Oh, no, it's on an entirely different level. You not only have to deal with elastic screen size, you also can't tweak to pixel-perfection nearly so easily as you can with iOS. If this were all that was wrong, Android would be better. However, due to fragmentation, any app with nontrivial data parsing/caching/display requirements that wants to be both widely usable as well as robust and stable needs to (in
my experience):
1) Use the compatibility library for lazy-loading and easy reloading of data via CursorLoaders and SimpleCursorAdapter. This means mostly abandoning ArrayAdapter (it can easily cause eternal garbage collection if your dataset is slightly too object-heavy), assuming your data is mostly expressed in rows in the SQLite database.
2) Use Content Providers, as this is the only simple way to make the CursorLoaders work. Lots of boilerplate and semantics to accidentally get wrong, and URI overhead that you really don't give a damn about.
3) Either use a service or something resembling one that's initialized in Application#onCreate() to make API calls that store into the database (having them run inside an activity can cause nasty bugs if you're not careful as AsyncTasks are unceremoniously killed when rotation causes the activity to be killed and recreated)
I'd have to say as a developer of both iOS and Android, iOS is way, way more flexible, and gives you better APIs, and frees your mind to work on interesting problems. Android has too many development dead-ends that are easy to waste time on, and an irritatingly slow build process, if you want to ensure your build doesn't have any bad information from dirty caches that failed to clean. I can't say how many times I switched git branches only to find images and color resources still stuck on old values, even when I was exporting to deploy the apk.
tl;dr: Even if Android is worth developing for, it's still a time suck because a lot of little things cause problems. Nowhere is it made more clear that simplicity requires complexity than in the comparison between iOS and Android, because Android shoves all of that complexity in your face with not a whole lot in terms of guidance to guide the way. Meanwhile, Apple's documentation is world-class.
EDIT: not to mention different devices appearing differently because of stupid default themes, the lack of a stable image loader service that doesn't cause memory and application response issues at volume, crashing inexplicably because some bitmap refused to decode, random devices with non-compliant h.264 decoders failing on perfectly valid videos - randomly during successful playback, too! - vocal commenters/raters using extremely old devices complaining about the lack of support, occasionally nondeterministic state preservation when paging out views/activities, and a fuckton of other shit that's annoying as hell.
