The reason Apple and Google bottom tabs behave differently is due to their respective authoring tools. By default in iOS, when transitioning from a parent (tab bar) view to a child view, the tab bar remains visible, and the developer has to explicitly tell the app to hide it if they want to. Google however, makes the developer jump through hoops in order to keep the same tab bar on every screen. A new activity in Android is treated like its own separate entity — not as a part of its parent activity (you could even make the argument that every activity is modal in Android, even with a back button). In order to keep a static tab bar everywhere, the developer needs to keep everything inside a single activity and use child fragments everywhere, a tedious technique. This hidden tabs oversight is probably because bottom tabs were only recently added and not designed to be part of the platform from the start. Hopefully this changes in a future Android release.