No, it’s more difficult. Building for 100 devices from 10 manufacturers is harder than building for 5 from 1.
This isn’t true, or at least is pretty neglible. Unless you’re interacting with lower level nitty gritty stuff which tend to be implemented differently like cameras, the code you write is going to work on the majority of modern phones. This means that UI facing things tend to be very low effort to work on different devices.
As for screensizes, you tend to only need to make two versions of relevant UIs: one for a phone, and one for a tablet. Hell, you could just have one UI and it would work on both (but space wouldn’t be that optimised). Android’s layouts automatically grow to fit the screen, so you don’t have to design for each screen like you’re implying.
They’re probably just spending a lot of time on future infrastructure, and ensuring security, rather than implementing public facing UI features.
Source: am professional Android developer (who’s expanding into iOS currently)
Feels like the iOS / Android disparity is growing not shrinking
Don’t worry, we’re getting iOS features everyday