I don't think that is an unreasonable requirement. I think they are talking about a decent 2D Android game or productivity aid or a ContentProvider/database-driven/synch app (e.g. not something that looks bad, has no value). And ideally, for a client that was high profile.
Hipmunk's iOS app is awesome. I'm scratching my head as to how you would build their custom UI in Android with custom views and gestures. A Hipmunk widget to monitor a chosen 'I-want-to-go-to-X' flight would be of value. I am confident that they will find the right person and look forward to using or beta testing it. Android developers are hot right now because most iOS developers are scared of the Droid/Java/XML (no IB)
IB sucks, and is XML anyway, just very abstract. Seems if you want to do anything fancy with IB and custom controls you end up doing lots of your own code anyway: some things are only possible in code.
Other than that: many Android apps seem to look to replicate their cool iOS look. Foursquare looks very similar in both platforms, and there's some more examples.
IB is fine – very handy for setting up tedious things like layout, auto-resizing masks and the like. Any view, especially full-screen, with major complexity should start in IB, even if there's plenty of custom action going on. At the very least, that can be a few dozen lines of label and button configuration code completely skipped, which is awesome.
I'm happy to have IB in my toolbox and it can definitely save a lot of grunt work but I do think it tends to break down in more complex cases. Just today I gave up after a few hours of trying to align several subviews in a big scrollview and did it in code in a few minutes.
The beauty of IB (along with pixel-perfect layouts since there are only 3 devices) is that our designer can checkout the project and skin the app and not have to touch code. Yes, there are something that IB can't handle (try passing a managed object context to a view controller in a tab using IB) but you can do anything you want in code.
In Android, there is no IB. Closest equivalent is someone's project called http://DroidDraw.org. Since there is no IB, it is all code. XML is more code than meta-data when it comes to defining views. To make an equivalent UI in Android that is pretty as the iOS one requires a lot more unit effort than in iOS (and a lot more of that coming from the developer).
The closest equivalent to IB in Android is actually built into the standard Android dev toolset (the Android Developer Tools for Eclipse).
Droid Draw has been abandoned for years. The visual UI tools in the latest releases of the ADT is actually pretty decent. Probably not as good as what I've heard about IB, but not bad. Certainly better than Droid Draw ever was.
Hipmunk's iOS app is awesome. I'm scratching my head as to how you would build their custom UI in Android with custom views and gestures. A Hipmunk widget to monitor a chosen 'I-want-to-go-to-X' flight would be of value. I am confident that they will find the right person and look forward to using or beta testing it. Android developers are hot right now because most iOS developers are scared of the Droid/Java/XML (no IB)