Yep -- and more than that, I’d say that animation orchestration worked well because of the very elegant design that leaned on Objective-C’s strengths (like dynamic key-value observation to track animatable properties).

And using reference-counting rather than garbage collection helped to minimise jankiness even on low-memory systems.

I think Android in particular had a very hard time matching iOS here because Java just didn’t lend itself to that dynamic programming style, and because the GC was just inherently janky. (It’s a lot better now that hardware is vastly faster.)