That's extremely exaggerated. What phone did you need to find a "manufacturer-specific toolset"? I'm not even sure what you are referring to. In fact starting on Android is significantly easier than iOS. Enable debugging, plug phone in and you can start debugging your apps on the phone.
Don't even get me started on sharing apps to testers. iOS is just a nightmare without using something like TestFlight.
You can't even get started on iOS without having a Mac, a $99/year subscription and worrying about creating app ids, profiles and other strange things through the developer portal.
Some phone manufacturers (like Samsung) ship with an incompatible, JSON library. You have to enforce the dependency against the official library if you want your app to not fail mysteriously.
Nothing is as bad as Apple's brain-dead method of tracking files in its projects. They create UUIDs for each entry, instead of doing something more file-specific. This results in merge conflicts when more than one person works on a project. Poor design.
I haven't run into that issue but I am not surprised. Anything goes with Samsung phones.
With Gradle and Maven support I've found it really easy to manage dependencies to third party libraries. Personally I use Jackson when dealing with anything JSON related.
On Windows, plugging in a new phone/tablet can be bothersome since you can need to install a new driver.
On OsX/Linux, it is pretty much transparent. take the phone, activate dev mode if it is not already the case, plug it and you are done.
You can't even get started on iOS without having a Mac, a $99/year subscription and worrying about creating app ids, profiles and other strange things through the developer portal.