OK, I'll bite
1. Mixed. The "smart stack" concept of swiping between different information displays could be nice if implemented flexibly enough. I might use that to make widgets which display related information from different apps: e.g. a weather widget I could switch between providers, news widget I could use the same way, music/podcast widget where I could switch which was shown. That type of thing would be more use to me than a mish-mash of different information in one widget.
I don't really care for widgets that change their content with time of day though. I remember early HTC launchers having alternative home screen profiles for use a different times of the day, and I never found a use for that. I suspect I wasn't alone either as they abandoned it after a while.
But the key question here is how flexible the system is. Can you place widgets wherever you want, including leaving parts of the screen blank, or do they just will up your home screen in a grid the way app icons currently do? Can the "smart stack" include any widgets or just those Apple think you want to use this way? How open will the system be to third party widgets?
But this is real progress in the iOS desktop (the first worthwhile progress I can remember in fact), and there are ideas here that would be useful on Android if done right.
2. I'm sure I've used android launchers which have the ability to place recently used or recently added apps in special locations or folders in the app drawer, but it's one of the things I turn off first. Predictable ordering matters more for usability in my book. Automatic sorting into folders might be useful for getting started, as long as I can override it (move apps between folders, create my own categories). If it's just "accept what we decide" it will make choices that don't fit my view and hence make things harder for me to remember - though if it lets you get away from the "pages and pages of icons" crap of the standard iOS interface it may still be an improvement.
I'd personally like it if they gave you the option of making the alphabetical list thing the default, rather than the folders being the default and having to hit a search icon to get the list. But of course there are Android launchers which offer that style of app drawer, and have been for years.
3. I've not used any built-in messaging app on Android for more than a few hours, so I've no real opinion here except to note that there's not really any such thing as "android's native messaging": there's the Google app, the Samsung app, the LG app, etc. Personally I just stick my preferred 3rd party SMS app on and ignore the built-in stuff. But it barely matters: since SMS are limited and the people I message use a range of platforms (so neither RCS nor iMessage work universally) I use 3rd party cross-platform message apps for most of my messaging, and SMS is a rarely-used legacy system. I suspect that if I had an iPhone nothing would change: iMessage (or some other app) would be an occasionally-used SMS app and I'd just use the same things I use already.
4. Inventing what seems to be essentially a platform-specific version of a QR code sounds like the opposite of progress to me.
5. Do you remember the early days of Android, when the Play Store would list the permissions an app would have before you installed it? That was before Google decided that this "friction" wasn't in their commercial interest and removed it in the interests of "simplifying the experience" or some such BS. So I will give credit to Apple for this, while Google's downplaying of this during app installation sends the wrong behavioural cues if you want people to take privacy and security seriously.
Of course there has been progress from Android as well as that regression, though the regression came first by several years. What I'd like would be for user control of permissions to be broader (not all can be controlled) and more granular (because permissions are so broad you often have to grant apps access to a lot more than is needed).
