What was so successful about Android is the speed they pivoted as the market changed. This was, obviously, largely a response to the iPhone, which didn't stop at technology pivots, but the entire business model. This did indeed lead to a rate of development and collecting far too much crap along the way, which has been problematic since.
However, Symbian are a great example of the opposite, in the sense their development had slowed to a crawl. Things like OpenGL and anti-aliased text rendering appeared first in feature phone user interfaces, and then moved up - it was nuts. Quite how Nokia, in particular, remained oblivious to the potential UI improvements the new stuff enabled is beyond me, but then a good number of us were floored by just how bad the performance of the G1 was.
The "improvements" you mention are, with the exception of the bought in runtime, inconsequential. We've been through the phase where people wanted to use WebViews for most of the apps (I was a champion of that idea at one time) and it sucked. Do things like Google Now use the WebView for rendering their UI? Now that the lower levels are approaching good the real problems that remain are much more pervasive, causing an unbelievable amount of app developer time to be wasted (at Google too), and the sad thing is it doesn't look like they will ever be fixed because the answer will be "we're replacing them with web stuff" which is an answer no one making this stuff actually wants.
What was so successful about Android is the speed they pivoted as the market changed. This was, obviously, largely a response to the iPhone, which didn't stop at technology pivots, but the entire business model. This did indeed lead to a rate of development and collecting far too much crap along the way, which has been problematic since.
However, Symbian are a great example of the opposite, in the sense their development had slowed to a crawl. Things like OpenGL and anti-aliased text rendering appeared first in feature phone user interfaces, and then moved up - it was nuts. Quite how Nokia, in particular, remained oblivious to the potential UI improvements the new stuff enabled is beyond me, but then a good number of us were floored by just how bad the performance of the G1 was.
The "improvements" you mention are, with the exception of the bought in runtime, inconsequential. We've been through the phase where people wanted to use WebViews for most of the apps (I was a champion of that idea at one time) and it sucked. Do things like Google Now use the WebView for rendering their UI? Now that the lower levels are approaching good the real problems that remain are much more pervasive, causing an unbelievable amount of app developer time to be wasted (at Google too), and the sad thing is it doesn't look like they will ever be fixed because the answer will be "we're replacing them with web stuff" which is an answer no one making this stuff actually wants.