[shaan7]

I'd argue that your latter point (optimizing background apps) is majority of the improvement and this is something you can do in the OS regardless of where an app comes from (excluding rooted/jailbroken devices from scope). This would've been a reasonable argument if Apple only ever denied apps because they did stupid things, not because they offered a payment gateway that did not pay Apple commission. Lets not pretend that Apple's control is only about curating an experience for the user, it is very significantly about maximizing profit as well.

As a side note, I've always understood that just stock iOS is way more optimized than stock Android simply because of better engineering. However, this is anecdotal and I don't have any references as such.