It&#x27;s because Android has to scale across such a wide range of device types and sizes. If you look closely at Material Design, you&#x27;ll notice that pretty much everything can be implemented with vector graphics. The primary colors serve a similar purpose. Not every phone has the ability to display high resolution images, but even the lowest of lowest-end Android phones can display &quot;red&quot; and &quot;blue&quot;. The same thing applies to the information density. Displaying information at a comfortable density on something like a Nexus 4 means that the same information displayed on a Nexus 6P (or Samsung Galaxy S7 or what-have-you) is going to look blown-up and sparse. It&#x27;s even worse when you go to tablets.<p>I think Google has really dropped the ball when it comes to designing their own apps. Rather than putting in the time and effort to make apps that scale <i>properly</i> (e.g. displaying different amounts of information on different screen sizes) they took the lazy way out and just scaled up the white-space between list and UI elements. And of course, Android application developers are following Google&#x27;s lead in this regard. This is why there are so few applications that are designed for Android tablets. Whereas Apple&#x27;s iPad apps look and work substantially differently from their iPhone counterparts (as you&#x27;d expect), Google apps on Android tablets look like scaled up and blown out versions of their phone counterparts, with the attendant losses in usability.