The article kind of touches that:

"Ultimately, the Android audio tack has fundamental architectural problems stemming from engineering decisions made at Android’s genesis, well before Google’s acquisition of Android."

Much of Android was designed for simple apps written in Java and running on resource-constrained devices. This is quite far from the reality of today. Perhaps it allowed Android to get to the market early and get a thriving app ecosystem, but billions of dollars have been poured to fixing those "mistakes" from the early days.

Audio apps are pretty much the polar opposite from what Android was originally designed for. Audio processing needs to run on native code or at least without ever invoking the garbage collector or any other unpredictable source of latency.

iOS and OSX audio stack is completely different and achieves a very low latency. Many musicians prefer Apple products because the audio works well out of the box. You might be able to achieve similar performance with Windows or Linux, but it's not as easy.

While the Superpowered has a neat improvement on Android's latency figures, 8...24 ms is not good enough for professional music use (and they don't mention any confidence intervals). For music apps, audio latency must be consistently less than 10 ms, preferably less than 5 ms.

It's an improvement but I don't think it inspires enough confidence that you'd see musicians performing in front of an audience using Android devices any time soon.

Doesn't have to be less than 5ms -- ~10ms and below (like iOS demonstrates) is great.

Short answer: abstraction layers.

Because Android has to be able to run on so many devices there are a bunch of abstraction layers between the app and the hardware, all adding delay.

iOs does not have this issue.

I bet your iOS also has some abstraction layer, I doubt you get to poke DAC chip registers directly from userspace. Superpowered Media Server is an abstraction layer too and so are desktop OS audio APIs.

And yet, they don't suck as badly.

On iOS, you'd at least be running audio code on native code without garbage collectors or other expensive runtime features. Native apps with low latency wasn't what Android was originally intended for.

Apple has the best audio stack out of the box anyway (desktop and mobile). There are very few music apps for Android, a lot of music apps are iOS only (or target a select few Android devices).