Well, the answers to your question are largely market and business defined.
Apple is a hardware company. You can't buy their operating systems on anything but their hardware. When you go with their combo, they're quite unbeatable in some areas.
If we look at the history of the iPhone, it evolved from what many considered to already be the most advanced media player interface. Remember how Jobs introduced the iPhone: Here's our most advanced iPod and it even makes phone calls! (I paraphrase from memory, but that's nearly perfect - and exactly perfect in its spirit.)
And it's built from there.
Rather than call out the UI, you'd be closer to the truth calling out the media experience. With Apples experience with the industry-leading QuickTime engine (that tends to be a dog on a Win platform, so most people don't get how astounding it is when configured for proper execution) and their Adobe-shaming iPhoto and Preview apps, it was no surprise that the iPhone performs so well as a media platform.
The iPhone's had full codec support that's only now coming to Android - because the iPhone was designed to interface with a Mac or iTunes host flawlessly.
Now - take Android.
Unlike Apple, Google is not a hardware company - Google is purely a software company.
Google designed Android to complete the vision of cell phone pioneers that it acquired a few years before Android's release and had a different goal than to move Google's (non-existent) iron:
- To provide a smartphone operating platform that competed with Apple, RIM, and Windows by providing an open architecture and FOSS
Just as OS X's humble beginnings were BSD, so too was Android's beginnings with pure Linux.
Unlike Apple's offering that could be fine-tuned for a particular hardware class, Google's offering was designed to reach the broader market.
When Apple built OS X, they already had decades of UI design, going back to their inheritance from Xerox PARC.
When Google built Android, they had no such background (as an organization - their new Android leaders did have some cutting edge UI ideas looking for a home, though), and adopted Linux as the foundation - and let's face it - the Year of the Linux Desktop never really happened.
So, in a few short years, Google's accomplished a great deal with Android.
You can want them to tackle all fronts quickly so as to catch or surpass Apple in every area - and I often hear that Google has the money, so why not? as an argument - but the simple truth is that 9 women cannot have a baby in one month.
Integration takes time.
I'm not sure what you mean when you ask why they put tethering and Flash on the map and not the UI.
It really goes back to their overall approach - get the performance they desired, up to the JIT compiler in Froyo (2.2) and then deal with the UI.
Actually - this is paying off for Google.
Apple was long-locked into its UI. Have you noticed that the new retinal display is exactly 4x (2x2) greater than its predecessor, and is now 960x640?
Everything got painted into that 480x320 corner. The only easy path to migration for a suitable display was to go overboard - so the software to be updated needed only a 2x scaling in each dimension. Not that there's anything wrong with the retinal display - other than they sure had to put a lot of pixels into a space where fewer (cheaper) would've been just as invisible to the users' eyes. An example of UI-first thinking.
Meanwhile - the Android dev community was forced into more traditional resolution scaling methods, and has the _potential_ for a healthier future for the UIs because infrastructure and portability came first.
As far as the UI being a medium priority, especially for acceleration - yeah - of course.
Android is generic and can brought out on lower-cost, lower-performance devices.
That does not prevent vendors from putting out higher-capability systems at a higher cost - just like with an Apple, better performance can be had and it will simply cost more.
Here's a few things for you to Google - on my phone, I have the basic arm-7 architecture support, but I have more than arm-7 -- so my flavor of Android is also extended with kernel support for swp, half thumb, fastmult, vfp, thumbee and neon.
And my browser codebase? Well, here's its UA:
- Mozilla/5.0 (with Linux details); AppleWebKit/533.1(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1
So - on that browser thing - maybe you just have not seen the right one on the right Android platform yet.
And yes - you can run Android on small iron or misconfigure it on big iron - and it will lag. You can make iOS lag, too.
Google just updated their Market. I have no comments on their Market search. I think their Market just has a ways to go and is also showing some youthfulness - again - they didn't have a years-long iTMS experience model to draw from before moving forward.
