It is a fork of the Java language with its own AOT/JIT compiler, nothing to do with a certified JVM.

Larry Ellison doesn't seem to agree with your "nothing to do with [...] JVM" assertion, to the tune of a 9.3 billion USD lawsuit, and indeed Google itself is developing Fuchsia with no java stack at all in it.

Moreover, it's not Linux if you have to use a Java API to do anything useful.

Nothing to do from the point of view of the headaches that brings to those of us that care about Java.

And everything to do regarding being a fork on the Java ecosystem, and I side with Oracle.

It remains to be seen if Brillo or Fuchsia will have any relevance on the market, even when coming from Google.

and I'm not a java lover as you can tell, but I can super-appreciate that for java guys, having some fork that tries to be java-not-java and confuses the ecosystem, is a pain in the butt. Be java fully committed and move it forward, or leave java well alone. Don't sit there and create a java version of the Python 2/3 mess that screws everyting up. I can totally appreciate that. Well put.

The lawsuit was not about the VM.

Look. The gist of the comment is that Android forces you to use java, or at the very least, a java API. You can dance around semantics as much as you like, but it will not change the fact that, unlike Linux, Android is intricately interlinked with java.

It's a subset of Java, with a totally different compiler, JIT, etc. Newer versions don't even use Dalvic, but compile/cache the bytecode into ELF/machine code.

What does it matter what's underneath? At the visible layer which most of us have to use, it's java.