Searching for Pixel 2 XL replacement i was reading the same articles on iPhone 13 and Samsung Galaxy A32. Every of those screens is high DPI, more or less flickering OLED. What I've observed is that on Android phones rendered text is artificially sharpened, similiar to delicate outline (not the outline from Android accesibility settings). Effect is similar to often oversharpened fonts in Windows.

Reading some text on Android I feel like ants going around letters and this effect is much, much smaller on iOS.

Do you have similar observations?

Yes, it's software. 9 for example doesn't have this accutance issue.

5 days later

Do you mean Android 9? I was trying to read some text on many smartphones at supermarket, from budget to flagships and this issue seems to be totally random. Like for example there were some pretty nice IPS panel in Motorola smartphones and some of them had this oversharpened text, some of them no oversharpened but with supposedly BGR font smoothing instead of RGB (text had this reddish-greenish tint).

This is pretty absurd on high dpi screens… And probably font antialiasing can be changed during Android updates to some other settings, probably still chosen by accident by phone manufacturer.

To do justice - in iPhones text rendering and default fonts are much more polished.

dev