> As I understand it : iOS provides essentially a C (C/C++ /Objective-C) interface. Android has a Java API. You're talking one level of abstraction above to wh

> As I understand it : iOS provides essentially a C (C/C++ /Objective-C) interface. Android has a Java API. You're talking one level of abstraction above to what I am. Underneath that Java/ObjC API, there's a layer called the user space library. It consists of libc and other utility libraries that talk with the kernel. It is usually implemented in the C programming language (with a little bit of Assembly code that executes the system calls to the kernel), regardless of what language the APIs on top of it use. Android's Dalvik (Java) and iOS's Cocoa (ObjC) is written on top of that.