Although not having used Android specifically, I can easily see the UI designer being poor compared to iOS's. I still have yet to see anything as good as Interface Builder for any other platform, and I think a lot of it just boils down to the fact that when IB was designed it was actually considered to be "the right way" to make pieces of your app from the beginning, as opposed to something bolted on later. Making a nib less app is really hard in Cocoa. A lot of stuff in Cocoa/Touch just makes more sense from a UI builder perspective than a hand-coded perspective. The new constraints API which is absolutely awesome is a good example of this for desktop Cocoa, and the storyboarding stuff is a good example for Cocoa Touch.
Moreover, Interface Builder's file format is quite literally a serialized version of the class constructed at runtime, as configured in Interface Builder. What can be done in IB can also be done in code, which is more than I can say for Android's xml.
What do you mean it's more than you can say? Android's system is precisely the same. To build an Activity you set up and extend Views using the ViewGroup function 'addview'
No, there are methods and settings that can be set via code that cannot be set via the XML, and vice-versa - I'm not talking about mixing them together. Yes, they are the same classes. No, they are not created and instantiated and configured in exactly the same fashion; there are occasionally differences.
Why would your app need twice as much code? Why is using the Android ui designer so much harder than iOS's equiv?
What is so undocumented about IBinder? It's basic IPC?
I would really like to hear reasons, not abbreviations.