual threaded operation, but Android devices win multithreaded benchmarks. As most mobile workloads are not very parallel, the iPhone's CPU typically is a much better bet.
In terms of memory, while you're correct that most Android devices ship with more, they also need significantly more. 90% of processes on Android use garbage collection. It's been demonstrated over and over that garbage collection only works well when there's an excess of memory hanging about. A garbage collector is a fine thing when it has a spare gig or two to fill with things it might collect in the future; but it's a terrible idea on a memory constrained example. This is why when you look at application launch tests between top end Android and iOS devices, typically the iOS device will have more processes still in memory on the second loop through the apps, despite having half the amount of RAM.