The average Android device is not exactly a top of the kind phone on top of that, Java based Android apps aren’t exactly known for performance.

If the top of the line Android phones are slower than the $399 SE, can you imagine how slow the average Android phone is?

But I think this is all a moot point, there shouldn’t be any heavy lifting on the client and all phones have special hardware to handle streaming video.

Now its Java is relatively fast thanks to ART (AOT) meanwhile Safari need to JIT compile JS (and dynamic lang). Java can also utilize multithreads.

I agree that iPhone SE is steal cheap for chip performance.