The main advantage ios has over Android is its lack of support for virtualization (like java). This makes their apps much less resource hungry, faster, and the phone does not slow down as much over time. Given the fact that idiotic apps like Instagram and Facebook need supercomputers to run on Android the difference for the end user is a huge gulf performancewise. It must be a nightmare for developers though.

For people who know what they are doing it is very easy to maintain the software health on android and keep it running fast over time. If you don't though usage of apps like the ones mentioned above will make it run like a commodore in months.

[–] bspar@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

That virtualization thing hasn't really been true for quite a while. Android compiles the Java-ish code ahead of time (the .oat file is a playful acronym for "ahead of time") to native code. There's still overhead with exceptions and other java-isms, but that still very much exists in objective-c.

I'd bed that iPhones only seem faster because it's normal to have more powerful and expensive new iPhones. Android has auto-suspended apps in the background for longer than iphone, and it doesn't require any maintenance to keep running smoothly (it doesn't even require "closing" apps from the app drawer).