The only extant Android phone with superior camera hardware is probably the Huawei P20 Pro which has insane low light performance for a smartphone and makes up for middling software with a large bump in image sensor hardware. The Pixel 2's software is good enough to subjectively push it ahead of all iPhones until the recent XS/XR where I think Smart HDR and an increase to an equal sensor size has just about tied with it.

Maybe, but the iPhone camera has never lagged terribly behind the top of the line Androids. But the same time, the so called “top of the line” Androids had other compromises that iPhone usually did not.

An iPhone is usually a well balanced phone. It may not have the best of anything, but is usually right there at the top. And if you want a great camera so badly that you are willing to compromise on everything else, by all means, buy a dedicated digital camera. Similarly, if you want your phone to be so good at playing music that you are fine with the other compromises, you might want to look into a dedicated music player. Smartphones are meant to to generally purpose jack-of-all-trades sort of devices and the iPhone excels at that. If I want a device specialised for a purpose, I’ll buy the just that — not a smartphone.

Please, define worse. Number of pixels? This doesn't mean better pictures (often worse). Performance? Clearly, no. iOS camera is much faster. ML processing? Clearly iOS is much much better to preprocess your photos. On latest generation they even get several pictures with different focal points and pick a best one. Sure, their camera is just current generation without inflated specs, but works much better.

Picture quality. Performance is exactly the same — both have zero shutter lag. All reviews so far show XS is worse than a top of the line Android phone camera from last year.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878018/iphone-xs-x-pixe...

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-xs-max,review-5747.html

https://youtu.be/tZ9wpMl8pzo

Shutter performance is less important than time to start.

All tests shows different white balance between pixel and xs. This is highly depends on screens that are used on the phones and photos on iPhone can simply adjusted to iPhone screens.

iPhone 5C was never top of the line though. When it came out it was already last years tech.

Again, I was comparing top of the line phones only, not the 5C.