| It's not actually about the apps being de-coupled from the OS. It's all about the Android compatibility library and the Google Play Services library that gets pushed to all devices through the Play Store is the important part. When they introduced fragments in 3.0 they decided to backport them and push them out to older devices. All the new UI libraries get pushed out to older devices, this allows app developers to use some of the latest and greatest parts of Android on all versions. It's kind of strange they didn't include the Action Bar in the library, but Action Bar Sherlock takes care of that. With the addition of Sherlock you can follow the latest UI guidelines and APIs without much worry. It makes it extremely easy then to support multiple sized devices, small phones, tablets, laptops. There is some fragmentation in other parts, like sensors and cameras and such that can be troublesome, but for most apps there really isn't a fragmentation problem. I've never run into anything that wasn't solved in an afternoon. Of course, if you compared it to writing for iOS, yes it's trickier. If an iOS developer decides to jump into Android without actually learning how the UI works, he's going to have a horrible time. iOS design can almost be pixel perfect, Android is more like a responsive CSS design. Without the compatibility library being pushed to older devices a lot of this wouldn't be possible. |
I would go so far as to say that iOS design can be and often is pixel perfect.