> My company has prototyped on both platforms, and I strongly prefer Android for this purpose. Test flight is significantly more inconvenient for all parties than sending around Android apks. So is Apple's provisioning process for development (you'll certainly have to figure out how to re-provision your development devices a few times).
Mine has also prototyped on both platforms and I will personally strangle anyone who suggests we do that on Android again. Slowly and painfully.
Sending applications for testing is somewhat more difficult on iOS, but that's really the only gripe we had. Between the useless documentation and the horrible development environment, it consistently takes us about twice as long to get an initial demo up and running on Android. This is especially on UI-heavy applications, considering that Android still doesn't have a decent UI builder.
(Just to put things into perspective: iOS's has incremental/convenience features over the original NeXTStep GUI builder, which basically puts Android's in a pre-1992 state).
The initial costs were higher for the Apple hardware, too, but even in the short term (1-3 months), it was worth it. This is especially true for a small company, that should prefer being punctual and keeping short deadlines.
> Finally, the Android developers that I know simply don't use the simulator, they always use hardware.
I also used hardware when developing for Android. However, that was not because I'm an uberdeveloper who has some obscure skill, it's simply because it sucks. It's slow, the debugger borks every once in a while, the management interface is unusable and while the list of integration features is longer, when you start crossing out those that break every other build you're pretty much left with just starting and stopping the simulator.