1. AppCompat used to crash on device rotation with no clear error message on KitKat.

2. There are many third-party libraries that expand on what Google provides to allow devs to actually provide good-looking Material apps, from MaterialDialogs to MaterialDrawer to MaterialTabs.

- https://github.com/afollestad/material-dialogs

- https://github.com/mikepenz/MaterialDrawer

- https://github.com/florent37/MaterialViewPager

Many things, like a multi-pane preferences activity with AppBar, are not possible without hacks, reflection or access to internal com.android APIs either.

And when Google provides support for something, it’s often lacking features, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/3vwpna/im_incen... or full of bugs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30537413/textinputlayout-...

Hell, Google isn't even doing that much. Half of their apps don't have proper tablet UIs. How can third parties bother to do decent tablet apps if even the company who develops the platform doesn't care enough to do so? Google is in a leadership position, which means they have a responsibility to lead, and not only did they drop the ball, they threw an interception straight to Microsoft.

That at least was the idea back when they introduced the Fragments framework. there they took the existing activities concept and turned them into panes in a larger UI. Sadly the world quickly turned that into that "hamburger" bar.

Nor did it help that Apple, via the iPad launch, had gotten app devs to think about phones and tablets are separate spheres. Thus for a while there was "HD" apps popping up in the Play store that had the whole Fragments thing going, right alongside existing phone apps.

And then Google kinda abandoned the tablet world for a while, instead trying to pitch ChromeOS and Chromebooks as a corporate platform.

That didn't catch on so now they seem to be returning to Android tablets after doing some work on various things like multiple user accounts, and Android for Work that allows someone to have one app state for work and one for personal use on the same device.

Actually, with sufficient number of sufficient-quality developers, its a problem Google can solve fairly directly, by developing their own, compelling, Android tablet apps.

OTOH, I think that this is a problem that is overstated; Sure, there's lost of Android apps that are just "blown up" phone apps, but there's a lot of apps where there's no compelling need for something more, and "blown up" to tablet size improves interaction when you have a tablet available.

Its also not really like like Microsoft's problem.

That said, Drive Docs, Slides, and Sheets are very nice on larger tablets. Still, Google needs to raise awareness that Android's APIs have very nice support for larger screens.