Fair question, here's some 2019 benchs that found similar latencies between high end Samsung and Apple devices: https://blog.gamebench.net/touch-latency-benchmarks-iphone-x... so it seems some Android manufacturers did manage to catch up finally.

I owned many Android phones over the years, beginning with the OG Droid. Had some Samsungs along the way, my last few were Pixels. My final Android phone was a Pixel 3, I switched to an iPhone SE 2020.

Maybe the total time to complete a given task is about the same, but I can seriously say I have never seen the iPhone drop a single frame. The Pixel got choppy all the time. Every Android phone owner knows the feeling of "why is my phone suddenly hot? Oh some runaway background service" or "why is this thing running at 5fps? Oh an app is auto-updating in the background".

iPhone just doesn't have these issues.

Personally I experienced a similar thing switching from a Galaxy S10+ to an iPhone XS.

Hmm, fair point since those are similar gen and both flagships.

Personally I switched from an S10 to Iphone 11, and was absolutely repulsed by the horrible screen on the iphone. They both felt similar in terms of UI responsiveness. But due to the screen I went back to the S10.

Somewhat related: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Exactly, modern android flagships are at par or better than Iphone when it comes to touch latency. Most people who express the sentiment "OMG iphone is so smooth" went from $200 Moto G to $1000 Iphone X. Compare in the same class, and you will find that both OSes are comparable.

Not sure how you got that from the link. The iPhone devices have 20%+ lower latency.

That link is old. There are similar measurements for modern devices available on many review websites. This link does identify the correct metric that people seem to respond to when they feel a phone is "faster".