Android platform is infamous for security problems of all kinds.
Every SW is full of many bugs. It is just the fate of all popular SW, it becomes target for hacking. Every malware uses some "hole" so live and spread. If some SW becomes very popular, you have plenty of devices with those "holes" perfectly aligned, so just rather primitive task to shoot through. And that invites so many attackers. If there are just few devices and then another platform with different holes, then yet another, your virus (trojan,...) should be able to pass all of them, pretty impossible task to write such virus. Even when all these platforms are by itself way less protected. So the malware authors then do not target such platforms, too much work for nearly no result...
So it is just the fact they are not the same on most devices, what makes the exotic platforms in reality rather safe and the common ones endangered, not their architecture.
It's indeed very easy to download ADK and a nice IDE of your choice - all for free - and start playing...
That is a must for any platform aiming for wide user base, as only that allows the desired customizing. It is common for Windows (.NET environment tools you may download for free and start playing,...), all Linuxes (GNU tool chain; there the fact each distribution is tweaked somehow makes their holes not that well aligned, plus it is not spread that widely),...
The iOS appear to be protected (try to add your custom app to your phone only), yet they are the victim of very frequent attacks as well (it gets against the hypothesis of the easy access to the development tools causing the wide spread of malware)