iOS; Android: manual sound recording level

[Kurt Kaufman]

I understand that on both iOS and Android, there is no provision for manual adjustment of sound recording levels. I assume that there must be some sort of compression scheme used to "average" the sound levels, with low level sound boosted and high level sound clipped.  I also guess that there might be problems with background noise at very low sound levels, and distortion at very high sound levels. Anyone have experience working with sound recording on these two platforms?
Thanks, Kurt