This is hardly consistent even in Apple's world. I recently went through your exact exercise myself, except instead of tabbars in Android, it's Core Data storage in iOS.

The vaunted Core Data + iCloud integration is woefully underdocumented (actually, it's practically undocumented), with the main resource being a mega-thread on Apple's dev forums, where every few pages someone from Apple will chime in with ever more confusing suggestions, and yet never updated sample code nor docs.

I really don't think "shitty documentation" is a uniquely Android thing, nor is it something iOS has resolved.