Situational. But often these apps are doing something just using that standard ios ux library from the really old days, and they open almost instantly as a result as it was designed to work on an iphone 3gs.

In theory, sure, but in practice devs who care about package size correlate to those who care about launch times.

We are up to the iphone 18 now. The iphone is said to be about 50% of Apple's revenue since 2012. Regardless of app developer quality, it is quite literally Apple's now-well-honed job to ensure that enough people want to buy next year's model, by various types of forced obsolescence. Indirectly, this means that the durably snappy and non-sluggish experience you're forever wanting can never actually happen. 'Forever wanting it' is an essential part of the business design here!

In this system. Of 'smartphones', where a small handful of corporate masters - who also happen to (now!) be a big share of the world's largest and most profitable corporations - now own over half of the computing world that we love, following their whirlwind 20-year takeover of it.

"No I need better phone app developers." - Hmmm. Commiserations. The trend of developer quality (and/or it's inverse - e.g. system complexity and overheads) has been fairly constant since the term 'developer' became mainstream parlance, and you won't need me to point out what effect AI coding agents have had upon the doorway-to-entry.

Not that you aren't correct, but Tahoe is a MacOS release, not iOS. I assume you mean iOS 18 (the version before iOS 26)?

Indeed, on modern laptops and phones every UI interaction should be instant (check out BeOS in 1995 for comparison). For background stuff, add some progress indicator.

Can't believe the crap OSes and frameworks add these days in terms of performance cost (and sadly, Apple doesn't exactly shine in that regard)