I regret to say your friend is very obviously a low-level C-head with masochist tendencies. He's right at home with Apple's Objective C.
you may point him to:
http://developer.android.com/referen...e-summary.html
to do media streaming in a high-level way.
OTOH, no automatic memory management is also the reason why iOS is usually a bit snappier than Android. A reasonable price to pay for much saner development.