I have MAMP installed on my Mac with OS X 10.6. This computer's name is chocolate.
If I want to view pages on chocolate with chocolate, in the address bar of a browser I can type localhost/. If I want to view pages on chocolate from another Mac or an iOS device (e.g. an iPad) I can type chocolate.local.
However, when I type in chocolate.local on my Android phone's stock browser, I get a search results page. If I type http://chocolate.local/, I get a "Web page not available" message.
But I can use the IP address of chocolate to connect from my Android. Is it not possible to connect to a local web server on a Mac with Android by using computername.local?
In short, no the Android device will not be able to by default access your Mac by a .local address. On Macs, ".local" generally will be attempted to be resolved via mDNS (Zeroconf/Bonjour).
The Android operating system does not have built-in support for mDNS (although specific applications can implement it using a library, the default web browser is not one which does). Android resolves domain names through standard DNS, which, unless you run your own local DNS server, will not resolve your local network addresses (Such as .local). The Android device is either using your ISPs DNS server, or your routers DNS server that forwards to your ISP.