Practical experience with developing native cross platform applications in my experiece strongly aligns with geekbench results.

Cross platform as in most CPU intensive code is in C++ that is exactly shared between both, only trivial but obviously needed differences in input handling. And for Android the renderer is Vulkan and for iOS it’s metal, both essentially identical in how features are used.

Some super high end Android phones come close in some cases, but on average iOS devices wipe the floor with Android ones.

I want to emphasize that on top of Android HW being slower on average it is also hampered by the decision to use Java. Some api’s are Java only requiring JNI, which is slow, to access. Another issue is GC pauses, they are small but can result in skipped frame here and there, making the experience subtly worse.

There was a version of Geekbench a while ago for which you could make a good argument for that but Geekbench 5 seems to tell the same story that Spec, web tests, etc all tell. Apple's cores really do seem to be that good though they benefit from running at the clock speed they were designed for, unlike an Intel U-series which has more pipeline stages than it needs to hit its clock.

And Apple also benefits from being able to set their own page size and probably from getting to have caches that are virtually indexed and physically tagged rather then physically indexed and physically tagged. Doing address translation in parallel with way lookup is a nice little performance boost. There are rumors of other cleverness in the cache heirarchy from control of the OS but I don't know the details.

specint2006 shows that A13 outperforms desktop ryzen 3900x. 5W vs 105W. 6 cores vs 12 cores. something is wrong with numbers here.

Where can I see these SPEC results for Apple CPUs?

Anandtech frequently includes SPEC results in their reviews.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...

Thanks! These are SPEC2006 which is already retired, but those numbers for the A13 do indeed come in the same ballpark as the last official SPEC2006 results that were published for Xeons in 2017 before retirement.

We also know that the average selling price of Android is less than half that of an iPhone. Most Android phones being sold are lowend phones.

Besides that, there have been plenty of articles where they found that Android manufacturers were detecting when benchmarks were being run and cheating.

Anandtech uses SPEC2006 and the performance gap is not much different than Geekbench: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15207/the-snapdragon-865-perf...