"Or the API changes in Android?" At least Google releases the support library to overcome that
The API changing game is another problem - it does not allow you to use existing application with newer system. As far as I know, this does not happen on Android (for now).
That is why you have to import android.support.* versus android.app. Which forces you to have some form of preprocessing in the Java code.
Plus the API for the action bar is still missing from the support library.