Apple defends against Android faster web browsing claims

Apple has spoken out against claims that Google's Android operating system (OS) is 50% faster at loading web pages than Apple's iOS.

A comparative study between Apple's iOS version 4.3 and Google's Android version 2.3 by web performance specialist Blaze Software measured 45,000 page loads to discover that Android loaded web pages more than two seconds faster than iOS.

According to a blog post by Blaze Software, Apple claims Blaze's research was flawed because it failed to test the native Safari browser on the iPhone device, instead using an embedded web viewer in a proprietary application.

Blaze's CTO and co-founder, Guy Podjarny, defended the results and the use of a purposefully written app to perform the measurements. "It's important to emphasise – we used each platform's embedded browser, not our own browser. Embedded browsers are expected to behave, for the most part, the same as the regular browser," he said.

"However, Apple is now stating that its embedded browser, called UIWebView, does not share the same optimisations MobileSafari does… To the extent of our knowledge, this is the first time Apple has openly made such a statement," he continued.