> Froyo feature set is a really good base line for most of the applications. I challenge
> you to find a new feature in higher versions that you really need to have in a general purpose app.
So, for "general purpose apps", whatever that is, Android 2.2 (which was launched 2 years ago) is great. 2 years is ages in computer land and this is a huge issue, even though the author likes to downplay this because the 2 year old software works "just fine". Android is very fragmented and if you have to develop for 2 year old software still today, that's a big proof.
> Developer tools
This whole section can be skipped when developing for iOS. Big deal, there are tools to help you develop for the chaos that is the Android flora. Just because the tools exist doesn't mean it's easy to support all these different devices.
> Developers can provide different graphics for different screen sizes
I don't have the exact number on the range of Android screen sizes, but there's much more work to this than the author implies. Just because you can doesn't mean it's easy.
> There is an emulator and UI builder that can emulate any Android version, screen resolution
> and pixel density combo
The ARM emulator is really really slow. Maybe it's picked up speed with Android x86 but when I was developing for Android the emulator was almost unusable and basically everybody's advice was to go out and buy an Android device. This will get pretty expensive pretty fast if you need to emulate the range of Android devices.
> It doesn’t matter if you prefer a large vs a small screen, a hardware keyboard vs software
> input, a 1Ghz+ quadcore vs a 600Mhz single core, a device from an A brand vs a Chinese
> copy or maybe you just want the best available phone for you specific budget.
> There will be a device available for your needs. This is only possible due to the so called
> “fragmentation”.
IMHO, sure, some people prefer larger screen or a hardware keyboard. But the rest of this paragraph doesn't make sense. Who'd want a single core rather than quadcore? Who'd want a chinese knock off instead of a brand? This is both just a question of budget. So in reality, again IMHO, I think the "featureful" difference between Android devices is much less then is purported in this post.
Just one more thing, I'm not knocking on Android as such - variety is good and Android has some features over iOS and iOS has features over Android. But having developed a little bit for both platforms, Android is definitely very fragmented and harder to develop for.