A few days of programming on iOS and Android illustrates a vast difference.

Android is not a toy, you can easily see it's an improvement over traditional mobile, and it highly influenced by the web.

I fought Android until I decided to throw my entire weight behind Java and settled on it as a platform. Don't fight it: learn Java proper, do a few SWT & Swing apps, feel the burn .. then do Android.

You can ignore the abstractions and just "draw up" your application with Eclipse, inside one giant activity, but you would be doing yourself a disservice.

I told myself "Java sucks, it's bloated, it's big, yada yada yada. Just man up and learn it; no sense in bitching about what you don't know" :-) Glad I did. It gets work done.

Hortsman & Cornell's, two volume "Core Java 1.2". I only read the first.

Gosling's "The Java Programming Language".

And Josh Bloch's "Effective Java".

After that, Java Concurrency in Practice.

Langr's "Agile Java" is good for just that.

Bloch, Goetz, and Doug Lea have each written excellent books on java concurrency.

That's just about all the java books I would want to recommend. Many j-books are trash.

I mostly agree with the blog post. It is perhaps too hard to make proper app in Android, but all those abstractions are powerful, imho. Consider quick search/suggestions. If done properly, then you can plug your implementation also to system-wide search with just some config changes (and user permission, of course). Sure, content providers seem far too difficult (search dictionary example in dev docs), but then you can reuse them for your list activity or quick search or access them from another app.

Since I recall you being a Common Lisp enthousiast: do you see, for example, ECL ever becoming a viable alternative for making Android apps?

I've been exploring iOS using Objective-C and I'm about half-way done with my first real app for the Appstore and I can't wait to try and rewrite it using ECL once it is done.

Otherwise it will probably be Unity for me since my main interest is games and game-like apps. I really don't have the time to become and expert in each and every differing mobile platform.

Just a point that needs clarification: how is any of this comment relevant to the points raised in the OP? That is, how does this help against the fact that Android has:

* A much more complex set of (good!) abstractions that are poorly documented;

* and, if I might add alongside the OP, requires a much higher workload in terms of code length and complexity, debugging, device configuration management and tools for what seems to be a much lower payoff?

I have a successful iOS app out, and I tried to rearchitect it in a manageable way to port it on Android. What I found out is:

* The code would be roughly twice as much as the iOS version.

* A proper UI effort would require roughly 2.5x work than the iOS version, as I need to prep up a flexible layout that will work on phones (the buckets 'small' to 'large'), and then another for tablets (actually up to two: 'xlarge' and Honeycomb, which may require some rethinking to accommodate the new action bar). Contrast this to two, fixed-size layouts for the iOS version.

* I already have a path for implementing backgrounding on iOS and it requires minimal change to account for services not available while backgrounded; otherwise, code is exactly the same. On Android, I would have to plan for it from the beginning and set up very poorly documented IBinder stuff to have my Activities talk to a background Service.

* The general unwillingness of Android users in the face of paid apps, and a use model that does not lend itself easily to the insertion of ads, would make my (more costly) effort go unpaid.

I must admit I have never used resources other than developer.android.com and Google, and the latter didn't help me as much as (as little as) developer.android.com did. There might be an excellent book on all of this, but I haven't bought any — any recommendations are welcome.