[qb45]

I bet your iOS also has some abstraction layer, I doubt you get to poke DAC chip registers directly from userspace. Superpowered Media Server is an abstraction layer too and so are desktop OS audio APIs.

And yet, they don't suck as badly.

[exDM69]

On iOS, you'd at least be running audio code on native code without garbage collectors or other expensive runtime features. Native apps with low latency wasn't what Android was originally intended for.

Apple has the best audio stack out of the box anyway (desktop and mobile). There are very few music apps for Android, a lot of music apps are iOS only (or target a select few Android devices).