That's a mistake at a level above engineers and software architects (or at least a mistake so far - if, hypothetically, Intel managed to crack their mobile CPU problem the choice of Java would turn out to be very smart). This is the dual of Apple's situation with iCloud. The strategic choice to start building out cloud services to support their ecosystem is clearly the right one, it is the implementation that has missed the mark (so far).
This is why writing something like a Twitter client is actually much easier in Android but doing something really interesting like realtime multimedia or highly responsive, complex UIs is difficult to the point of impossible in some cases.
I think Android and WP's XML-based structural layouts are far, far easier to work with, understand, modularize, and reuse.
Autolayout, on the other hand, has a more general approach of establishing relationships between properties of views. Baseline alignment then just falls out: make view1.baseline = view2.baseline, or view1.top = view2.top for top alignment if you prefer. Equal widths fall out too: view1.width = view2.width. If you want a vertical stack you can write view1.bottom = view2.top. If you want a fixed aspect ratio (say, 4/3), you can write view1.width = view1.height * 4/3.
The result is that it's possible to directly express complex layout ideas. For example, "make three buttons baseline aligned, 10 pixels apart, all of them equal width, none of them clipping their labels. If they cannot fit, then in turn: shrink the padding down to 4 pixels, don't require them to be equal width, truncate the first button's label, or lastly then grow the window / make the view scrollable, until they fit."
That's an unrealistically elaborate example, but with autolayout it can be done entirely in IB, without any code at all. I am guessing with Android it would take a fair amount of manual work.
So my view from a distance is that the autolayout approach is more general and elegant, while the Android approach may handle simple cases easily, but is more ad-hoc and random.
It's true that AutoLayout's systems of interdependent linear equations are strictly more powerful than Android's structural layouts but they're a far more awkward solution to the vast majority of common UI layout problems. In practice Android UIs are far, far easier to write and maintain. Debugging the kind of complex AutoLayout schemes you describe can quickly become a nightmare. The structural approach taken by Android and WP is far more natural for the kinds of UIs you actually find in the field.
Also, Android's CSS-like style system makes it far easier to define app-wide constants like grid spacing, margins, button padding etc and to change them in one place.
For example, Skype: http://i.imgur.com/4XwVmjy.jpg
Responsive design is one of Android's most fundamental design principles. It just took a while (and a few million tablet sales) for developers to take the platform seriously.
Most new android apps are responsive these days. And those companies that maintain their existing apps are busy adding big screen support.
I'm glad to hear that companies are busy adding big screen support, though that support is arguably coming late. The main point is that an Android app's interface could be stretched across anything, and this has certainly been a design obstacle in the past.
I just posted two screenshots showing otherwise.
> Android's fragment API makes it a lot easier than he iPad to adapt to a proper tablet UI if you want.
And this is just ridiculous. Regardless of whether you prefer iPads or Androids, iPads are most decidedly easier to design tablet UIs for because there are so few screen sizes.
Cocoa Touch + Obj-C is a very nice platform in a lot of ways but I'm losing faith in Apple's software architects. Contrast this with Android and even though I think Java is a poor choice for mobile development their engineering teams really seem to know what they're doing.