as JayVanguard already pointed out native means another thing. but putting that aside.
You are confusing what HTML and XML are if you think they are similar. XML is a way to encode data, validate it conforms to a schema, query it, etc. HTML is more than the surface syntax. It includes an schema and semantics (the DOM, the CSS OM, the boxing model, etc). Using XML as a declarative layer on top of their UI, as android does, does not make it similar to writing HTML because of the completely different semantics associated with it.
Android takes all the xml layouts and compile them and expose them through the R(esource) class.
I see more than one person on this thread who thinks native means "runs native machine code" and more than one person who thinks it means "looks like it was built with the native GUI library" so the term is ambiguous. Before iOS app store, I think it was more common to mean the former, so it may be related to that.
You are confusing what HTML and XML are if you think they are similar. XML is a way to encode data, validate it conforms to a schema, query it, etc. HTML is more than the surface syntax. It includes an schema and semantics (the DOM, the CSS OM, the boxing model, etc). Using XML as a declarative layer on top of their UI, as android does, does not make it similar to writing HTML because of the completely different semantics associated with it.
Android takes all the xml layouts and compile them and expose them through the R(esource) class.