The only real complaints people tend to have about their old iPhones is slow performance, and that's pretty normal. IPhones do not have the "apps randomly breaking or giving odd error messages" issue.
8 hours? What?
It probably goes without saying that iOS isn't for him.
My own anecdotal Nexus experience (I own the Google updated GSM version): no crashes (although there was a brief syncing outage last night), updates are smooth and fast, and the whole "it just works" thing applies.
But you're right about the error messages, when thing go wrong there are very few apps that will tell you about it.
I don't see a problem with just jumping back to the homescreen, most people will reopen the app right away anyway.