In that kind of situation, you usually own the whole device. You don't have to worry about being removed from memory because the user wanted to run some hotel's booking app or whatever - the user doesn't have the option of doing that.

You may have some additional hooks that give you some control of whatever custom hardware that comes with the device. You may or may not have to drop down into native code to access those hooks.

You can't develop against a standard phone or tablet. You have to have your hardware to develop against.

So, yeah. It's the same... but it's different.