Android is great if you are on a budget and can't purchase other operating systems for mobile devices. It is also great for installing third-party apps if you find one you like. Although there is a lot of customization options available, this may cause some users to become frustrated if they are unfamiliar with this system.
I've worked with several network device vendors in my 10+ years of being in the industry and my favorite continues to be Cisco IOS. Overall, Cisco IOS tends to be the most stable, the most intuitive, has the best TAC support, and has the best knowledge base articles and white papers.
By this point, there are several "flavors" of the Cisco IOS such as XE, XR, and the standard Cisco IOS. While they are all fairly similar, there does exist syntax differences between them. It would be ideal if at some point in the future, Cisco is able to unify all of them into one standard operating system which would use the same syntax across all platforms.
While overall Cisco does a great job of QA'ing their IOS, no matter the release, there's always some minor bugs. I think it's important that Cisco continue to pour resources into their QA team to test their software.
While I'm very familiar with the graphical readouts of "show processes cpu history" I would love for Cisco to eventually find a more intuitive way to display this data. I can't begin to count how many times I've had to teach more entry level (and even mid level) engineers how this graph is interpreted.
I do wish that Cisco had something similar to Juniper's "commit check" or "commit confirmed". This helps validate the changes you're about to apply, and catch errors, so that you have a better idea of the impact of the change.
It is very easy to use and the customer user interface is very smooth and logical. Rarely do applications crash and need reinstallation. The app store is secure enough to prevent malicious software from being advertised and potentially downloaded. Rebooting devices does not have to be a regular occurrence so this allows for high availability.
The data that Cisco IOS is able to provide is extremely relevant, it's fast, and it's intuitive. I also love that you're able to leverage things like macros or EEM scrips to run multiple commands at once. This is especially useful when you have more junior or entry level engineers in your environment and you want to provide them with a "shortcut" by having them type a single command to execute multiple commands.
There have been only two times that I have needed to contact Android support for technical issues and both times I received some support. I received more helpful tips from Youtube, so I now bypass support and try to do most of our troubleshooting on my own with these support videos online.
Android allows users to customize their systems. It is very simple to use and there are a lot of devices running it. The interface has been improving a lot since Android Lollipop and it has been becoming more useful. For developers, Android gives more possibilities and the license for distributing your app is cheaper than the Apple Software Developer Program.
We have found other Cisco software to be filled with added functionalities as compared to iOS. New NCS software has certain programmability features that are advantageous to legacy iOS software but are more complex to use for some users. Hence, we still have most areas of the network that functions using iOS software.
