What is an operating system (and why should I care)?

An operating system is basically what appears on the screen on a touchscreen device – the underlying software that you interact with. There are two companies that make the operating systems for most of the mobile devices in the UK: Apple and Google.

Apple’s operating system is called iOS and powers just under half of the mobile devices in the UK. Google’s is called Android and runs just over half.

It doesn’t really matter which operating system you choose as they both do similar things. But it can be useful to know which one you’ve got though – the list below has the details.