Why are the Android phone apps (Contacts, Messages, etc.) so slow?

Question

I've owned a Pixel 2 and a Motorola something-or-other. On both phones the built-in Android apps were outrageously slow (compared to other apps like Facebook Messenger, Gmail, etc.) Long rendering times when I went into a sub-screen, slow search, major delays with adding multiple names to a single address line, etc.What gives? Aren't these apps mostly fetching and displaying plain text stored locally--shouldn't they be really fast?

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

Some of it is that Android phones are slow. Apple has been consistently improving the performance of their chips but the Qualcomm chips used in cheap phones have stagnated since 2018.