About those "Chrome on Android is faster than Safari on the iPhone" claims

This week, Google posted that Chrome on Android was now notably faster at browsing the web than Safari on iOS. This led to the bold line in the post:

Android is now the fastest mobile platform for web browsing.

Likely due to corporate lameness, they didn't put specific labels on their bar chart, they just identified that 3 Android OEMs have devices that performed better on the Speedometer 3.1 benchmark than some "competing mobile phone platform". Here's their chart for posterity:

A bar chart without proper labels is going to raise some eyebrows, including John Gruber's, who posted:

Name the devices or shut up.

I happen to be someone who has the fastest iPhone and the fastest Android phone from the most popular Android maker in the US: the iPhone 17 Pro and Galaxy S26 Ultra.

I guess today is a day of benchmarks for me, because I literally just posted a bunch of benchmarks, including GeekBench scores which showed the Galaxy matching the iPhone in single-core, and beating it in multi-core.

But yeah, I get the same results as Google did, although the iPhone scored a bit lower on my device for some reason (this is the average score across 5 tests on each device with a short cool down between runs).

Here are the individual results if you wanted to see them all.

It's been a while of iPhone speed dominance, but it seems Qualcomm has more than caught up in raw performance. iPhones obviously are still outstanding, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are plenty of ways that Apple's chips are great that can't be shown easily on benchmarks like this. As I keep saying, maybe it's time Apple fans stop obsessing over benchmarks like they're Windows fans in the 2000s. Benchmark wins are a nice bonus if your platform is on top, but it's probably not the actual reason you use that platform.