From a developer's point of view, Android is known to be a mess. I thought the reason was the lack of organization between the numerous manufacturers. Now I see that the reason is even more fundamental.
If the OP were Icelandic I think that'd be a pretty good reason not to switch to Android.
Also, while excluding a country would be a fairly crappy thing to do, Iceland is the 174th largest country in the world by population, so it's not big relative to very much at all
Source for this?
- The emulator was slow as hell
- Impossible to resize the emulator window dynamically so testing is really slow and painful
- Bugs with manufacturer roms & drivers (hello Samsung !) So you have to test with a lot of devices without guarantee it will work
- you have to copy all the fields yourself when your device pass in portrait mode since everything is being erased (even text fields)
- You need to create some strange XML for just about everything, nothing really works by default.
- No package manager for the libraries, you have to copy some random .jar here and there
- Really poor API. No usable date picker (I'm discarding the default one here), no file picker, no contact manager you can inherit from in built-in, you had to reimplement everything yourself, even a button with an image on it you had to do it yourself.
- Poor consistency in the XML names, it was difficult to guess what meant what.
- The documentation was also hard to browse
- The permission system is close to broken (they are working on that at the moment apparently).
- If your APK is too large, APK expansions (can't remember the exact name now) API's were borderline broken and buggy.
- SD card management was a mess.
- Everything related to layout was difficult to get it right and nothing would ever resize right unless you put a lot of effort into it (the opposite of the web on this).
- Android browser was close to unusable but now that I've checked a recent version, it seems they solved that.
Better to me than using a third party solution like carthage or cocoapods in the iOS world.
Compared to Apple, there's a lot of variability in devices, and that may be what they were referring to.
IMO, variety is not a mess - this is has been the norm programming for the consumer space for decades (PC applications, all non-console games, web development). Fixed resolutions & hardware is the exception (consoles, and previously iPhones: now iOS devices are 'fragmenting' too)
Somehow development for the desktop or the web, where all those points you've made apply in tenfold, is still doing fine.