Android versus iPhone Wi-Fi speeds — with a clear winner
Apple smartphones, on average, achieved faster download and upload speeds over Wi-Fi in Q3 2025 than Android devices in South Africa. Meanwhile, Android devices recorded better average latency.
MyBroadband Insights compared the data from the MyBroadband Speedtest app on Android and iOS devices during the third quarter of 2025 to see which devices performed better on Wi-Fi networks.
MyBroadband’s speed test servers are hosted in Teraco’s vendor-neutral data centres to ensure a neutral testing environment.
NAPAfrica provides all network operators at its peering points a free 10Gbps connection to the MyBroadband Speed Test platform.
As network speeds are highly dependent on the actual Wi-Fi connection, we needed to compare devices on the same networks.
We first downsampled all the data to unique devices on specific ISPs, so that one device doing multiple tests on a very fast or slow network would not skew the data too much.
After this, we found the ISPs or IP groups where the most unique devices had performed tests on both Android and iOS, and averaged these top results.
On average, the iOS devices outperformed the Android devices in speed, but not latency. This was consistent across most of the large ISPs, where multiple devices have performed many tests.
Android devices recorded an average download and upload speed of 41Mbps and 38Mbps, while iOS users recorded 55Mbps and 48Mbps.
Apple users had an overall average latency of 55ms, while Android users recorded a latency of only 44ms.
One possible bias in the data is that the average Apple device is more expensive than the average Android device, and would more likely be used to connect to a more expensive Internet package, offering higher speeds.
The filtering methodology should compensate for most of this bias, but it cannot be entirely dismissed.
Because much cheaper Android devices exist, these could also account for the lower speeds, as they might not have the same level of Wi-Fi hardware as more expensive Android and Apple devices.
Considering all this, the biggest surprise in this comparison is the better average latency from the Android devices.
The table below shows the average speeds for Android and iOS devices in the third quarter of 2025.
| Operating System | Download speed (Mbps) | Upload speed (Mbps) | Latency (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|
| iOS | 54.53 | 47.91 | 55.46 |
| Android | 40.87 | 38.22 | 43.52 |
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