I’ve worked at both, and the quality of engineers is about the same. The general caliber is higher than I’ve encountered elsewhere, but there’s still variation.

I think what you’re seeing is more likely UI design decisions, or performance gates on other factors. E.g someone at each company probably decided the amount of time a given animation/interaction should take, browser page loading is for most sites dominated by networking traffic, etc - nothing gated by CPU time.

At the same time there are also large hardware differences, android devices still tend to have something like 2x the ram of idevices, as well as more cores, which means what is needed to make multitasking responsive is different.

But you also need to realize that you should not notice that in terms of responsiveness - in all likelihood none of the devices are coming close to using all the available cpu time for any interaction - simply because the closer you get to pegging the cpu the closer you are to hitting some kind of perceptible stuttering.

Finally, you’re ignoring battery life - one of the reasons for having a fast cpu is the ability to return to idle, because for whatever reason and cpu that takes X% longer to get back to idle uses potentially much more than X% more power.

So a lot of things are involved here that mean that a simple “this harder is better but the UI performance feels the same” is not going to tell you who has the better engineers.