First of all, it is well known that phones last for roughly three years before their quality inherently gets degraded, like bad battery life. At the time Apple recommends you to switch your phone, the specs have become outdated, it’s not an arbitrary date chosen due to money hunger. And you can have the battery replaced. I know people with 8-year old iPhones. They are just now becoming incapable of running the old software. Of course some apps still cannot be run, but only few, and no common ones.
Second, Android may be more customizable, but not easily. iOS has professionally made customization features, rather than Android, which only has files you can edit with a laptop. So with Apple, you can’t customize as much (yet), but you don’t need to modify files to do it.
Lastly, just because you are not capable of modifying your phones files, does not mean you are not smart. There are geniuses who use their iPhones solely for utilitarian purposes. And I know some Android users, who, no offense to them, are not the smartest people I know. And, I don’t know if you are aware, but Apple includes a scripting software with all iPhones. If you are really smart, you can figure out how to use that to do pretty much anything. That’s arguable more impressive than going to stack exchange to add a meme screen to your phone. I’m a Linux user (Android copied Linux but for a phone), and I know how Linux is more flexible than, say, windows, but the features added by Linux that improve on windows are on-par with Apple. And, since Android just copied Linux, it is not necessarily higher quality. Apple made a unique operating system, that can be constantly active. Google copied Linux, so it has features from a desktop operating system (not meant to be operated constantly), that are not suited for always-active devices. This makes Android significantly more dangerous than iPhone. A layman could simply take your email address, use your phone remotely, install a virus remotely, and run it. On iPhone, background processes do not exist, so none of that could happen without the input of the device’s user.
Caption this Meme