Unfortunately, I think many Android app developers either don't know or care about "API abuse". When my Android phone is sitting "idle" with the display off, adb logcat still shows tons of debug logging from apps doing more work than they should. I like the freedom that Android gives developers, but, as you suggest, I think iOS provides a better user experience.

I can think of many ways Google could fix some of this bad behavior by throttling apps running in the background.