Android and Chrome Just Hit Record Web Browsing Scores, Up to 47% Faster Than iOS

A Record-Breaking Claim, Backed by Numbers

Flagship Android devices running Chrome are now outperforming iOS on two key mobile web benchmarks, according to Google's March 25, 2026 announcement on the Chromium Blog. Three unnamed Android flagships, widely speculated to be the Pixel 10 Pro, Galaxy S26 Ultra, and Xiaomi 16, scored an average of 48.2 on Speedometer 3.1 against 43.8 for an unnamed competing platform, almost certainly iOS. On LoadLine, the Android average was 276.3 versus 207.4 for iOS, a gap of roughly 33%.

Google attributes the gains to deep vertical integration across hardware, the Android OS, and the Chrome engine, coordinating with SoC and OEM partners to tune Chrome and kernel scheduler policies at the silicon level. Year-over-year benchmark scores on select flagship devices improved between 20% and 60%. For users, the real-world translation is more modest: four to six percent faster page loads and six to nine percent smoother interactions on average.

The Caveat Worth Noting

Speedometer is a legitimate industry standard co-developed by Apple, Google, and Mozilla, giving it genuine neutrality. LoadLine is different. It was built by the Chrome and Android teams alongside their hardware partners. The headline figure, that Android tops iOS by up to 47%, comes largely from a benchmark Google had a hand in designing. That does not invalidate the result, but it is the appropriate filter to apply when reading the numbers.

The benchmark-to-reality gap also matters. A 47% LoadLine advantage translating to roughly 5% faster real-world page loads reflects how synthetic benchmarks amplify differences that daily use compresses. The performance improvement is real. The margin in practice is smaller than the charts suggest.

Apple has not responded publicly. Given that Speedometer improvements consistently follow competitive claims of this kind, a response in the next iOS or Safari release is the likely outcome.

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