Ottawa-based Blaze Software has put the web performance of Android phones and iPhones to the test, and they’ve concluded that browsing the web on the latest generation of Android phones is “faster. MUCH faster.” Blaze’s tests were fairly rigorous: They took a total of 45,000 separate measurements on 1,000 different websites, thus clearing what they called the limitations of past performance studies which used either artificial benchmarks or limited sample sizes. Blaze’s conclusion: Android beat iOS in 84% of the tests run, and on average, up-to-date Android smartphones are 52% faster than the iPhone, with an average pageload time of 2.1 seconds versus the iPhone’s 3.25 seconds.
Update: Loop Insight makes a case that the study was flawed.
Partly by design and partly by necessity, the tests blur together the impact of hardware specs, operating system, and browser type: The iPhones were running Safari and the Android phones were running the generally faster Chrome.
According to Blaze, once Android tablets come into their own, the difference in Web performance between them and the iPad will likely be even starker:
Android’s dominance in handling non-mobile sites is especially important when considering tablets. Tablets use the same OS and similar hardware phones do. However, users expect the full experience on tablets, not the simplified mobile sites. This means Android’s edge will make an even greater impact.
(via BGR | Blaze Software)
